Back when I worked for Marvel Comics in the ’70s, the Dreaded Deadline Doom was (to steal a phrase Stan Lee often used in comics) wreaking havoc. Late writers and artists were resulting in thousands of dollars in penalty fees from the printer. And it was no fun for readers either, who wanted their comics on time. The only ones who benefited were beginning writers like me, who thanks to Marvel’s attempts to prevent those delays from messing up publishing schedules got to write fill-ins and back-ups.

That’s how I got to script issues of Master of Kung Fu and Omega the Unknown, as well as countless shorter stories, such as John Romita, Jr.’s first published piece.

But not every story I pitched or plotted made it to the page. Amazingly, there were a few, approved by editors, which were never turned in by the artists, creating their own Dreaded Deadline Doom. You wouldn’t think a new artist would blow a chance to get published by Marvel, but several did.

One pitch, however, meant for a fill-in issue of Marvel Team-Up, never made it to an artist, for it was presumably rejected. I have no memory of the circumstances, and only know that it was submitted on August 14, 1978 because that’s the date written on it.

As it’s the only Marvel method plot in existence for any of my published comics (none of my DC Comics full scripts survive either), I thought it worth sharing here to give some idea of how I worked back then, when I was 23 and still trying to figure out how to write comics. (And just in case it’s not obvious—the images below that I grabbed to break up the text here were not a part of my original proposal.)

And so …

Spider-Man’s Lonely Hearts Club Fans!

SPLASH: Spidey is swinging by the main branch of the New York City Post Office. His patrol is interrupted by a cry for help coming out of an upper window of the building.

THE STORY CONTINUES: Spidey-sense tingling, Spidey swings in the window. From inside we see a costumed goon with a futuristic gun on either side of the window. Spidey, still holding onto the webbing, does a split-kick, knocking each thug back off his feet. Spidey sees no sign of the person he’d heard cry for help just seconds before, and he thinks this odd. Spidey disarms the crooks with webbing and a tug. He grabs an empty mail sack and then, flipping over so that his feet are holding him to the ceiling directly above the two crooks’ heads. he grabs them by the scruff of their necks and stuffs them in the sack as they protest:

“Wait, Spider-Man, you don’t understand— ”

“I only understand that something wacky’s going on here!” says Spidey, as he holds the sack out the upper story window and begins questioning the crooks. Suddenly, from behind Spidey, a dry, cracked, withered, and shaking voice says:

“Stop that right now, y’hear, you young whippersnapper!”

Spidey turns, drops the mail sack at his side, peers off-panel, and says: “Who the heck are you?”

Stepping out of the shadows, wiggling his ears furiously, is Willie Lumpkin, mailman for the Fantastic Four (first seen in FF #11).

Spidey starts laughing at the sight, and Willie Lumpkin warns Spidey not to hurt the two men … or else. Spidey, in-between titters, manages to ask Willie Lumpkin for an explanation. Explains Willie:

“I’m the Fantastic Four’s mailman, and these two gentlemen are just regular mailmen. Do you realize you get more mail each year than Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny combined? It used to be destroyed every six months, but the bigwigs are more worried about lawsuits stemming from their stepping on people’s constitutional rights now. And since I’m the only postal employee who’s ever had experience with superheroes, they figured I’d be the best one to work up a plan and give you all this!”

Willie Lumpkin waves his hand about the room where there are dozens of huge mail sacks stuffed with cards and letters for him.

“Next time, try taking out a classified in the Daily Bugle,” said Spidey.

CUT TO: Spidey, swinging away from the Post Office, holding a net made of webbing filled with the tons (literally) of mail. Two passersby look on, and the husband tells his wife:

“Look, Mildred—if he’s been declared a hero, how come he’s stealing the mail?”

CUT TO AVENGERS’ MANSION: With the Beast’s “help,” Jarvis is doing the dishes. Jarvis is in a flowery apron, washing, and the Beast is standing on his head, drying the dishes by juggling them with his feet. This quite perturbs Jarvis, because the plates happen to be Tony Stark’s favorite antique china.

“Er—why don’t you check your fan mail, sir?”

