While destroying hundreds of pages of bad poetry I scribbled as a teenager, I made a few surprising discoveries which cause me to reminisce about my poem “Ode on Comic Book Company Loyalty,” written 18 days after I was hired by Marvel Comics, my extremely rough sketch for the second Scarecrow splash page, my team-up with Quicksilver and 7-Eleven to freeze your brain with Slurpees during the summer of 1975, Tony Isabella’s heavy edit on my early Avengers script assist (and why we should all be grateful), my forgotten horror pitches bounced by Marvel in 1974, and much more.

You can eavesdrop on those memories via the embed below or download at the site of your choice.

Here are some images which will enhance your listening experience, and probably won’t make much sense without it —

My 1975 Park Slope Apartment

My Scarecrow Splash Page Sketch

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For decades, people have been asking me which of two brothers had his body taken over by the Scarecrow, a character I created back at Marvel Comics in the mid-’70s. And for decades, I’ve been telling those people—I can’t remember!

But at last, the answer can be revealed.

For while going through a box of papers recently, I discovered my plot for a Scarecrow adventure which was never drawn. And this being Halloween, it seemed like a good time to unleash it on the world.

The Scarecrow concept led a complicated life, both before and after his first story was published.

I created him to appear as a backup in Monsters Unleashed, one of Marvel’s black-and-white books, where he was meant to rotate with Tigra and Frankenstein. His debut there was even announced in the August 1974 issue of the fanzine The Comic Reader.

But Monsters Unleashed was cancelled before the world ever got to see him.

Next up, he was going to appear as a back-up feature in Giant-Size Werewolf by Night … which also got cancelled before the world could meet him.

But at last, the first Scarecrow story was published … in Dead of Night #11, the final issue of what had previously been a reprint title.

After that, he was scheduled to move on to his own comic, as you can see from this subscription ad.

But that book never launched, swallowed by the great Marvel implosion, and the story which was to have been in Scarecrow #1 was burned off in Marvel Spotlight #26. (more…)

That Bullpen caption contest I shared with you recently wasn’t the only bit of Marvel memorabilia I uncovered during my dive into the vault. I also found the original guide which would have been sent to the printer so they could properly complete the color separations.

Was it Marie Severin who took brush in hand and decided which colors would appear on the cover to Dead of Night #11? Could it have been Glynis Wein?

I’m afraid from this distance, I no longer have any idea. But regardless, the marching orders given to World Color Press are now yours to behold!

While rummaging through the detritus of my Marvel Comics years in search of something other than what I’m about to share, I found evidence of a frequent Bullpen pastime—the caption contest.

Somebody would tape a photo to the wall, and everybody else would attempt to write something funny about it. That this was indeed something done frequently can be seen by the fact that whoever filched the photo from me numbered this particular contest 12,439,874,869,710.

So take a look below if you want a small taste of what it was like to work in the Marvel Comics Bullpen of the mid-’70s.

Some of the jokes will only be funny if you recognize the woman with whom I’m posed.

Do you?

I won’t give it away so that those don’t immediately know who she is have a chance to guess based on the captions themselves, but here’s one hint—I met her at a Halloween party run by the National Cartoonist Society, to which I was invited by Bill Kresse.

As you should all have figured out by now, it’s Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West!

And I was very happy to have been her Munchkin that night.

I’m working on an essay for Marvel Comics which will appear in a volume about the Fear Lords, one which will reprint my stories of the Scarecrow, who is these days more commonly known as the Straw Man. And as I thought back on my few years at Marvel so long ago, I suddenly remembered that before there was the Scarecrow, there was almost … the Grim Reaper.

Had that pulp-era vigilante ever made it to the pages of the Marvel B&W magazine for which it was intended, I might never have gone on to create the Scarecrow. No evidence exists today of the Grim Reaper save this one image from 1974, pencilled by P. Craig Russell and inked by Duffy Vohland.

I don’t even own the original, merely a photostat, and one so large I was unable to properly scan it, but instead only photograph it. I’m guessing no original exists. Still, I wanted to share with you another fragment of the secret history behind my first comic book creation.

Of such are alternate universes made.

