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…)

As Irene and I have done for quite a few years, we used her attendance at the New Jersey Romance Writers annual conference to swoop down on Marie Severin, the nicest lady in comics, with whom we worked at Marvel during the ’70s.

She was back then, and continues to be now, a hoot.

We swung by Thursday and took her out for Italian, plying her with wine and swapping stories of the old days. As usual, we filled her in on news of all our old friends (and all our old non-friends, too).

She asked after Stan Lee, and was tickled to hear he now had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We tried to figure out who the oldest surviving comics creator was, and thought that it had to be Joe Simon, who just turned 98. (You’ll tell me if I’m wrong, right?) We got her talking about the old EC days, which I don’t think we’d ever done before, and she told us what a good boss Bill Gaines had been to her.

But in addition to the comics gossip—unavoidable when we get together—we of course caught up on life in general, with much laughter. (There’s GOT to be laughter when you’re around Mirthful Marie.)

And here’s the lady herself, looking 82 years young.

We’ll continue talking by phone often, but I hope we won’t have to wait until next November to see her again in the flesh.

We love you, Marie!

As soon as I learned that this year’s Stoker Awards banquet was going to be held on Long Island, I decided to make the most of it. And one way I did that was by bookending the event with lunches that had absolutely nothing to do with the primary reason for my trip.

I planned a Thursday lunch with Frank Cama, the Junior High School drama teacher who changed my life, and I planned a Sunday lunch with Marie Severin, the Marvel Comics artist who’s the funniest, nicest lady I ever met in the business. (Don’t worry—Irene won’t mind in the slightest that I said that.)

As the time for my lunch with the Mirthful one drew near, signs indicated to me that Fate was not indifferent to my trip, and very much wanted us to spend time together.

For example:

1) I was asked to present one of HWA’s two Lifetime Achievement Awards to Al Feldstein. The fact that Feldstein was an editor at EC Comics also meant that he was … Marie’s boss.

2) A couple of days before I was to head off to Long Island, I was contacted by Sean Howe, author of an upcoming history of Marvel Comics in the ’70s. He gave me the phone number of fellow Bullpenner Stu Schwartzberg so I could pass it on to Marie the next time I saw her … which Sean had no idea was only going to be a few days later.

3) I had dinner Friday night with (among others) William Freedman, who’s married to the niece of one of Marie’s high school classmates. We’d met online when he reached out to tell me about his encounter with Marie Severin and how she drew on his walls, and he retold that tale at our dinner party.

4) Sunday morning at the hotel, while noodling around online, I discovered that one of Marie’s most famous covers was on display as part of a comics exhibit at an Istanbul museum. Since Marie doesn’t do the Internet, this meant the only way she’d ever know about this honor was if I showed her that pic on my iPad.

You’d think those would be enough reasons to prove the universe was smiling at my encounter with Marie, but no, there was an even more astonishing one … (more…)

A recent post over at the always wonderful Giant-Size Geek sent me scurrying to the vault. Richard Guion posted pages of Bullpen photos from the 1975 Mighty Marvel Convention booklet, which happened to include pics of both me and Irene.

In case you don’t remember those pics from previous posts, here we are again.

Didn’t we used to be cute? (Well, Irene still is. Though as for me … )

But never mind that. We’re here today to talk about the cover. Here’s the cover con attendees saw back in 1975.

If you ever wondered how that layout came to be, I’ve got the answer—because among my many other Marvel staff duties at the time, I edited that program book, and I still have Marie Severin’s original sketches showing off two possible designs. (more…)

As anyone who’s ever seen me play softball or touch football knows (or should I say, as anyone who’s ever seen me try to play softball or touch football knows), I’m about the least athletic person on the planet. Which is why I’m glad that I’m able to provide evidence that during the summer of ’76, I was able to raise my game from pathetic to merely embarrassing as part of the Marvel Comics softball team.

What position did I play? I was put wherever the rest of the team felt I could do the least damage at any given moment.

As the certificate below proves, I was the team’s Most Improved Player. But just to show how miserable my performance really was, I’ll point out that the certificate calls me the Most Improved Player … for a Boy. If not for parsing the categories that finely, I’m sure that when the time came to hand out the awards at the banquet at the end of the season, I’d have walked away empty handed.

Because calling any change in my playing abilities an improvement was an act of kindness. Believe me.

The certificate was designed by … wait a second. Let’s make this a quiz.

If you’d like to guess who created these certificates, stop reading now, examine the lettering closely, and think about it for a bit. Then take your guess, scroll down, and see if you were right.

Are you done cogitating?

Ready to know who’s responsible?

Are you sure?

Well, then …

… it’s …

… it’s …

… Marie Severin, of course!

Did you guess correctly?