I was doing a lot of smiling last night. That’s because I finally carved out some time to read Dewey Cassell’s book Marie Severin: The Mirthful Mistress of Comics. As I’ve told you many times, I don’t just like Marie—I love Marie.

And last night, I relived many of the reasons why. (I was about to write that I “remembered” many of the reasons why, but that would imply I’d forgotten those reasons … and no one could ever forget Marie.) (more…)

Someone took a look at my Twitter icon last night and said, “Hey, that doesn’t look like you!” Well, it did … once. Or who knows, maybe it didn’t, and perhaps only Marie Severin thought so. Because that’s how she drew me back when dinosaurs still walked the Earth and I left my job in the Marvel Bullpen.

Here’s the long-ago going away card she cooked up when I quit to become a full-time freelancer.

I can sometimes grow melancholy if I look too closely at the signatures on the card, since so many—Dave Cockrum, John Verpoorten, Archie Goodwin, for example—are gone.

Of course, many are still with us, such as my wife there in the upper right corner, and even good old (seemingly immortal) Stan Lee in the upper left corner.

But that’s not the only signature-festooned card I received during my time at Marvel … (more…)

Todd Klein recently posted a wonderful report about a visit to DC Comics in the ’60s, which included a floor plan of the company’s offices at 575 Lexington Avenue, and made me realize—Hey! I have a map of Marvel’s 575 Madison Avenue offices from the ’70s.

A map unseen for more than 35 years.

And mine was drawn by Mirthful Marie Severin!

I can’t say for sure exactly when this map was sketched, but it was obviously begun when Roy Thomas was still Editor-in-Chief (since his name is visibly crossed out), but finished before Len Wein resigned and ceded the position to Marv Wolfman, which to me places it somewhere between late 1974 and early 1975.

This map was created to figure out where to put all the warm bodies, and not as a guide to the famous cover Marie drew around a year later for FOOM #16 (December 1976). (more…)

As Irene and I have done for quite a few years, we used her attendance at the New Jersey Romance Writers annual conference to swoop down on Marie Severin, the nicest lady in comics, with whom we worked at Marvel during the ’70s.

She was back then, and continues to be now, a hoot.

We swung by Thursday and took her out for Italian, plying her with wine and swapping stories of the old days. As usual, we filled her in on news of all our old friends (and all our old non-friends, too).

She asked after Stan Lee, and was tickled to hear he now had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We tried to figure out who the oldest surviving comics creator was, and thought that it had to be Joe Simon, who just turned 98. (You’ll tell me if I’m wrong, right?) We got her talking about the old EC days, which I don’t think we’d ever done before, and she told us what a good boss Bill Gaines had been to her.

But in addition to the comics gossip—unavoidable when we get together—we of course caught up on life in general, with much laughter. (There’s GOT to be laughter when you’re around Mirthful Marie.)

And here’s the lady herself, looking 82 years young.

We’ll continue talking by phone often, but I hope we won’t have to wait until next November to see her again in the flesh.

We love you, Marie!

As soon as I learned that this year’s Stoker Awards banquet was going to be held on Long Island, I decided to make the most of it. And one way I did that was by bookending the event with lunches that had absolutely nothing to do with the primary reason for my trip.

I planned a Thursday lunch with Frank Cama, the Junior High School drama teacher who changed my life, and I planned a Sunday lunch with Marie Severin, the Marvel Comics artist who’s the funniest, nicest lady I ever met in the business. (Don’t worry—Irene won’t mind in the slightest that I said that.)

As the time for my lunch with the Mirthful one drew near, signs indicated to me that Fate was not indifferent to my trip, and very much wanted us to spend time together.

For example:

1) I was asked to present one of HWA’s two Lifetime Achievement Awards to Al Feldstein. The fact that Feldstein was an editor at EC Comics also meant that he was … Marie’s boss.

2) A couple of days before I was to head off to Long Island, I was contacted by Sean Howe, author of an upcoming history of Marvel Comics in the ’70s. He gave me the phone number of fellow Bullpenner Stu Schwartzberg so I could pass it on to Marie the next time I saw her … which Sean had no idea was only going to be a few days later.

3) I had dinner Friday night with (among others) William Freedman, who’s married to the niece of one of Marie’s high school classmates. We’d met online when he reached out to tell me about his encounter with Marie Severin and how she drew on his walls, and he retold that tale at our dinner party.

4) Sunday morning at the hotel, while noodling around online, I discovered that one of Marie’s most famous covers was on display as part of a comics exhibit at an Istanbul museum. Since Marie doesn’t do the Internet, this meant the only way she’d ever know about this honor was if I showed her that pic on my iPad.

You’d think those would be enough reasons to prove the universe was smiling at my encounter with Marie, but no, there was an even more astonishing one … (more…)

A recent post over at the always wonderful Giant-Size Geek sent me scurrying to the vault. Richard Guion posted pages of Bullpen photos from the 1975 Mighty Marvel Convention booklet, which happened to include pics of both me and Irene.

In case you don’t remember those pics from previous posts, here we are again.

Didn’t we used to be cute? (Well, Irene still is. Though as for me … )

But never mind that. We’re here today to talk about the cover. Here’s the cover con attendees saw back in 1975.