“Good idea,” says the Beast, as he tosses the plate into a nearby cabinet like frisbees, where they land unbroken. “And don’t forget to order another thousand of my eight-by-ten glossies—we’re almost out.”

He bounds out of the room, leaving behind a Jarvis who has just collapsed spreadeagled into a kitchen chair.

CUT TO: The Beast, mail sack over his shoulder, leaping into the Avengers’ main meeting room, where he dumps the contents of the sack onto the round table as he perches on the back of the chair. His extraordinary sense of smell enables him to pick out a letter drenched in perfume.

“Va-va-va-VOOM!” says Hank as he sniffs. Ripping it open, he reads the following engraved notice:

“You are hereby invited to be the GUEST OF HONOR at the FIRST ANNUAL BEAST FAN CLUB CONVENTION at the Midwood Hotel (-date-)”

The Beast notices that the invitation is for the next day and declares, “Can’t disappoint my happy fans!” Beginning to bound out of the room and back towards the kitchen, the Beast calls out: “Hey, Jarv—best make that another ten thousand glossies!”

CUT TO THE STATUE OF LIBERTY: Spidey is sitting on the lip of the torch, his web net full of mail sacks hanging from the side of the torch.

One of the sacks is next to him, its mail spilled out in a pile. It is night, and Spidey’s been here for hours, hardly making any dent in the mountain of mail. He reads yet another junk letter concerned with selling him something (“Dear Ms. Man”) which he consigns to the sea, dropping it below him. He reads a letter from a twelve-year-old boy who volunteers to become Spider-Kid, which Spidey tucks into his belt as one he must answer, and then comes across an invitation much like the one the Beast received, except it says “FIRST ANNUAL SPIDER-MAN FAN CLUB CONVENTION.” The date on the invite is also the next day.

“Fan club? For me? Spidey is shocked. “I didn’t even know I had one! Won’t JJJ be steamed when he hears this!”

But every silver lining has a cloud, because just then a cop runs up to Spidey and tries to give him a ticket for littering—”You’ve been dropping junk mail all over Liberty island all night!”

“Tell you what,” says Spidey as he swings off with the huge bundle of mail under his arm. “Send it to the Daily Bugle! J. Jonah Jameson’ll be relieved to know there’s at least one law I’ve really broken. Sheesh!”

CUT TO THE EXTERIOR OF THE MIDWOOD HOTEL: Spidey is peering through the building’s skylight into a convention dealers room. There are two life-size Spidey superhero statues, and kids are wearing Spidey buttons, hats, et cetera.

“Well, whaddaya know? It wasn’t a joke! So Flash isn’t my only fan!”

In through the skylight swings Spidey, and a young blond kid calls back to his friends in joy (looking at the reader as he point at Spidey): “At last! He’s here!”

INTERCUT ONE PANEL: We are in a darkened control room, elsewhere in the hotel. On a view screen is the scene of the last panel. A shadowy, masked, unrecognizable figure stands in the foreground. In the background, a lackey points at the screen, his pose imitating that of the young blond boy, and he shouts:

“Master—at last! He’s here!!”

“Good,” says the figure in the shadows. “All is going according to plan. Proceed!”

CUT BACK TO THE CON: Spidey is swamped, surrounded by hundreds of wildly shouting kids, asking him dumb questions, pleading for piggyback rides, etc.—and Spidey is loving every minute of it! His spider-sense tingles … but Spidey chooses to ignore it.

“After all,” he thinks. “My spider-sense tingled when the only menace I had to fear was that of Willie Lumpkin! What harm could there be in kids—and my fans yet!”

But the harm, dear Spidey, lies not in the kids, but in their master! Time passes and we …

CUT TO THE CONTROL ROOM: Our villain in the shadows lets us in on part of his plans as the lackey giggles with delight that all is going well.

“Soon my cellular decoders hidden in the ballroom’s ceiling lamps will have finished their job … and allowed me to steal the secret of Spider-Man’s natural animal-based powers so I can implant them in myself!”

“All done, master!”

“Then his usefulness is ended!”

“Yes, master (giggle)!”

The lackey presses a button.

CUT BACK TO THE CON: A child comes over to Spidey to ask for an autograph.

