Doorway to Nightmare #1

History

Editor Joe Orlando commissioned the character from cover artist Michael William Kaluta, who modeled her on an unnamed host figure he had previously drawn for DC's Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion. The lead story, 'Cindy Barns,' was scripted by David Michelinie with interior art by Val Mayerik, while Kaluta supplied all cover art for the series. The book was part of DC's 1977–78 expansion wave, going on sale October 6, 1977 (with a February 1978 cover date), but the entire line was gutted by the DC Implosion before the series reached its sixth issue; a prepared Doorway to Nightmare #6 was photocopied for the internal-only Canceled Comics Cavalcade rather than distributed to newsstands.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearance of Madame Xanadu (Nimue Inwudu), a mystical fortune teller and sorceress who became a cornerstone of DC's supernatural corner.
• Written by David Michelinie, with interior art by Val Mayerik and a cover by Michael William Kaluta — Kaluta painted all five covers in the series.
• Edited by Joe Orlando, who requested Kaluta design the character; the series deliberately rotated writer-artist pairings each issue rather than keeping a consistent creative team.
• Cover date: February 1978; actual on-sale date: October 6, 1977 (confirmed via a house ad in Justice League of America #149 and Comic Reader #149).
• The lead story, 'Cindy Barns,' establishes Madame Xanadu's Greenwich Village/East Village shop and her signature narrative structure: a protagonist visits, receives a tarot reading, confronts an occult threat, and the defeated entity ends up sealed in a jar in her back room.
• The series ran only five issues before being cancelled as part of the DC Implosion of 1978; the strip then continued in four issues of The Unexpected (#190, #192, #194, #195) and eventually a solo Madame Xanadu one-shot — DC's first direct-market-exclusive publication.
• The debut story 'Cindy Barns' was reprinted in DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #20 (April 1982), and also appeared in the Australian reprint Terror Tales Album #15 and the French anthology Spectral #6.
• Madame Xanadu was later portrayed by Jeryl Prescott in the 2019 DC Universe/CW television series Swamp Thing, and received a critically acclaimed 29-issue Vertigo ongoing series (2008–2011) written by Matt Wagner with art by Amy Reeder Hadley.

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