I dug into my file of old Marvel Comics memos again this evening, and it wasn’t entirely an exercise in nostalgia. I’ve been talking to Sean Howe, author of Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!: Writers on Comics, who’s putting together a book on Marvel of the ’70s, and struggling to piece together what was going on behind the scenes.

This hasn’t been first time I’ve been interviewed about the old days.

One topic which keeps coming up is how back-up and fill-in features were assigned. Who decided which characters should be written about? Did the writers pitch ideas or did the editors arbitrarily assign characters to writers? Sometimes the gap between when stories were OK’d and when they eventually came out spanned multiple editors, and so it’s hard for historians to figure out which editor had his fingers in which pies.

To help Sean (and whoever else cares) understand a little bit of what it was like in 1976 and 1977, here are two memos I wrote to Archie Goodwin, then Marvel’s editor-in-chief. The first is from August 13, 1976, listing 19 possible characters I thought it might be fun for me to tell 5- or 6-page stories about.

Those blue check marks you see were made by Archie, giving me the go-ahead to cook up plots about the Angel and the Hangman. The Angel story ended up in the hands of artist Brent Anderson, and was published in Marvel Treasury Edition #27. As for the Hangman story, well, you’ll see what happened to that below. You’ll also see that Archie must have also later OK’ed a story about the Sub-Mariner from that list.

This second memo, dated April 25, 1977, more than eight months later, gives an idea of the difficult journey some of my plots had to take. Some of them didn’t survive, through no fault of mine. You’ll note that I’ve done a little redaction to protect the guilty. Because after 32 years, even they deserve forgiveness.

Here’s what happened to the five stories I mentioned:

1) The Two Gun Kid/Hawkeye story was eventually published, as drawn by Michael Nasser, in Marvel Tales #100, dated February 1979.

2) The Hangman story never saw the light of day. Remarkably, the artist never turned it in, and as far as I know, I don’t have a copy of the plot.

3) The Falcon story eventually appeared in Captain America #220, April 1978, drawn by Bob Budiansky.

4) As with my Hangman tale, the Sub-Mariner story never surfaced again. That makes two artists who, given a chance to get published by Marvel Comics, decided … why bother?

5) The Master of Kung Fu plot was eventually taken back from the recalcitrant artist and returned to Mike Zeck, who did a magnificent job of it. The story was eventually published in Master of Kung Fu #64, May 1978.

Three out of five ain’t bad. But I still mourn for those two stillborn stories—and there were others—which never saw the light of day. And if not for a couple of unmotivated artists, I’d have gotten paid for the scripts and you’d have gotten to read them. Which of course hurt me more than it hurt you, because I was no Steve Gerber. But still.

And if you think that’s the last you’ll hear from me about the secret history of comics … believe me, there’s more.