In 1981, I had a commemorative coin minted to celebrate the fifth anniversary of my marriage to Irene Vartanoff. I was working for Psychology Today magazine at the time, where catalogs would continually arrive from manufacturers of merchandising giveaways—key rings, belt buckles, T-shirts, etc.—that could be personalized. And it struck me—why should companies have all the fun?

So I ordered a batch of metal coins incorporating our names, the dates we’d been married, and—here’s the part that tickled me the most—

… the words LEGAL AND TENDER, a description of our marital status that’s also an allusion to the phrase LEGAL TENDER which appears on U.S. currency.

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Earlier today, I told you about my hunt for a 30th anniversary gift that led me to purchase a page from Love Tales #73 (May 1957) for Irene, and it occurs to me you deserve to see the rest of the original art from that story,

Page 4 of “The Wrong Kind of Guy!,” drawn by John Tartaglione, has been hanging on Irene’s wall since 2006. Amazingly, I was able to find the splash page, page 2, and page 3 online as well, scanned and uploaded by their owners.

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Well, Valentine’s Day was this week, which means my thoughts turned to romance … romance comic books, that is. It reminded me of a dichotomy I noticed several years ago between the covers to romance novels and the covers to romance comics, a difference I’ve never seen anyone mention. And so I figure I should mention it to you here now so that you can go, “Oh, Scott, you dummy, where have you been, everyone already knows that!”

It started for me back in 2006, as Irene and I were approaching our 30th anniversary. I decided that, because of Irene’s love of both romance novels and comic books, I’d buy her the original art to a romance comic book cover for an anniversary gift. What I soon discovered, as I studied all the art then for sale from dealers, was that romance comic book cover art was terribly sad, and not at all suitable to celebrate three decades of love!

Somehow, even though our house has always been filled with both romance novels and comics, I’d never noticed this.

Take a look at the covers to a couple of random romance novels. (more…)

Irene and I had a wonderful time in Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend, a visit that was sparked entirely by my desire to experience Next restaurant’s transitory Kyoto menu. I’ll share more about it when I can, but for now, let these seven photos stand in for a more detailed write-up.

Looking up at the stained glass dome of the Driehaus Museum

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Thirty-eight years ago this morning, a guy looking something like this …

… woke in the Brooklyn apartment he lived in with his parents and took a bus to a train to 575 Madison Avenue for his first day on the job at Marvel Comics, where he met a women looking something like this …

… after which one thing led to another.

And they lived happily ever after.

The end.

Last week, I told you how my wife was selling her copies of Amazing Fantasy #15 and Amazing Adventures #1 so that in the far-flung future, we won’t be reduced to eating cat food. But … what if your tastes run more to original art?

Then how about the wonderful Green Lantern page below, drawn by Gil Kane and Sid Greene, which not only features an encounter between the Silver and Golden Age incarnations of the character—but is signed by Martin Nodell, who created Green Lantern back in 1940!

The page was published in Green Lantern #61 (June 1968), and if you’d like it to be yours, head on over to Heritage Auctions.

Todd Klein recently posted a wonderful report about a visit to DC Comics in the ’60s, which included a floor plan of the company’s offices at 575 Lexington Avenue, and made me realize—Hey! I have a map of Marvel’s 575 Madison Avenue offices from the ’70s.

A map unseen for more than 35 years.

And mine was drawn by Mirthful Marie Severin!

I can’t say for sure exactly when this map was sketched, but it was obviously begun when Roy Thomas was still Editor-in-Chief (since his name is visibly crossed out), but finished before Len Wein resigned and ceded the position to Marv Wolfman, which to me places it somewhere between late 1974 and early 1975.

This map was created to figure out where to put all the warm bodies, and not as a guide to the famous cover Marie drew around a year later for FOOM #16 (December 1976). (more…)

It’s Irene’s birthday tomorrow, and as part of the weekend’s celebration, we’ll be driving to Richmond for a visit to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to catch their Fabergé exhibit. While we’re there, I hope to snag her one of those eggs I keep hearing so much about.

And along the way, I hope to add two more Man v. Food restaurants to my “yeah, I’ve eaten there” list—Buz & Ned’s Real BBQ and The Black Sheep.

But as for Caliente … never. I don’t do heat, and poor Irene would probably burst into flames if we even drove past the place.

I’ll let you know what I thought of these restaurants—and how they compare to other Man v. Food picks—once we get back.

On September 4, 1978, Irene and I celebrated our second anniversary by having lunch at Windows on the World restaurant. It was part of an anniversary weekend that included a rented Rolls Royce, orchestra tickets to the then-hit Broadway show On the Twentieth Century, dinner at the reopened Stork Club, and a suite at the Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park. (No, we weren’t rich … but I’d just gotten paid for The Captain Midnight Book of Sports, Health and Nutrition and decided to blow most of the proceeds celebrating.)

For those who don’t remember … Windows on the World was on top of the north tower of the World Trade Center.

The original to this photo is displayed to the right of my desk, which means I see it and think about that lunch and that venue every day.

I sure wish we lived in a world in which we could go back there again for some future anniversary …

As we rode the Spaceship Earth attraction at Walt Disney World during our 35th anniversary weekend, our pictures were snapped and dropped into a personalized video showing our future, which was screened for us as the ride was ending … and then emailed so it would be waiting for us when we arrived home.

So here’s what Irene and I will be doing in the world of tomorrow!

We giggled when this unexpected video popped up.

We did a LOT of giggling at Disney World …