DC Direct Current Hot-Line!

Here ya go Mark - "DC set up in the 70’s with pre-recorded news updates for titles, rumors and fun. It was always busy and I’d have to try for hours to get through. Finally, it was never updated on a regular basis."

Clipped from Steven Thompson:

In the mid-sixties, National Comics began utilizing a lightning logo'd yellow box labeled DIRECT CURRENTS to plug upcoming comics. "DC," get it? The title and logo were revived in the seventies for a column in issues of THE AMAZING WORLD OF DC COMICS. Later on it was done up as a mail-order newsletter. In between those last two incarnations, however, was THE DIRECT CURRENTS HOTLINE!

You called the number, originally once a week but later less often, and you were regaled by one of your favorite creators with hard to hear news and information about upcoming comics and related topics via the miracle of...taped messages. A few years later this might have been a pay call but the Hotline was free!

Dork Note: Go to Steven Thompson blog to read the whole posting. It's a great sliver of time captured on paper now reprinted digitally by him.