I’ve shared a number of firsts about the Scarecrow since I started blogging, such as who the first artist was supposed to be, the first (and perhaps the last) Marvel subscription ad featuring the character’s never-published stand-alone book, and Don Perlin’s first page to what was supposed to be Scarecrow #2.

And as I skimmed further through that 1974 issue of The Comic Reader which I told you about last week, I came upon another first—the first time fans would have found out such a character even existed.

In the Marvel News section, which included a blurb that “a Spider-Man live action film and a new TV series are being planned” (for which we’d all have to wait, as that TV show wouldn’t air until 1978, while a film wouldn’t hit theaters for another 28 years), readers wound find this item.

I’ve no idea when the August issue of The Comic Reader would have gone to press, but as I started on staff at Marvel on June 24 of that year, I obviously wasn’t there that long before then-editor Len Wein leapt on my idea … even though my name is never mentioned in that announcement.

And as those familiar with the history of the Scarecrow already know, it never did appear in the pages of Monsters Unleashed, nor in its next announced location, as a backup in Giant-Size Werewolf by Night, but instead ended up debuting in Dead of Night #11.

That wasn’t the only fascinating thing I found in this issue of The Comic Reader. Check out this curious factoid about Marvel’s Planet of the Apes series.

And now we know why Don McGregor never got that assignment.

ba-dum ching!

(I kid, Don, I kid! You know I love you.)

While being interviewed the other day by Shaun Clancy about Captain Marvel for an article which will appear in an upcoming issue of Back Issue magazine, I got to talking about my first published comic book—which also happened to be the first appearance of Marvel’s Scarecrow. And when Shaun mentioned in passing that the character came out of a painting, right, I told him that, yes, he did, and I have that painting.

Which may leave you thinking … huh? But the painting from the story wasn’t real … was it?

If you ever read the initial Scarecrow story in Dead of Night #11, you’d have seen that painting as the fifth page of story by artist Rico Rival, which is first an action scene and later an object being auctioned.

But what you never saw, unless you were working beside me in the Marvel Bullpen back in the ’70s, was the original art for that page. (more…)

When I was interviewed by Dewey Cassell about the origins of Marvel’s Scarecrow for an article which was to appear in Back Issue magazine #60 (October 2012), one of the things he wanted to know was—who was originally intended to be that character’s first artist?

The reason that even came up was because back in the the pages of Dead of Night #11 (August 1975), I’d mentioned in an essay that “the artist who the assignment was given to had since disappeared into the wilds of the city.” So Dewey asked … which artist?

It had been more than three decades since he had vanished, but I had a pretty good idea who that artist had been—Bill Draut. After a little research, though, I began to doubt my gut, and as you can see in an excerpt below from Dewey’s published article, I’d decided I must have been wrong.

But thanks to the latest installment of Comic Book Legends: Revealed, I learned today that I’d been right all along! (more…)

Way back in 2008, I shared with you some Scarecrow artwork which had never been seen in U.S., since it had been created specifically for Marvel’s mid-70s’ British reprint books. But it turns out there was another piece I didn’t know about. Or rather, according to the artist, I’d known about it but had forgotten.

Andrew John Standish uploaded this post to Facebook yesterday, created by penciller Howard Bender and inker Duffy Vohland.

This originally appeared in Super Spider-Man and the Titans #216 (cover-dated March 30, 1977). As to why I have no memory of this, I imagine it’s because there was no actual Scarecrow story published in that issue, only the poster, so I never received a contributor copy.

Howard was surprised I didn’t remember it, though, because he tells me that he and Duffy showed it to me before it was published.

To which I say—hey, that was 37 years ago!

Thanks for digging this up, Andrew!

If you’d like to know more about The Scarecrow, who I created for Marvel Comics back when dinosaurs still walked the Earth, pick up a copy of Back Issue magazine #60, which features a five-page article by Dewey Cassell focused on the character.

In addition to gathering and making sense of everything I’ve written about the Scarecrow on my blog over the years, Cassell also conducted new interviews, melding it all together to finally put in one place the story of the character’s creation, how he almost got his own book, and why that never came to pass.

So pick up a copy, if for no other reason than that it will satisfy your craving for the history of Marvel in the ’70s that you won’t get a full picture of until Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is published next month.