“Of course,” says Spidey, his spider-sense still tingling. When Spidey opens the book, an explosive cloud of knockout gas puffs into his face. Spidey inhales a good whiff of it, which makes him too groggy to cover his face. Dazed and losing consciousness, he reaches out and grabs the arm of the kid whose autograph book it was—and there’s no pulse!

“Lord—no wonder why my Spidey-sense was tingling! This child—all of these children—they’re not human! It’s all a giant trap! Got to … get out … ”

He punches at the kid who aced him and knocks his block off to reveal that he’s naught but a robot! Spidey fades out, the kids laughing at him. His last view is from flat on his back looking up at their demonic faces—and one kid has neither face nor head, ’cause Spidey knocked his head off, so he only sees a neck with wires sticking out.

CUT TO THE INTERIOR OF AN AIRSHAFT OF THE MIDWOOD HOTEL: The Beast is peering through an air vent in which he is hanging upside-down. He sees a con room filled with Spider-stuff.

There is a place that had two Spider-Man statues where fans appear to be hastily putting up a third. The Beast wonders why all the Spidey stuff and no Beast booty but then he empties it from his thoughts and makes a grand entrance … a bit too early for the likes of our mysterious villain! The Beast leaps in from the airshaft, bouncing off chandeliers, pillars, the heads of the three statues, etc.

CUT TO THE CONTROL ROOM: “Too early!” shouts the lackey—”He’s too early! The plan’s gone awry!”

“Silence, fool!” answers the master, still in shadows: “The Beast is too much of an egomaniac for your failure to put out the Beast material in time to affect his suspicions in the slightest! One reason Spider-Man and the Beast were chosen as my pawns is because the former’s ego was so shaken from years of hate by his public that he needed to believe this was real—while the latter’s self-love is so great its weight will force him to stumble into my trap anyway!”

The Beast is continuing his ricochets on the room’s view screen.

CUT BACK TO THE CON: The Beast has finally come to a stop, and there is a marked difference in the thoughts and reactions of our two heroes to the crowd. While Spider-Man was shocked by the unexpected adoration, the Beast expects and is used to it! He’s getting mobbed by little and not-quite-so-little girls. Close-up of the new Spider-statue—thinking!

“I don’t know what the plan is—but I’ve got to stop the Beast from being captured, too! I’ve got to!”

He struggles against the super-strong lucite-like yet air-permeable covering that he’s been coated with—and sees a little girl approaching the Beast—a little girl holding an autograph album! His spider-sense is tingling like mad—and this time he pays attention to it! He realizes the Beast is about to get knocked out. As the Beast reaches for the book, Spidey uses every ounce of strength—and the coating shatters!

“Look out!” screams Spidey as he uses his webbing to pull the book from the girl’s hand and sends it hurtling to the skylight above where it crashes through, exploding its gas. “It’s a trap! They’re all robots!” says Spidey.

“I thought it was odd—in a room with over five hundred people there was no human odor!” mentioned the Beast.

CUT TO THE CONTROL ROOM: The lackey is on the floor, crying, not a single giggle left in his body.

“Control yourself, idiot!” shout the mysterious master. “Has not the computer already taken all the information we need? Then set the robots on them—so that the plan of the Masked Marauder may work!”

The villain steps out of the shadows with those words.

“My failure,” he explains, “has always been in relying on others, as you yourself prove so well. My Tri-Man and Tri-Animan creatures were all creations outside myself! Well, this time I shall the the Tri-Man! With Spider-Man’s spider-like powers and the Beast’s agility and strength, combined in my body with my intellect—I’ll be unstoppable! I chose these two because their powers are wholly a thing of nature—unlike Iron Man, Thor, or the Vision, who must rely on machinery or the like for their powers!”

During this speech, the Masked Marauder steps between two ray-shooters which bathe him with powerful energy blasts while he … changes! When the energy has done its work, his mask is gone and he is wearing a different costume. His physiognomy has altered to slightly resemble that of The Beast.

“And now—the Masked Marauder no longer—I shall triumph! I—the Super-Triman!”

