In order to track down exactly when I’d interviewed Steve Gerber, I pulled out my back issues of the Marvel Comics fan magazine FOOM, and you know what happens once I pull out old magazines. I can’t resist reading them.

Among the many intriguing things I found was this blurb in the “Department of Infoomation” of FOOM #10, the June 1975 issue, which explained a bit more about the Scarecrow comic that never was, filling in some of the blanks about the Don Perlin splash page I’d forgotten I’d even owned.

It’s also the only place I’ve ever seen a third issue mentioned. Wonder what I’d meant by “supernatural turns super-hero”?

I’m guessing Ruben Yandoc was meant to have drawn the story meant to be introduced by that Perlin splash I’d found. Did Yandoc ever draw it? Did I ever even plot it?

I don’t think so, but I honestly can’t remember for sure. When I walked away from comics, and disposed of most of my collection, I think I suppressed many of my memories at the same time. For all I know, there could be a typed plot in a box in the basement. If I ever find one, I’ll certainly share it here for what few Scarecrow fans there are out there.

That blurb at the top will be of interest to Gerber and Omega fans. What kind of a vague tease is that? Was Marvel being deliberately coy, or did we truly not know what Steve had planned?

Yet another mystery in an unending string of Marvel mysteries …

Over at Diversions of the Groovy Kind, The Groovy Agent posted an eight-page photo feature from the 1975 Mighty Marvel Convention program book. Included on those pages were 71 photos of Bullpenners, including two who are particularly near and dear to my heart.

One is me. The other is Irene, my wife of nearly 34 years.

As I study those faces, my heart grows heavy. About one-third of these old friends are gone now, absent forever.

But … as I study those faces, my heart also sings. Because working there, surrounded by such people, was magical.

If my younger self, ensorceled by Stan Lee and standing with 12 cents in his palm trying to decide between Avengers #1 and X-Men #1 (as they both hit newsstands the same day), could have looked ahead to my slightly-less-young younger self, he would have thought, Scott, you’ve made it to Heaven.

And so I had.

The universe would like me to share an anecdote about the short-lived comic-book company Atlas, founded in 1974 by Martin Goodman, who also founded another company you might have heard of—Marvel Comics!

As I’ve mentioned before, Sean Howe, author of Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, is working on a book about Marvel in the ’70s. His mention of Atlas in an e-mail today sent me scurrying to the vault …

So here’s a memo, dated March 18, 1975, from Marvel Publisher Al Landau to Production Manager Sol Brodsky that was then forwarded to Editor-in-Chief Len Wein before eventually making its way to Editorial Assistant me.

Obviously, Landau was hoping there’d be a smoking gun that would prove Marvel had been ripped off. (more…)

Today’s mail brought yet another omnibus volume from Marvel Comics which reprinted one of my late ’70s stories. With the reprint books I’ve been in over the past few years, plus the ones coming out over the next 12 months that I already know of, there’ll soon be little left from my early Marvel comic-book output that won’t be available to new readers.

The latest collection is Essential Avengers Vol. 7, which includes my 8-page story about the Vision, drawn by Herb Trimpe. It’s a fun little story, but as I flipped through the book, and realized that it included writer Steve Englehart’s final issues of the Avengers comic, I remembered I owned something I think you’ll find far more interesting than anything I ever wrote. (more…)

Scott Andrew Hutchins, who seems to be the world’s number-one fan of The Scarecrow, a comic I wrote for Marvel in the mid-’70s, has sent along this ad which offered subscriptions to the book, and to other comics which were never published. (I explained the on-again off-again nature of the character’s publication history here.)

Though the title had appeared on Marvel’s internal calendar, I’d forgotten that a public solicitation had actually appeared before the horror implosion occurred and killed the series. Click on the scan below to check it out.

I wonder how many people bothered to send in the $3.50? And when the comic they wanted became a stillborn, which title they chose instead?

Here’s the third and final Ethics column of mine which appeared in The Comics Journal in 1985. I’d go on to publish four more of them in 1986, and write two more after that which were never published. Now that the decades have passed, I’m not sure why those final two never saw print. I’m sure if I dug out my correspondence with the editors, I’d be able to dredge up the memories, but I’m not in the mood to do that right now.

Give it a read, if the first two installments haven’t scared you away, and then join me on the other side for some thoughts my 2009 self had about what my 1985 self thought of my ’70s self.

And now, a few random comments: (more…)

Yesterday, I shared the first in a series of Ethics columns I wrote for The Comics Journal in which I attempted to make sense of the time I worked for Marvel Comics. Here’s the second installment, which appeared in that magazine’s September 1985 issue.

But first a few comments from the perspective of 24 years later—

1) One of the editors at TCJ—I can’t remember who it was, though I’m sure I have the correspondence around here somewhere—insisted on formalizing the names of all of the people I mentioned, changing Marv and Len and even my wife Irene to Wolfman and Wein and Vartanoff, not at all the way I thought of them or should have had to refer to them. They were adhering to a journalistic style I didn’t think fit a memoir or personal essay, and it still seems strange to me when I reread the pieces, as if I’m holding at arms length those whom I should be embracing. If I ever collect and republish these essays, I’ll give my friends (and my wife) back their first names.

As for my other two comments, I think I’ll leave them until after you read the following, if you do bother to read the following.

2) I have no memory whatsoever of the fear I described at the bottom of the first column of page two. I remember the CPL essay, but I have no memory that once it appeared, I was worried about the repercussions. I think that ties into something I said in response to a comment on my previous Ethics entry—that time does heal all wounds. Many of the negative memories I had of my Marvel experience are gone, and the bile you’ll see in some of these installments has vanished. Some of that cleansing, as you’ll see later if I continue posting these columns, came through the very act of writing, which had an extremely exorcising effect.

3) All of the highly emotional details I wrote about the circumstances of my departure from Captain Marvel are also gone. If asked today to tell you what happened then, I could sketch in the vague details of Archie Goodwin’s unhappiness, Jim Shooter’s betrayal, and my own ineptitude at stating my case, but they would be factual only, coming from the head and not the heart. I am truly a different person, and those ancient emotions no longer resonate. But I share them here because, well, they’re honest to who I was then, and those who’ll want to know what it once was like at Marvel will get a more honest answer out of the me of 1985 than the me of 2009.

Next up—”Opportunity Knocked.”

Sean Howe, writer/editor of the book Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, has been in touch with me because he’s writing a book in which he’ll attempt to sort out the Marvel Comics of the 1970s, which means that I’m doing some sorting out of my own.

During the mid-’80s, after I was no longer working in comics, I tried to process some of what went in in the mid- to late ’70s by writing a series of Ethics columns for The Comics Journal. And since I’m scanning copies of them for him, I figure why should the two of us be the only ones who suffer?

So here’s the first installment, which appeared in the magazine’s June 1985 issue, and started to explain how my love affair with comics turned into a love/hate relationship. You’ll see, if you hang in through all the installments—including the final one, which has never before been published—how my ambivalent feelings were eventually exorcised.

Somewhere I have copies I’ve proofed to correct typos and editing errors, but since I can’t find those right now, I’ll let these stand as originally printed.

I’ll be interested to learn how these read to you, because sitting down today and reading my 1985 opinions of my 1974 sure seems odd to me!

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…)