If you ever wondered how that layout came to be, I’ve got the answer—because among my many other Marvel staff duties at the time, I edited that program book, and I still have Marie Severin’s original sketches showing off two possible designs. (more…)

As anyone who’s ever seen me play softball or touch football knows (or should I say, as anyone who’s ever seen me try to play softball or touch football knows), I’m about the least athletic person on the planet. Which is why I’m glad that I’m able to provide evidence that during the summer of ’76, I was able to raise my game from pathetic to merely embarrassing as part of the Marvel Comics softball team.

What position did I play? I was put wherever the rest of the team felt I could do the least damage at any given moment.

As the certificate below proves, I was the team’s Most Improved Player. But just to show how miserable my performance really was, I’ll point out that the certificate calls me the Most Improved Player … for a Boy. If not for parsing the categories that finely, I’m sure that when the time came to hand out the awards at the banquet at the end of the season, I’d have walked away empty handed.

Because calling any change in my playing abilities an improvement was an act of kindness. Believe me.

The certificate was designed by … wait a second. Let’s make this a quiz.

If you’d like to guess who created these certificates, stop reading now, examine the lettering closely, and think about it for a bit. Then take your guess, scroll down, and see if you were right.

Are you done cogitating?

Ready to know who’s responsible?

Are you sure?

Well, then …

… it’s …

… it’s …

… Marie Severin, of course!

Did you guess correctly?

Since it’s hump day, and I’m smack dab between two weekends, I think it’s still OK if I make one final comment about last weekend before the new one begins.

On Sunday morning, Irene and I took off from the Marriott at which the New Jersey Romance Writers annual Fall for the Book conference was being held, and after a visit to the grave of my late Uncle Jack, conveniently located directly across the street, we headed to Long Island for lunch with mirthful Marie Severin, our favorite person from all our days at Marvel. (Except for each other, of course!)

Since the three of us always used to have lunch at Lotus Eaters back when we worked together, Irene and I tried to find the best Chinese food in the neighborhood. Using my iPhone to track down nearby restaurants, we eventually ended up at Dragon Gate. The place was empty when we got there, which worried us. But the food was so good that we’re sure it was football, and not any fault of the menu or chef, that kept people away.

So we had a great meal, filled with dumplings and gossip. We caught Marie up on the latest doings of every name from the ’70s Bullpen, and Marie cracked us up by telling us exactly what she thought about each of them. (Don’t worry, she wasn’t being snarky. Marie couldn’t be snarky if she tried. But, as always, her opinions were dead-on … and hilarious!) As for the details, uh-uh, not so fast. What’s said on Long Island, stays on Long Island.

After lunch, we headed to a nearby Carvel. We have fond memories of Marie and ice cream, ever since she once ended up face down in an ice cream cake we’d bought for her birthday. There’s no photo of that from the (sadly) pre-digital days. You’ll have to settle for this picture of her holding a humongous cone, which amazingly, happens to only be a medium. (more…)

Yesterday, Irene and I visited Marie Severin and whisked her away to Blackstone Steakhouse to celebrate her 80th birthday. As I’ve told you before, we both love Marie. She’s the nicest person we ever met in comics, one of the most talented, and easily the funniest. When Irene and I realized during our last visit that such a momentous milestone was moving toward her (uh-oh—one evening with Marie and I’m alliterating like Stan again), we decided that attention must be paid.

So we told Marie that unless one of her friends had already made plans, we wanted to take her out to dinner. Heck, if a friend had already made plans, we’d take the friend, too! But luckily for us, Marie was free last night, and so we had her to ourselves for a long and hilarious evening. Here we all are after having demolished an amazing meal:

Before heading to the restaurant, we spent an hour or so at her apartment, and one of the things we did was show her printouts I’d made yesterday morning of sites which had wished her a happy birthday. She was astounded by the outpouring of love, and astonished by some of them, particularly the lengthy write-up at fanboy.com of her career. When I read her part of it aloud, such as the sentences— (more…)

I dreamt this morning that I was visiting with Tony Isabella, a comic book writer and editor I first met a very long time ago. To give you some idea as to how long, I’d never have gotten my job at Marvel Comics without him. (There we are below in a Marie Severin caricature originally published in an ancient issue of Marvel’s fan magazine FOOM.)

In the dream, I was hanging with him in a hotel room, where we were accompanied by a couple of PR flacks I’d never met before. We chatted for awhile, catching up, and then Tony playfully said, “Hmmm … I wonder where I’m going to find someone to finish this aliens story I don’t have time to write?” Which was his way of asking whether I would take over a project he couldn’t complete.

I told him it sounded good to me, and then those corporate types jumped in, clarifying with the details. It seems I’d misinterpreted when Tony had spoken of lower-case “aliens,” because this was no tale of random aliens I was needed to tell, but rather some sort of continuation of the film Aliens. For some reason, they also thought it important to mention that there be no music in whatever I wrote, that these aliens did not have that art form. Since it had never occurred to that they would, that didn’t bother me.

The dream ended with Tony and me sitting and talking, just two old friends who haven’t seen each other in an awfully long time filling in the missing years.

In a later dream, I was in a phone conversation with Michael Dirda while he was in Cambridge and I was at home, and I was recommending what bookstores he should visit while there … as if Michael would ever need advice from me on where the best bookstores are!