While I was over at my sister-in-law’s house Sunday night, I happened to notice a stack of old comics on the coffee table and picked up this one—Detective Comics #350 (April 1966)—because who could resist a Batman drawn by Joe Kubert or those Go-Go Checks?

The house ads in the issue were as much fun as the stories (which is often the case), and I was particularly intrigued by this one, in which DC claimed it sold “twice as many comics as any other competitor” and “almost as many as all other comics combined.” (more…)

Earlier this week I shared a photo taken in high school which shows me wearing a tutu and a black-and-white sequined bra—a photo which once seen cannot be unseen and therefore deserves some kind of trigger warning before you click.

While flipping through old albums in search of that photo, I came across a couple of other images which feature an equally unrecognizable while also bizarre younger me. These were taken when I worked in the Marvel Bullpen, and were used in the fake ad below which appeared in an issue of Crazy magazine.

Behold!

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Next Saturday is Free Comic Book Day, which means that if you wander into a comics shop on May 4, 2013, you might just walk out with a comic book written … by me!

But how is that possible? I haven’t written any comics in decades. How could I possibly have anything in a comic handed out on Free Comic Book Day?

Blame Thanos!

Bill Hall of The Daily Kirby let me know today (beating out Marvel Comics, who’s yet to alert me) that my back-up story from Logan’s Run #6, which starred Thanos and Drax the Destroyer, will be reprinted in Infinity, Marvel’s giveaway for Free Comic Book Day. All because Thanos is now a big deal due to his appearance at the end of The Avengers movie.

The freebie is described as follows: (more…)

As Irene and I walked south down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue Saturday, I happened to look to the left at just the right moment to spot the Hulk looking back—because this print by artist Doug Bloodworth was hanging in a gallery window.

Here’s a clearer version of the piece, with the image not obscured by the glare of the street lights.

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Back when I was on staff at Marvel Comics and writing the Bullpen Bulletins pages (well, all of it save Stan’s Soapbox), I kept a suggestion box on my desk in which people could drop notes with things they thought worthy of mention.

One day, I opened the box to find this card from Mirthful Marie Severin …

Oh, Marie … I love you!

Sean Howe posted a moving Fred Hembeck strip today over at his Marvel Comics: The Untold Story Tumblr. It seems to have been originally published in 1986 on the occasion of Marvel’s 25th anniversary, but it’s still relevant 27 years later.

And yeah … I know that, and you know that … but I don’t think they know that.

I used to have a pretty decent Silver Age comic book collection—that is, until working in the business burned me out on comics altogether. Eventually, I couldn’t bear to look at them, and sold all save a few of the more valuable ones, which I hung onto in a safe deposit box purely for investment purposes.

But as I’ve mentioned here before, there’s one comic I later regret letting go of—a comic I wasn’t even sure of the title and issue number of at first—but which thanks to one of you I learned was Tales of Suspense #69.

And thanks to Claudio Piccinini, who located and kindly sent me a copy, Tales of Suspense #69 is mine again. (more…)

Remember the Merry Marvel Marching Society mystery I asked for your help in solving two months back? The one about how I’d thought my name had appeared as an M.M.M.S. member in an issue of Tales from Suspense which featured Titanium Man on the cover, though one of you thought my name was actually published in Strange Tales instead?

Well, it turned out I was right all along!

According to Claudio Piccinini, my named appeared (along with 24 other M.M.M.S. members) in Tales of Suspense #69 (September 1965), which featured the first appearance of Titanium Man. I would have been 10 years old.

Mystery solved!

Last month, I expressed my regrets for having gotten rid of whichever Marvel comic book it was that had included my name as one of the early members of the Merry Marvel Marching Society. (Printing 25 different names in each issue every month was a thing Marvel made a habit of back then.)

I had a memory of my name appearing in an issue of Tales from Suspense which pictured Iron Man battling the Titanium Man on its cover, and I asked for your help in tracking it down. Well, some has tracked down my name—though where exactly it was tracked down from remains to be seen.

Over on LiveJournal, Doc Hermes posted the following scan, and if you look at the box of names, you see mine in the third column, four up from the bottom.

So if I now have a scan of the page containing my name, then why did I state in the header above that my mystery wasn’t fully solved, but “almost” solved?

Well, first of all, if you click on the image above, you’ll see that as of yet, I don’t have a full-sized scan.

But the real reason the mystery remains is because Doc Hermes scanned the page without making a note as to where it originated. Also, he thinks “this was from an issue of STRANGE TALES, early on in the Nick Fury run (before Jim Steranko),” which completely contradicts my Tales of Suspense/Iron Man memory.

So—I’ve got the puzzle partially completed. Any chance these additional clues will help you fill in the final piece?

I was tweeting last night about Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, which I’m currently about 75% of the way through (more on that later), and in response to my statement that I was glad I’d left Marvel before things got truly ugly there, I was asked whether I’d moved on before or during the Jim Shooter era.

Well, not only was I there during the beginnings of the Shooter era, but he and I actually once fell from the sky together!

In case you didn’t know that, check out this sidebar I wrote that appeared in the December 1976 issue of Marvel’s fan magazine FOOM.

And since the pics accompanying the article are quite fuzzy thanks to FOOM‘s far from state-of-the-art printing process, here are some of the original pics to show how insane (and young) we once were. (more…)