I discovered a wonderful site yesterday—The Marvel Comics Bullpen Bulletins Index, which reprints those gossipy pages which took us all behind the scenes at Marvel and enthralled me when I was a kid … and which I was eventually privileged to write!

You can see my first one, which appeared in all April 1975 Marvel Comics titles, here. (I was responsible for everything but Stan’s Soapbox, which he dutifully banged out himself each month.)

I can still remember sitting in the Bullpen typing away, and then going into Len’s office and reading it aloud to Len, my future wife Irene Vartanoff, and others, and how proud I was when they laughed as I read and then told me I’d nailed the voice.

But that’s not the Bullpen Bulletins page which I found the most interesting, at least not today. The one which just caught my attention came out the month before, in the March run of books. It included the first mention of me in a Bullpen Bulletins page, on the occasion of me making the move from my position as Associate Editor of Marvel’s British reprints to Assistant Editor on the U.S. titles.

It referred to me as “the latest—easily the LARGEST—Assistant Editor our cavortin’ color comics line has ever seen.” And as you can see in the detail, it says that I’ve “shambled several doors over.”

I’m not sure who wrote that entry, whether it Roy Thomas, penning his final Bullpen Bulletins page, or Len, writing his first one before passing the baton on to me. So I can’t say for sure which one of them laid that verb on me (at least it wasn’t given to me as an adjective, and I retained my Stan Lee-created nickname of “Sparkling” Scott Edelman).

But as someone who’s written a great deal of horror fiction over the years, whenever I think of shambling, I think of zombies. So I wonder if having been dubbed a shambler so long ago wasn’t somehow an omen of all the zombie fiction I’d write over the years!

I’ve written and sold eight such tales, three of which have been nominated for Stokers—and I’m currently scribbling away at the beginning of my ninth! I don’t think I’ll ever stop being fascinated by them. For me, zombies are far more fictionally intriguing to play with than vampires, werewolves, or any of the other traditional creatures of horror.

But enough of this. Back to shambling!