Sam Maronie continues to be my personal time machine. After turning up old cosplay photos of me bare-chested and wielding a broadsword, he’s now shared something far more horrifying.

I mean, would you take a look at that shirt!

I completely understand why Don Perlin, the artist for my Captain Midnight Action Book for Sports, Fitness & Nutrition, can be seen averting his eyes.

This pic is from the 1975 Mighty Marvel Comic Convention. I was 20 years old. Remind me to tell you sometime how a 20-year-old kid ended up in charge of programming and putting together the program book for Marvel’s first convention …

When I was a kid, ads in comic books were all Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs and P. F. Flyers, which says a lot about who the target market was considered to be at the time. But a couple of decades before that, the ads in comics were aimed at an audience a little bit older.

Check out the inside front cover from the December 1945 issue of Airboy Comics. Doesn’t seem as if the same readers who’d want to order 200 plastic World War II soldiers would need insurance paying $1,000 in the event of “accidental loss of life, limbs, or entire sight.”

But maybe that’s just me …

I was reading the September/October 1954 issue of the comic Dream Book of Romance (as one does), and came across a moment that had me cheering.

In the lead story “Woman of Shame,” after Nancy’s father dies, she drops out of college and takes a job as a night club “snapshot girl” in order to support herself and her aged mother. (more…)

If you worked at Marvel or DC in the mid-’70s, and were not lucky enough to have connected with a counterpart at your competitor who was willing to trade you a weekly package of all of their company’s comics for those published by your own (as I sadly was not), you surely ended up at Ed Summer’s Supersnipe Comic Book Emporium.

I can’t count the times someone in the Bullpen would cry out, “I’m heading up to Supersnipe” as the day wound down, and we’d march en masse from 575 Madison Avenue to 84th Street and Second Avenue to squeeze into the tiny store (seen above in an image borrowed from Sean Howe’s blog) that was the comics shop of the day. And when I say tiny, I mean it. In my memory, no more than half a dozen people could squeeze inside at a time, as most of the narrow store was behind the counter. (more…)

Last weekend, I accompanied Irene to the New Jersey Romance Writers conference, but I didn’t hang around there with her. All of my fun occurred outside of New Jersey. And serendipitously, each of the three days of my trip delivered a comics-related delight.

On Friday, I headed to the Comics at Columbia exhibit, which was held in the Butler Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Highlights for me included a George Herriman Archy and Mehitabel illustration, a nostalgia-inducing photo of Chris Claremont taken around the time I would have met him in the ’70s, Jerry Robinson’s sketch of Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne made during class in 1940 when he was supposed to have been taking notes, and this 1970 letter in which Joe Shuster thought he and Jerry Siegel were “very close” to settling the Superman lawsuit.

That last one made me a little sad.

The Columbia University exhibit will continue through January 23, 2015 and is well worth your time. It’s one of the better comics exhibits I’ve seen.

Saturday, I visited the Society of Illustrators to catch an exhibit on Dick Dillin, who was the primary Justice League of America artist of my youth. (more…)

Unlike Mark Evanier, I never met Marcia Strassman, who portrayed Julie Kotter, the wife of Gabe Kaplan’s character on Welcome Back, Kotter. Strangely, though, I felt as if I had, because I wrote two issues of the DC Comics series based on that TV show, and so got paid to put words into the mouth of an actress who never actually got to speak them.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I believe I was given the chance to script that comic because I was a Sweathog. (Don’t believe me? Just listen to what I sounded like back then.) Which meant that I had far more in common with guys from Brooklyn than those who would marry them after they grew up. (Or, to put it more accurately, after they didn’t grow up.) But still, I did my best to channel the character she embodied.

In my first issue, that consisted primarily of her reacting to the antics of those around her …

… which while accurate to the show, was also what, according to Evanier, had her dissatisfied with it. (more…)

So I was on the way home from Fort Lauderdale, where I’d spent a couple of weeks helping my mother pack and move (the details of which are a tale for another time), when I spotted a guy at the airport walking quickly by while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the face of a mustachioed man chomping a cigar.

I pointed at his chest as he passed and asked, “Stan Lee?”

“No,” he said, followed by him revealing who it really was, which I heard as “Ditko.”

“Ditko?” I asked, surprised. “Steve Ditko?”

“No,” he answered, baffled by my cluelessness. “Coach Ditka.”

And thus do two fans confuse each other!

While I was down in Florida last week visiting my mother, I spotted a box of Manischewitz matzoh which celebrated the creators of Superman, those two Jewish kids from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. My first thought was, how cool is that?

My second thought was … well … take a look at the back of the box and see whether you can guess.

Did you spot it? (more…)

The New York Times ran an article today about how artist John Romita Jr. was jumping from Marvel Comics over to DC to draw Superman, calling it “the equivalent of Derek Jeter leaving the Yankees to play for the Mets.”

I was touched to see that John mentioned me by name in the piece, repeating a comment of mine which he’s shared many times before. (more…)

Over at eBay, someone just picked up a bound volume of Incredible Hulk 167-182 which had my name embossed on the cover in gold. (The cognoscenti among you will recognize that run as including the origin of Wolverine.) And he wondered … what’s up with that?

I’ve only been asked about this sort of thing once before, by someone who wanted to know whether receiving bound volumes of comics was a perk regularly given to Marvel Bullpenners in the ’70s. (As if!)

So why does this artifact exist? The short answer is … it seemed like a good idea at the time. (more…)