I’ve been working so hard all week (and this weekend, too) that I’ve been forced into silence here since Saturday. But since three things equal a post, how about we let these pics stand in for my week?

First, a lovely pic Irene snapped of me with Geoff Landis and Mary Turzillo at my favorite local dim sum restaurant, New Fortune. While on their way to Maryland for a scientific conference, Geoff and Mary swung through West Virginia Saturday night and had dinner at the Edelman-Vartanoff homestead, followed the next day by shumai over in Maryland, which Irene and I ran over to share.

It was good to play catch-up outside of the madness of a convention.

Next up, a pic of that shows old Marvel pal Bill Mantlo, whose medical woes were recently reported on at length, in far happier times. I published it in the December 1974 issue of Marvel’s official fan magazine, FOOM. It was part of a strange idea I had of running baby pictures of artists and writers, and while everyone else turned in the real thing, Bill came up with this.

And that’s how I’d rather remember him. (more…)

The Champions was a Marvel Comics supergroup of the mid-’70s created by Tony Isabella which starred Hercules, Ghost Rider, the Black Widow, Angel, and Iceman. Except for a fill-in issue by Chris Claremont, and one scripting assist by Bill Mantlo, Tony handled the first seven issues.

But with The Champions #8, the October 1976 issue (cover below), Bill took over the title and wrote the book until it was cancelled with #17, the January 1978 issue.

But before he began, he laid out his plans for the book in a two-page memo to Gerry Conway and Jim Shooter. Would you like to be able to compare his plans for the group with what actually happened? Well, thanks to my Marvel memo packrat ways, you can. Because here’s that memo!

I’ll leave it up to someone else to check the memo against the books themselves and provide a point by point comparison.

Why am I sharing this with you now? For those who haven’t seen my other findings from the vault (and by vault I mean the couple of file folders I’ve been lugging around for more than three decades)—

First, Sean Howe, editor of the fascinating Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, is working on a history of Marvel in the ’70s, and I’m trying to make sure he has all the info he needs to make it the best possible book it can be. And since I’m going to the effort of scanning these memos and letting him see them, I figure you should get a look at them, too.

But also—when Len Wein suffered a house fire a few years back, which damaged not only his comic book and original art collections but also many historical documents about the secret history of the business, I started to think … what if my house burned down, and it turned out I had the only copies of some of these memos? So I decided to get as many of them online as I could, because the info doesn’t just belong to me, it belongs to everybody who loves comics.

So when you see other posts like this from me in the future … now you’ll know why.

If there’s one thing that my old boss Stan Lee wasn’t known for, it was humility. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Shepherding the Marvel Universe into being was hard enough, but selling it to the world was even harder. You’ve got to be a salesman. And that requires bombast, which Stan had (still has) oozing out of his pores. But humility? Not so much.

Why is why, when Bill Mantlo, who was the writer of Marvel Two-in-One, which teamed up The Thing with a different character each issue, suggested Stan as one month’s co-star, it was surprising that The Man would say … well, see below.

Nothing ever came of it, and I have no idea why. Was it Marv? Was it Roy, Len, or Archie? Or was it that mysterious “etc.”? Who knows? But the team-up never happened.

What’s that? You say you remember a team-up between Stan and Benjamin J. Grimm? Ah, but that wasn’t 35 years ago, just five, in Stan Lee Meets the Thing, published in 2006.

Bill Mantlo had nothing to do with this eventual meet-up. Instead, the issue was written by The Man himself, and drawn by Lee Weeks and Nelson DeCastro.

I won’t say it was a story 30 years in the making … but Bill Mantlo was there first.