Here’s the fourth Ethics column of mine which appeared a few decades ago in The Comics Journal. This one, focused on what we say about our friends when they die (well, after they die, since when they’re dying I hope we’re all calling 911 or giving CPR or something), appeared in issue #104, the January 1986 issue.

And if you’re still here after I’m gone—feel free to tell the truth about me. I won’t mind!

Back in September, I shared a few covers from my 1970s’ fanzine Call It … Fate, and last month I posted a convention report on Phil Seuling’s first Second Sunday.

Here’s another page from that hectographed zine, one likely to cause drooling—an ad placed by my friend Brian Frazer for comic-book back issues.

Check out those prices!

Silver Surfer #1 and Conan #1 only 35 cents apiece? Captain Marvel #1 and Iron Man #1 only a quarter? Spider-Man #50 only 15 cents?

Hey, Brian—if you’ve still got the comics, I still have the spare change!

I dug into my file of old Marvel Comics memos again this evening, and it wasn’t entirely an exercise in nostalgia. I’ve been talking to Sean Howe, author of Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!: Writers on Comics, who’s putting together a book on Marvel of the ’70s, and struggling to piece together what was going on behind the scenes.

This hasn’t been first time I’ve been interviewed about the old days.

One topic which keeps coming up is how back-up and fill-in features were assigned. Who decided which characters should be written about? Did the writers pitch ideas or did the editors arbitrarily assign characters to writers? Sometimes the gap between when stories were OK’d and when they eventually came out spanned multiple editors, and so it’s hard for historians to figure out which editor had his fingers in which pies.

To help Sean (and whoever else cares) understand a little bit of what it was like in 1976 and 1977, here are two memos I wrote to Archie Goodwin, then Marvel’s editor-in-chief. The first is from August 13, 1976, listing 19 possible characters I thought it might be fun for me to tell 5- or 6-page stories about.

Those blue check marks you see were made by Archie, giving me the go-ahead to cook up plots about the Angel and the Hangman. The Angel story ended up in the hands of artist Brent Anderson, and was published in Marvel Treasury Edition #27. As for the Hangman story, well, you’ll see what happened to that below. You’ll also see that Archie must have also later OK’ed a story about the Sub-Mariner from that list. (more…)

Last month, I shared a few covers from my 1971 fanzine Call It … Fate—but what’s inside turns out to be a little more important. Flipping through one issue, I found my convention report for the first of Phil Seuling’s Second Sundays, a monthly convention designed to part fans from their money during the gap between Phil’s famed July 4th cons.

Since I haven’t been able to find a write-up of that first Second Sunday anywhere else online, I thought I’d share it here. Though I don’t give the exact date of the event in the text, according to a calendar, it would have taken place November 14.

Here are the best scans I could get off the ancient hectographed pages. (Did I get my terminology right this time, Patrick?)

But since, even after you’ve clicked them several times to view full size, you probably won’t be able to read them easily, I’ve transcribed my 16-year-old self’s fanboy squealing. (Though were we even called fanboys yet back then?) (more…)

Frederick Seidel, whose first book of poetry, Final Solutions, caused a controversy in 1962, was interviewed for the Fall 2009 issue of The Paris Review.

(As I’ve explained before, I have a lifetime subscription to that magazine, instigated by my wife as a present way back in 1979. The gift that keeps on giving!)

One of the questions dealt with the poetic influence of and his friendship with Poet Laureate Robert Lowell.

An unexpected name popped up in Seidel’s answer:

“He was my mentor and a friend and certainly an influence. I went to interview him for The Paris Review in 1959. It took two days, maybe four or five hours a day—an enormous amount of effort and time. At a certain moment late in the first day, my friend Whitney Ellsworth, who was manning the tape recorder, said, I’m afraid we’ve got to start over. It turned out he hadn’t had the machine on. That’s when I got to know Lowell! We hit it off, and he became a good friend.”

Unless there’s some other Whitney Ellsworth I don’t know about, this means that the comic-book editor of Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Batman, Detective Comics and Superman in the ’40s and mid-’50s, who later became the producer and story editor on the television series The Adventures of Superman, was also hanging around with the poetry circle of the period. Is this something that was commonly known?

On the other hand, he might not have had an interest in poetry at all. Maybe it’s just that Ellsworth had been a classmate of Seidel’s, and was also one of those early adopters of the ’50s who fooled around with reel-to-reel tape recorders, and so was called into service because of that.

Does anyone out there have further information on Ellsworth’s non-comics background? I’ve been unable to turn anything up online.

In any case, it’s an interesting case of six degrees of separation, and a piece of comics history I knew nothing about.

