I was contacted last week by a reporter for Back Issue magazine. He wanted to interview me about an obscure short feature I wrote starring the X-Men character the Angel when I worked for Marvel Comics in the ’70s. In addition to picking my brain about the creation of that story, which appeared way back in Marvel Treasury Edition #27, he was hoping I might still have my written Marvel-style plot or some of the original artwork. It turned out that I had neither of those, but during my search through the dusty Edelman archives, I did find two other bits of Marvel memorabilia which took me way back—ID cards which marked two very important stages in my life.

The first was my membership card in the Merry Marvel Marching Society, the fan club created by Stan Lee back when I was nine years old. I can still remember packing my pennies, nickels, and dimes into an empty Junior Mints box and then taping it shut before sealing it inside a envelope. I’m amazed that my lumpy, jingling package made it through the mail all the way to Madison Avenue.

Weeks later, after I received my kit of Marvel paraphernalia, I carried that MMMS card wherever I went. My membership number was 3656, and I memorized the Merry Marvel Pledge that was printed on the back.

You can see how worn the card grew during those fanboy years. (Had the word “fanboy” even been coined yet? I don’t think so.) The card grew quite worn, and so I foolishly cut the corners with a scissor to sharpen the edges and make the crumpled card look new again. I even covered the card with scotch tape in a kid’s amateur attempt at lamination, which is why, three decades later, it’s so horribly yellowed.

Years later, in the mid-’70s, I got a different kind of Marvel membership card—my Marvel employee ID. In a journey too convoluted to recount here (at least, not yet), I had somehow managed the miracle of transforming myself from an amateur fanatic into … well … a professional fanatic. The fanatic part hadn’t changed.

The company hadn’t yet begun issuing these IDs when I was initially hired, so this photo would have been taken during my second year on staff, when I started looking a little less scruffy, thanks to Vidal Sassoon. With that ’70s beard and haircut, I think I looked like I could have been one of the Bee Gees.

I remember that when I started working at Marvel, I thought I’d arrived in Heaven. I’d show up at work early, and never want to leave to go home. When you could spend your days proofing the next issue of Spider-Man off the original artwork, who would want to be anywhere else? I was just as insane then as I had been when I was nine.

Each of these cards is meaningful. Each stirs up powerful memories. I wish I could tell you which of the two remains the more meaningful, but you know something? I can’t.

Magic can’t be measured.