Thanks to a query from the prolific comics historian Brian Cronin, it’s time to step forward as the author of yet another piece of uncredited Marvel Comics promotional copy from the ’70s. He reached out to ask who wrote the one-line blurbs which appeared for awhile underneath the artwork at the bottom of most comics pages —

— which made me realize that though over the years I’d confessed to being the writer behind the Bullpen Bulletins pages (save for Stan’s Soapbox), the copy which appeared on top of the splash pages, a set of 60 Marvel Slurpee cups, and other promotional materials, I’d yet to out myself as being the author behind that particular project.

I have no idea who wrote those one-liners before I arrived on the scene in the Bullpen, moving over from the British reprint department, but during much of my time there, I was responsible for creating those distracting slugs.

The only writer I remember creating their own was Tony Isabella. I have no idea after all this time whether that was because he was the one who wrote them before I did and handed over his assignment, and so perhaps felt more invested in their creation, or was simply protective of the promotion of the titles he scripted. We are talking about more than 40 years ago! But … I don’t remember anyone else handing in each month’s content like that.

I also don’t remember exactly how or when the task was handed over to me — I assume it had to have been Len Wein who gave me the assignment — but each month, I would interview the writers about what they had planned and create catchy write-ups with that information. And not (while we’re on the subject of stepping out from behind the mask) just for a single purpose. I also wrote up the news for F.O.O.M. (which I’ve already admitted) and cobbled together the Mighty Marvel Checklists, those half-page promos which appeared each week across the entire Marvel line.

Here are two I definitely wrote —

As to why I’m sure I wrote them — I scanned them just a few moments ago from the portfolio I used to carry to job interviews in the late ‘70s when I was trying to get a post-comics job. As to the precise comics in which they originally appeared, well … I’ll leave that to historians like Brian Cronin!

Get ready to get nostalgic — or rather, listen to me get nostalgic — on an episode of Eating the Fantastic which features a guest I believe I’ve known longer than any other — comics legend Paul Levitz.

Paul and I go way back, all the way to Phil Seuling’s 1971 Comic Art Convention, when I would have been 16 and him 15, both fans and fanzine publishers, long before either of us had entered the comics industry as professionals. We later, along with a couple of other friends, roomed together at the 1974 World Science Fiction Convention in Washington D.C. As you listen, think of us as were were in the old days — that’s us in 1974 compared to us now —

In 1976, he became the editor of Adventure Comics before he’d even turned 20. He ended up working at DC Comics for more than 35 years, where he was president from 2002–2009. He’s probably best known for writing the Legion of Super-Heroes for a decade, scripting the Justice Society of America, and co-creating the character Stalker with Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko. He was given an Inkpot Award at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2002 and the Dick Giordano Hero Initiative Humanitarian of the Year Award in 2013 at the Baltimore Comic-Con. And if you try to lift his massive and essential history 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking, you’re going to need to see a chiropractor.

We discussed why even though in a 1973 fanzine he wrote he had “no desire to make a career for myself in this industry” he’s spent his life there, how wild it was the suits let kids like us run the show in the ’70s, the time Marv Wolfman offered him a job over at Marvel (and why he turned it down), what he learned from editor Joe Orlando about how to get the best work out of creative people, the bizarre reason Gerry Conway’s first DC Comics script took several years to get published, how he made the Legion of Super-Heroes his own, which bad writerly habits Denny O’Neil knocked out of him, the first thing you should ask an artist when you start working with them, why team books (of which he wrote so many) are easier to write, our shared love for “Mirthful” Marie Severin, how glad we are there was no such thing as social media when we got started in comics, why Roger Zelazny is his favorite science fiction writer, and much, much more.

Here’s how you can listen in as we chow down at the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill in New York’s Greenwich Village — (more…)

The journey to the meal you’re about to share — my dinner with Don McGregor, who I worked beside in the Marvel Bullpen of the mid-‘70s — began a year ago, as I was returning home from Readercon and learned from former guest Paul Di Filippo — Episode 62, check it out — that Don had moved back to Rhode Island, not very far from the airport out of which I’d be flying. That’s when I started making plans for an episode I hoped I’d be able to pull off on the way home from this year’s Readercon.

I reached out to Dauntless Don — we all had nicknames back them; he was Dauntless, I was Sparkling — and said, hey, how about if when I’m on the way back to the airport at the end of Readercon, I swoop down, take you out for dinner, and we chew over the old times. And that’s exactly what we did, at the Safehouse in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, along with Dauntless Don’s wife, the Marvelous Marsha, whose voice you’ll occasionally hear in the background of this episode.