I just finished reading the wonderful Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, edited by Sean Howe. Sean sent me a copy after he interviewed me about the good old days in the Marvel Comics Bullpen for a book he’s doing on the history of Marvel, and now that I’ve had a chance to read it, I regret not having come across it on my own when it came out back in 2004.

It features essays on comics by 17 writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Brad Meltzer, Aimee Bender, and Greil Marcus, and each of them spoke to me. It’s as if the book was written for me alone. Of course, that shouldn’t stop you from tracking down a copy, since if you’re bothering to read my blatherings here, you’ll probably find it enjoyable, too.

The most moving essay in the book was “Oui, Je Regrette Presque Tout” by Glen David Gold, which concerns his conflicted feelings about collecting. It begins—”All stories of collecting are about self-loathing, self-love, and self-deception, confused with the piquant cologne of loathing, love, and deception that drenches the object so desired.” The Lethem piece on Jack Kirby and growing up in Brooklyn comes a close second. (I think you can also find it here over at the London Review of Books, though that might only be an alternate version.) (more…)

There were hundreds (actually, probably more like thousands) of mini-comics for sale in Bethesda at SPX, but I only came home with about a dozen of them.

My rules for avoiding becoming overwhelmed were that: 1) I only picked up a book when something about the cover made me curious, and 2) I only bought that book when something about the insides made me smile.

So I’d walk the aisles, scanning the tables for an image or title that would make me go “Hmmmm … ”

To those first two rules, I guess I should add a third—that I’m only going to tell you about those comics and creators I actually enjoyed enough to want to track down more of their work and whose work I think you should track down, too.

East 9th St.

What caught my eye about the unfoldable comic by John Mejias was the dark ink and stark art of the handmade woodcut print. What made me buy it was that the punchline of the short strip made me smile. I thought of the incident he described as rather Pekar-esque in its pacing, though East 9th St. made me happy, which is something Pekar never does. Studying it further after I got home, I wished I bought more of his stuff. Luckily, you and I can both click to his online store.

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I got to the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, MD, yesterday when it opened at 11:00, and in-between multiple circuits of the dealers room, managed to catch three presentations, all of them entertaining. I’d never attended SPX before, since in the past it’s often been opposite Capclave, so I had no idea what to expect in terms of access. Panels at Comic-Con can be so over-attended that they’re often difficult to get into, and I worried I’d find more of the same here, especially once I saw how small the rooms were. But I had no trouble getting good seats.

At 1:00 p.m., I attended R. Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics. I was familiar with the cartoonist’s blending of Batman with Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but not much more than that. Sikoryak discussed his new career-spanning collection that pulled together his other mash-ups, including Wuthering Heights as if done as an EC comic drawn by Jack Davis, The Portrait of Dorian Gray as if done by Windsor McKay as a Little Nemo strip, and so on. During his slideshow, he took us through his step-by-step process on the Wuthering Heights adaptation, and I was impressed by the care he took to make sure that he wasn’t just spoofing EC Comics in general, but all of Davis’ specific narrative tics. He handed out 3-D glasses for one portion of his presentation, involving pirates who couldn’t see the 3-D effects themselves until they removed those furshlugginer eye patches! (more…)

For those of you hoping for more Stan Lee commentary on the recent sale of Marvel Comics, check this out:

“They want to make some real dynamite movies and TV shows based on all your favorite characters, plus any new, original ideas we come up with. And they know how to put excitement on the screen.”

You can check it out here as part of a Stan’s Soapbox on the sale.

Ooops! My mistake, folks! That isn’t Stan commenting on the recent sale of Marvel to Disney—that’s Stan writing in 1986 on the sale of Marvel to New World from the pages of the June 1987 Marvel Age.

As they say, the more things change …

Today was supposed to have been Steve Gerber’s 62nd birthday. In a just world, he’d still be with us. In a just world, when Steve was still alive, he would have participated financially in the success of Howard the Duck, instead of having to engage in legal battles which proved expensive and exhausting.

Sure, all most people remember now is the punch line that the Howard the Duck film became, but remember, too, there was a valid reason the film got made in the first place. Long before the film, the character had been a genuine hit. So on Steve’s birthday that might have been, should have been, let’s take a look back at a happier time—the moment Marvel Comics seemed to recognize exactly what it had on its hands.

There’s plenty of interesting info in this memo, but the two items of note today, the two things which would have thrilled Steve, are a note (on the first page) that “Howard the Duck will go to a monthly frequency, effective #9, December,” and a request (on the second page) to “Please schedule a new $1.50 special, (Treasury size) entitled HOWARD THE DUCK #1, 1976, 80 pages.”

Steve must have been thrilled that his creation had done so well in the marketplace that it went monthly and spawned a treasury edition.

Unfortunately, that joy wouldn’t last. A bitter battle was still to come.

But spare a thought for Steve on his birthday today anyway, OK?