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.

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? (more…)

Since I’m always bitching to you when I see fine art interpretations of comics go for big bucks while images by the artists who toiled in the field go for peanuts—as when I complained that a pop artist’s version of Green Lantern sold for 7,723 times more than one by the man who created the character—I owe it to you to share that for once, the comics field won.

You may have heard that a page of Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott artwork from Fantastic Four #55, one starring the Silver Surfer, was sold earlier this month by Heritage Auctions for $155,350.

But what you might not know (and what I only just remembered) is that Sharon Moody, a fine artist about whom I’ve written at length before, is either offering for sale or has already sold her own interpretation of that same page. (more…)

Well, that was fast! Less than an hour after putting out the call, I had scans for all the Captain America and Black Panther letters pages I wrote while at Marvel back in the ’70s.

So what will they reveal? Was there truly an orchestrated effort by us staffers, as some have claimed, to use the letters columns to sow seeds of dissatisfaction with Kirby among fandom?

Since I assembled many of those columns, I thought it important to respond with the facts, because as far as I know, none of those making such claims have done more than repeatedly make the claim, without evidence. What does a look at the actual texts of six such pages I put together for Kirby-created comics actually reveal?

(And a big thanks to Sean Howe, author of the upcoming history of Marvel in the ’70s, for responding so quickly!)

So let’s dig into Captain America 202, shall we?

Lots of positivity there, beginning with a letter that includes the line, “THIS is the Kirby I remember.” While the column does include is a letter hoping Kirby doesn’t do away with the characterization of the previous creative team, when isn’t there a letter like that whenever someone new is at the helm?

Since the column for issue 203 was about all-important issue 200, I managed to squeeze in 13 letters. And the ratio? (more…)

Do you have easily accessible copies of Captain America 202, 203, 205-207, or Black Panther 2? Are they reading rather than slabbed copies? Would you be willing to scan the letters columns and send me .jpgs?

If so, you might be able to help me dispel a Marvel Comics myth.

Yesterday, I posted a response to Robert Steibel’s commentary on my post of last year in which I recoiled from Jack Kirby’s mid-’70s run on Captain America.

Though he didn’t bring up the following point in his essay, Steibel and I exchanged a few emails, and in one of them he claimed that Marvel staffers were weighting the letters columns against Kirby in an attempt to orchestrate a campaign within fandom to get The King kicked off the books he was writing at the time.

I’d never heard such an accusation before, but when I searched online, I found that he didn’t originate the concept, that it had been comics hearsay for quite awhile, and that some even claimed staffers were creating fraudulent letters to make the Kirby backlash seem even worse. For example, Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon reported on this in their 2003 biography, Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book.

The thing is, though the charge of faking negative letters has been bandied about, it all seems to be vague rumor and speculation. I’ve yet to see anyone point at a specific column and say that such-and-such a letter was cobbled together by an Assistant Editor.

Since I only just heard the charge for the first time this weekend, it took a day for the idea to sink in, and for me to realize—

Wait a minute! I was the one who wrote many of the letters columns that appeared in Kirby’s books. I’m the one being accused of fakery! (more…)

Over at the Kirby Museum, Robert Steibel has something to say about a post I wrote a year back which explained how, when I was working for Marvel in the ’70s, I disliked the work Jack Kirby was doing upon his return there, and how I dislike that work still. By work, I don’t mean the energetic as always images Kirby was drawing, but the text he supplied once he was responsible for both words and pictures, without Stan Lee to complement him. As I wrote in that post, “The art could still be the stuff of dreams at times, but the words that came out of his characters’ mouths seemed more like a nightmare.”

When it comes to the Stan vs. Jack wars, I am a partisan of neither. Once the duo disbanded, I don’t think either of them ever worked separately at the level they did when together. They needed each other. So I wasn’t slamming Kirby to elevate Lee, merely making an observation that when the King tried to do it all, it was far from satisfactory.

But let’s leave for another time the debate as to who’s right about the quality of Kirby’s prose. (Though it looks like that time won’t be too far off, as Steibel’s post, after all, was the first of two, and his second will deal with exactly that issue.) What I’d like to address here, and what it seems as if Steibel is most interested in having me address, is my behavior when I was on staff at Marvel in the ’70s, whether there was a conspiracy of some kind to cause Kirby to be fired, and if we were trying to get the scripting duties of his books for ourselves.

Steibel wrote:

Clearly they were all ambitious kids who wanted to take Jack’s place. They wanted to write comics and pointing out what they considered flaws in Jack’s work was a step in that direction. Push Jack aside and move in.

No, no, a million times no.