Don started out his career in comics by writing some of the best horror stories to appear in the pages of Creepy and Eerie — and I remember well reading the first of them in the early ’70s. When he moved on to Marvel Comics, he did groundbreaking work with such characters as Black Panther, Killraven, and Luke Cage. In fact, his two-year “Panther’s Rage” arc was ranked as the third most important Marvel Comics storyline of the ’70s by Comics Bulletin. In 2015, he was awarded the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing at San Diego Comic-Con International.

We discussed how meeting Jim Steranko led to him selling his first comics story, why when he was 13 years old, he wanted to be Efrem Zimbalist Jr., what he learned from Naked City creator Stirling Silliphant, how his first meeting with future Black Panther artist Billy Graham could have been disastrous, why the comics he wrote in the ’70s wouldn’t have been able to exist two years later, the reasons Archie Goodwin was such a great editor, how he convinced Stan Lee to allow the first interracial kiss in mainstream comics, what life lessons he took from Westerns in general and Hopalong Cassidy in particular, why he almost stopped writing Lady Rawhide, and much more.

Here’s how you can share some sirloin with us— (more…)

On Monday, April 5, 1976, the Central New Jersey Home News published an article about a one-day comic con (or “Shabang” as they called it) which had been held the day before, just a few days after my 21st birthday. I remember that day, but it’s been a long while since I thought of it, or of who I was back then.

When I came across the article yesterday, and read what the reporter wrote I’d said, several things came to mind.

First, about the fact I’d stopped counting how many comic books I owned once I hit 4,000 of them—

Well, I did count how many comics I owned once I was no longer able to look at them without feeling bitter thanks to my experiences in the industry, and decided to sell almost all of them. I now own no more than a couple of hundred at most, and that includes the ones I wrote, but at the time I disposed of the majority of my collection, I owned more than 7,000.

The attendance at the con of Michael Avallone reminds me—there was a time I wanted to be Michael Avallone, about whom Wikipedia states: “His lifetime output was over 223 works (although he boasted over 1,000), published under his own name and 17 pseudonyms.”

I was once envious of that kind of output, and at some point early on wanted to be the kind of commercial writer who’d end up with an output of hundreds of novels. I’m not sure exactly when I changed, but now, having published one novel, and that a short story which ran away from me, the thought of deliberately attempting a novel seems bizarre to me. Short stories are what I love, and unless another one runs away from me someday and insists on growing through the revision process, it’s unlikely there’ll ever be another Edelman novel for you to read.

And speaking of novels, what made me smile the most was the way the writer of the article described me as “currently working on a novel for children.”

I did finish that novel.

And then I destroyed it.

Along with a couple of other novels and at least 25 short stories written in my teens and early 20s, an erasure I’ve told you about.

The novel about which I was telling the reporter was terrible—flawed in concept and embarrassing in execution. I’m extremely lucky it was rejected by every children’s book publisher which saw the manuscript back when I would have been 22, perhaps 23 at the oldest. I’d tell you the bare outline of the plot, but even that’s too wince-inducing to reveal.

I’m grateful it no longer exists as evidence of how foolish I was.

And hope that when I someday look back on my recent writing, almost all of it out in the world and unable to be recalled and destroyed as my earlier unpublished work was, I won’t consider those works to be evidence of how foolish I am now.

As I prepared to lunch with this episode’s guest, I was startled to realize I’d last interviewed him in 1974—43 years ago! Back then, I was an assistant editor in the Marvel Bullpen, while Marv Wolfman was (among many other things) scripting Tomb of Dracula and editing Crazy magazine, not yet having ascended to the role of Editor-in-Chief. And it was my job to report on his doings for the readers of F.O.O.M., Marvel’s official fan magazine.

Over the course of his career, Marv did a whole lot more than what I talked with him about back then. He went on to script the adventures of many legacy characters for both Marvel and DC, including the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Superman, and Green Lantern, and during that time he also co-created the characters of Blade, Bullseye, Destiny, Nova, and many others. He wrote the Teen Titans comic for 16 years. There’s even more to Marv than that, of course, as you’ll find out when you give this episode a listen.

Our lunch took place on the Sunday of the recent Baltimore Comic-Con when we fled the convention enter for La Tavola restaurant in the heart of Little Italy.