CUT BACK TO THE MAIN CON ROOM: Spider-Man and the Beast are in the midst of a battle with hundreds of kid-like robots. All through the fight the robots are following a vocal programming pattern—they ask for autographs, talking ever-so-nicely as they try to kill.

“Gotta keep reminding myself that they’re not really kids,” says the Beast as he bounds from one to the other, kicking and shattering them. About a dozen robots charge him as he lands to stop in one place, coming from all sides, and he leaps up into the air so they destroy themselves when they collide.

Spidey meanwhile is slugging it out with the robots, knocking their blocks off, turning tables filled with comics atop them, until he realizes that it could take forever fighting that way. And since they still have to get at the mastermind behind all this, they just don’t have the time to waste. Spidey begins forming giant web nets and dredging the robots into them, then hanging them from the ceiling. When Spidey is almost done, the Beast is still leaping about, taking out the final stray few—and then he ricochets into one of the web nets.

“GLUB!” His arms are caught but his feet are free. “Get me outta here!” says the Beast.

“I can’t,” answers Spidey— “That’s why I’m so careful with the stuff. It’s strong enough to even keep me trapped if I were to get caught in it. But don’t worry—the stuff’ll wear off in an hour!”

Suddenly, S-TA comes crashing through the wall. Says the Beast: “You’re sure ya couldn’t whittle that down to about five seconds? Pretty please?”

As Spidey’s about to shoot webbing at S-TA, S-TA’s head begins to tingle—for he’s picked up Spidey-sense—only he doesn’t know it! But when Spidey does shoot, S-TA sees it and leaps under it—and the headache stops. S-TA puts one and one together and comes up with two, learning one of Spidey’s powers. S-TA has leapt under Spidey’s webbing and slugs him (now that he’s got spider-speed) once. On the second swing, Spidey grabs S-TA’s arms and falls to his back, flipping S-TA towards the Beast.

Thinks Spidey: “He’s got the strength—but he just doesn’t know how to use it! And we’d better not give him the time to learn how!”

The Beast catches S-TA in his feet: “Just ’cause I’m all webbed up doesn’t mean I can’t have any fun!”

The Beast juggles S-TA like a seal juggles a ball, keeping him spinning in the air. S-TA, unable to concentrate and decide what to do, shouts in protest: “No! No! This just can’t be! It isn’t fair!”

“Methinks he doth protest too much,” says The Beast, giving S-TA a kick in the rear towards Spidey—or to put it more accurately, towards Spidey’s fist! In a half-page panel, Spidey uppercuts S-TA on the chin (“It’s fair all right—just face the fact you were always a second-rate baddie!”) which sends him flying through the ceiling of the ballroom and out onto the roof.

Spidey swings after him, facetiously ordering the Beast: “Don’t go away!”

Spidey reaches the groggy S-TA on the roof and stands over his prostrate form, asking him if he’s ready for more. Thinks S-TA: “I’m still beaten—even now! I wasn’t ready! I wasn’t used to the powers! But there’s till a Spider-power I haven’t used—that will ensure my escape!”

S-TA aims a kick a Spidey’s head and Spidey dodges it. S-TA curses, because he hasn’t figured out how to counter Spidey’s spider-sense. S-TA leaps off the roof in the belief that he’ll be able to use his webbing to escape. He extends his hands and flexes his fingers—but nothing happens!

He panics and screams for help, begging Spidey to save him. Spidey spins a web mattress onto which S-TA lands and sticks, spread-eagled.

“What went wrong?” moans S-TA.

Thinks Spidey: “You did! You thought my web-shooting was a natural power—and it’s not! It’s an invention!”

CUT TO: Beast, still stuck in webbing, looking up at the broken ceiling caused by S-TA’s passage. He sees Spidey swinging by, carrying S-TA in a web cage. The Beast calls out, “Spider-Man, wai— ” but Spidey is gone.

Groans the Beast with a pained expression on his face: “O my stars and garters!”

And “O my stars and garters!” is exactly what I thought at times as I reread this recently rediscovered artifact.

One reason—the way I abbreviated Super-Triman as S-TA. Why did I do it? No idea. If anything, it should have been S-TM, right?

The other reasons? I’ll leave you to decide on those for yourselves …