But to be more specific … (more…)

I’ve already told you how the only reason I got my job at Marvel Comics in the ’70s was because of a serendipitous encounter with the late Duffy Vohland. But in a way, I almost lost that job because of Duffy, too. Or at least … I thought I was going to.

Before Duffy pulled me into comics as a professional, he pulled me into his corner of comics fandom. Oh, I’d already been going to cons, buying fanzines, and getting involved in lots of other fanac, but he hooked me up with a bunch of guys who published and/or wrote and/or drew for a fanzine titled CPL—that is, Contemporary Pictorial Literature. If you know anything about comics, you’ve heard of some of those guys, because Bob Layton, Roger Stern, John Byrne, and Roger Slifer all went on to professional comics careers of their own.

Duffy wrote a column known as “Duffy’s Tavern” for that (and other) fanzines, and asked me to fill in for an issue, which I did, writing an essay that appeared in the CPL #8, which featured this spiffy cover penciled by John and inked by Duffy.

My essay, titled “Comic Art: Fact or Fiction?” was written when I was still a fan, and took a very jaundiced view of the creative state of the field. I wrote, among other things, that “There are very few comic books which even come close to what a comic should be.” I sent the piece off, and forgot all about it, until it was published … by which time I was working on staff at Marvel. And upon rereading it, I thought—What have I done? Once Roy Thomas reads this, he’s going to can me for sure!

I trembled for several weeks waiting for the axe to fall, or at the very least for the two us to have an extremely uncomfortable conversation due to my having written an essay which basically maligned most of Marvel’s output. As far as I recall, though, nothing was ever said, either because Roy never read it or had read it but just thought it was too silly to even comment on.

Rereading it now, it occurs to me that though It doesn’t quite express my feelings today, it does basically explain why I don’t like those recently announced Watchmen prequels and why I have no plans to read them. So some feelings never change.

But enough about me. Whatever you think of my essay, I’m sure you’ll find it far more entertaining to look at some of the great art from that issue, including a naked Ben Grimm.

That’s right. A named Ben Grimm.

By none other than the legendary Joe Sinnott! (more…)

And lo, there shall be an ending!

Over the past two weeks, I’ve shared scans from a folder of Marvel Comics character write-ups I found in 1975 wedged between drawers in a Bullpen file cabinet. They all included suggestions for which celebrities you should think of when reading the word balloons belonging to your favorite superheroes. One set (the X-Men) I published in an issue of FOOM, the others (Captain America, Thor, the Sub-Mariner, Doctor Strange, the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Iron Man) went unseen until I posted them on this blog.

Now here comes the final such write-up, on the Fantastic Four.

But before you click through to check it out, pause for a moment and try to imagine—who did Marvel think Reed Richards was supposed to sound like? And how about Ben Grimm and the rest? Got a name? OK, then go for it!

Did you come close? Whether you did or not, I’m sure you’re wondering—who wrote these? And why?

Because of the clues contained in these sheets, I was fairly certain they could not have been written any later than 1965, and therefore there were few possible culprits. I suspected Stan Lee, though my Bullpen peers offered up a few other names, such as Stan’s brother, Larry Leiber, or Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, who worked briefly for Marvel in the early days.

But why merely speculate, you might ask? Why not reach out to Stan himself?

And that’s exactly what I did. (more…)

Yesterday, I promised I’d share with you the Iron Man character write-up I found stuffed in the back of Marvel Comics file cabinet when I worked there in the ’70s, and even though you have much better things to do today than read this post and are off celebrating Presidents’ Day by buying a car or a mattress or a huge flat-screen TV, I’m a man of my word.

And so …

But wait!

Before you click on the scan below, first picture the characters of Tony Stark, Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan, and try to imagine which celebrity voices you’re meant to hear in your head whenever you read their word balloons.

Got a few names? OK, then now you can click away!

Well? Did you get close on any of them?

Whether you did or not, I imagine the main thing you’re thinking is … Korea?

Tomorrow, you’ll get to see the final character sheets I found—two pages on the Fantastic Four.

Plus a few words from none other than Stan Lee himself!

Over the past week or so, I’ve shared scans of pages I found in a Marvel Bullpen file cabinet during the mid-’70s—so far, you’ve seen the X-Men, Captain America, Thor, the Sub-Mariner, Doctor Strange, and the Hulk—and along the way I mentioned I had a feeling based on the content that these were written no later than the mid-’60s.

Today’s sheet will give you more of an idea of why I think this. Take a look at Spider-Man and his supporting cast and tell me what you see.

Or rather … what you don’t see.

Well? Did you not see what I thought you might not see? (more…)