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…)

I’ve been so busy preparing for, reporting on, and recovering from Comic-Con that I’ve had no time to share my thoughts about it here, so why not let a picture stand in for those thousand words?

One afternoon, as I was racing from one end of the humongous exhibit hall to the other, I spotted a dealer selling the original art for the cover to an issue of Doorway to Nightmare I’d written long, long ago. (Make that long, long, long ago.) So I stopped my power walking and asked, “How much do you want for the Kaluta?”

The dealer’s answer? “Thirty.”

You do realize I was meant to add three zeroes after that number, right? There was of course no way I could afford to own the drawing, but I figured I should at least get a picture with it.

And so:

Here’s the cover as it was originally published.

Time flies. Money flies, too.

Comic-book artist Michael Kaluta, perhaps best known for his work on The Shadow, turns 61 today. Kaluta is also known for forming—along with Jeff Jones, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Bernie Wrightson—an artistic collective called The Studio in the late ’70s.

In 1971, Kaluta won the Shazam Award, given by the Academy of Comic Book Arts, for Outstanding New Talent, and the following year, at Phil Seuling’s July 4th, 1972 weekend comic-book convention, he drew the image you see above right for an annoying kid named Scott Edelman who’d thrust his sketchpad at him.

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