Imagine you’re a kid in 1943, and you open your copy of Captain Midnight #8 to find, not an ad for a teacup-sized monkey …

… or X-Ray Specs … (more…)

Forty-one years ago at just about this time of the morning, this guy (who was neither Amish nor an Abraham Lincoln impersonator) nervously arrived at 575 Madison Avenue for his first day on staff at Marvel Comics (as this date was a Monday that year) …

… where he met this gal, who’d started work at Marvel Comics two months earlier.

(more…)

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted mysteriously about a new DC Comics cover featuring Superboy, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and the Atomic Knights, hinting that its existence was meaningful to me. Many wondered if I was implying I’d be writing comics again, but for reasons alluded to in this recent interview, that’s unlikely to ever happen.

To those who asked over on Twitter and Facebook what I could possibly have meant, your answer can be summed up with another DC comic book cover, one from a long, long time ago.

1962, to be precise. (more…)

Thanks to the recent audio interview of me I told you about that appeared over at The Horror Show podcast—which was picked up by Bleeding Cool and The Outhousers (who knew anything I had to say would be that newsworthy?)—traffic here has spiked.

But since I see that most of the traffic is for the front page of my blog, which as I type these words reveals more stories about food anything else, I’ve decided it would be useful to provide links where those curious listeners can find exactly what they’re looking for without having to dig through thousands of pages.

So after the embed below, where my interview begins at 41:10, are direct links to some of the things discussed.

The seven Ethics columns I published in The Comics Journal can be found here, in reverse chronological order.

Read about the years I spent writing Marvel’s Bullpen Bulletins pages and see the original draft of a Stan’s Soapbox here.

Want to read more about the Scarecrow story meant to have appeared in Monsters Unleashed, and why it didn’t? Go here.

Learn more about the artists who never handed in art for various back-ups stories of mine here.

Jack Kirby’s Captain America panel that so ticked me off? You can see it here.

Want to see photos of me skydiving with Jim Shooter? Of course you do!

Find out more about my issue of Omega the Unknown and the work of Jim Mooney here.

Learn more than you probably want to know about the Jack Kirby letters pages controversy here.

All of my posts relating to Captain Marvel can be found here.

My butchering of Marvel’s ’70s reprint comics? Here’s why I’m the guy to hate.

More about my Space Stars episode for Hanna-Barbera can be found here.

Find out about my two unauthorized biographies of pro wrestlers here and here.

Here’s where that new story of mine was just published.

Finally, this will go into detail about why I’m not rewriting an unpublished novel of mine.

That should do it!

If there’s anything else I referred to in the interview for which you’d like a direct link, just let me know.

As Balticon wound down last month, I was interviewed by Dave Thomas and Brian Keene for their podcast, The Horror Show, an experience which left us smiling (well, grimacing maniacally anyway) once it was all over.

That episode is now available for your listening … dare I call it … pleasure?

Click on the embed below to hear me (at least according to their write-up) yammer on about —

… his work at Marvel and DC Comics in the 70s and 80s, his memories of creators such as Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Gerber, how today’s diversity discussion echoes the past, his work for The Syfy Channel, Hanna-Barbera, and Tales From the Darkside much more.

And it seems before I could even get this post live, others have already given it a listen and found it interesting.

Perhaps you’ll find it interesting, too.

Another old comics acquaintance has passed, and though I hadn’t spoken to her for decades, the world still seems a little smaller today.

It’s being reported that Michelle Wrightson has died suddenly, apparently of natural causes. And though I did know her last by that name, I first became acquainted with her when she was Michelle Brand, and not in the flesh, but rather through her groundbreaking underground comics work.

This is how I remember her looking when we finally did meet, as seen in a photo of her and her husband Roger Brand taken by Patrick Rosenkranz.

My acquaintance with her work goes back just about as far as my connection with organized comics fandom itself. I went to my first convention at age 15 in July 1970, which was the same month the all-women’s underground It Ain’t Me Babe was published, featuring Michelle’s “Tirade Funnies.” I can’t say for sure that I bought my copy at that first con, but as I did buy other undergrounds such as Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary that weekend, it was either then or shortly thereafter. (more…)

The first—and last—comic book to which I ever subscribed was Fantastic Four.

It was my first because after all, it was the “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine”—wasn’t that what Stan Lee had been telling us on the cover almost from the beginning? And for several amazing years in the ’60s, that seemingly hyberbolic claim may not have been all that hyperbolic after all.

And it was my last because—have you ever seen a subscription copy of a comic book from the ’60s? If not, you might not realize how poorly they were treated. They were folded in half lengthwise and then wrapped in brown paper on which an address label was slapped. By the time copy arrived in the mail, that fold was an eternal crease, a condition from which any true comic book collector would recoil.

But if you’ve subscribed to a comic book during the past few decades, then you know that this destructive practice was eventually eliminated. Would you like to know when? (more…)

Step One: Go back in time to 1959 and pick up a copy of Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #14.

Step Two: Drool over the prizes offered in the Charlton Giant Contest, especially the First Prize of a Buster Crabbe swimming pool—named after the Olympic gold medalist who later portrayed both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. (more…)

Remember Brenda Starr’s cousin Abretha Breez, a woman mocked for being too large to fit through a kitchen door to get more cake? As you may recall, she had a crush on steam shovel operator Everett Diggin, which didn’t work out, since the guy had a crush on Brenda. Was Abretha able to find a soulmate, or was she destined to forever be held up as an example of a woman too overweight to ever be seen as desirable?

We seem to find our answer in Brenda Starr #9 (July 1949), though you never know—since I was unable to find anything but the covers to issues #7 and #8, there could have been answers there as well.

The lead story in this issue begins with Brenda and Abretha heading off to an auction at a Chinese antique shop, where Brenda wins two bookends for a buck. But something’s up with those bookends, because a latecomer offers Brenda $100 for them. She refuses, of course (or there wouldn’t be a story), so the man offers her $200! But Brenda turns him down again. And why would she refuse $200 in 1949, which is apparently the equivalent of $1,948.64 today?

“I’m a typical woman,” she says. “If anybody else wants it, I’m determined to keep it.”

Since we can read the guy’s thoughts, we know something’s up, because he gripes that “she’s walking off with a fortune and she doesn’t know.”

Brenda then leaves Abretha alone with the bookends because she wants to “run over to a couple of shops and see some of the new gowns.”

I’ll leave it to others to explicate the meaning of Brenda’s cliched behavior so far, because I’m more concerned with the treatment of Abretha—who I’m happy to say in this story now looks like more a human being rather than the caricature she was before. (more…)

If you were here to peruse the knick-knack shelves in my office, you’d eventually come across a bent key.

Why is it bent? Who bent it? What door does it no longer open?

I guess the title of this post gives away the answer to my last question. But as for the other two questions … (more…)