I made an interesting discovery about a somewhat forgotten piece of Marvel Comics history while reviewing those ’70s letters columns for my post on whether we Assistant Editors were stacking the deck against Jack Kirby. (Well, perhaps not forgotten by you, but when I came across one of the answers I gave, I thought for a moment I’d only been joking.)

A fan had complained that the constant use of exclamation points in comics “can get very boring,” and he wondered why we did it. My answer referenced that there’d been “an experimental run of Marvel Comics published in 1971, during which time all letterers used periods instead of exclamation points,” but that experiment hadn’t gone well.

Check out my full answer below.

My initial thought upon rereading this after so many years was … really?

I had so forgotten that Marvel ever did this that I thought perhaps I’d been punking the reader. But I sounded a little too serious about it, so I did some online searching, which led me to the always excellent Comic Book Legends Revealed. As Brian Cronin reported, “at one point, Stan Lee decided that exclamation points were too juvenile, so he decreed that no Marvel Comics were to feature exclamation points from then on.”

Go read his illustrated essay and learn why it happened and why it didn’t work out. You might learn something. Hey, I did!