We discussed his horrifying early job as a DC Comics intern destroying (and in some cases rescuing) original art, why he loves the science fiction writer Alfred Bester, how his writing back when he started out was a blend of John Broome and Stan Lee, what he learned from binge-reading 181 issues of Spider-Man before starting to script it himself, what it was like returning to DC after his years at Marvel, why he felt he could write Tomb of Dracula even though when he was handed the assignment he’d never read the Bram Stoker novel or seen any of the movies, his secret to making the Teen Titans seem like actual teens, why he owes his career to Gene Colan, and much, more.

Here’s how you can share some lasagna with us— (more…)

During the same deep dive into my archives that turned up a never-used plot for Marvel’s The Scarecrow #2, I also found a plot written on March 7, 1978 for an adventure of Supergirl meant to appear in an issue of DC’s mega-comic Superman Family.

I’d previously scripted a Supergirl story Gerry Conway had plotted for Superman Family #193 (February 1979), and wrote one entirely on my own which appeared in Superman Family #194 (April 1979).

That last one was inspired by the infamous Stanley Milgram experiments—

—but was also tied in with the mysterious energy being which had tormented Supergirl for many, many issues.

I no longer own a copy of Superman Family #194, so I’m not sure what kind of cliffhanger I used to end that story, but apparently, I’d planned for the next installment to begin moments later.

And here we go … (more…)

For decades, people have been asking me which of two brothers had his body taken over by the Scarecrow, a character I created back at Marvel Comics in the mid-’70s. And for decades, I’ve been telling those people—I can’t remember!

But at last, the answer can be revealed.

For while going through a box of papers recently, I discovered my plot for a Scarecrow adventure which was never drawn. And this being Halloween, it seemed like a good time to unleash it on the world.

The Scarecrow concept led a complicated life, both before and after his first story was published.

I created him to appear as a backup in Monsters Unleashed, one of Marvel’s black-and-white books, where he was meant to rotate with Tigra and Frankenstein. His debut there was even announced in the August 1974 issue of the fanzine The Comic Reader.

But Monsters Unleashed was cancelled before the world ever got to see him.

Next up, he was going to appear as a back-up feature in Giant-Size Werewolf by Night … which also got cancelled before the world could meet him.

But at last, the first Scarecrow story was published … in Dead of Night #11, the final issue of what had previously been a reprint title.

After that, he was scheduled to move on to his own comic, as you can see from this subscription ad.

But that book never launched, swallowed by the great Marvel implosion, and the story which was to have been in Scarecrow #1 was burned off in Marvel Spotlight #26. (more…)

If you want to know what it was like to have attended the 1971 New York Comic Art Convention, which was held that year over the 4th of July weekend at the Statler Hilton Hotel, I’ve got two recommendations for you:

Either track down this guy wearing a headband and listen to his long stories of what it was like—

—and yes, that’s me, age 16, at that very con—

—or else (and this will likely be far more possible for most of you) buy a copy of Ron Kasman’s wonderful graphic novel The Tower of the Comic Book Freaks.

Because then you’ll really know. (more…)

Irene and I accomplished many things during our extended weekend trip to New Jersey and New York—she while attending the New Jersey Romance Writers conference, me while recording three new episodes of my Eating the Fantastic podcast—but the most important thing we did was to spend Sunday hanging out with our dear friend Marie Severin.

And as usual when visiting Marvel’s Mirthful One, there was much kibitzing involved.

Did you recognize Marie? No?

Then about about now? (more…)

I first met Fabulous Flo Steinberg (who passed away on July 23) when I was eight years old, not that she knew it at the time. And not that I knew it at the time either.

What happened was, I’d read an issue of the Fantastic Four during the first few years of that title in which The Thing said he had a headache. I’m no longer sure why he made that claim. Perhaps it had something to do with the Yancy Street Gang getting on his nerves. In any case, little kid me was incensed.

How could The Thing have a headache? After all, wasn’t he super?

So I sat down and scribbled a note to Marvel Comics, and soon received a postcard back explaining it all.

“You see, Scott,” said the card. “It was a super headache!”

The card was signed “Stan & the Gang,” but it was, of course, from Flo, who at that time would have been in her first year as Marvel’s “Corresponding Secretary and Gal Friday.”

Flo’s face was first revealed to fans in the pages of Marvel Tales #1 (which bore a cover date of 1964), and we first heard her voice on a record which was produced in 1965 as part of the package I received when I joined the Merry Marvel Marching Society.

She sent me that membership kit when I was 10, along with a button I wore Sunday afternoon at the Society of Illustrators as I gathered with her friends, which included many current and former Marvel Bullpenners, to remember her. (more…)