I can remember exactly where I was when Avengers #1 and X-Men #1 went on sale, because it was the same day, I only had 12 cents on me, and could therefore only buy one.

I had to choose between them. Can you feel my pain? Imagine my horror?

It was 1963, and I was 8 years old. I was in Joe and Morty’s Brooklyn candy store on Avenue P a few blocks off Ocean Parkway. I visited there nearly every day, not just for comics, but to stay fueled on egg creams and cherry lime rickeys, and to pick up those unfiltered Lucky Strikes my mother needed.

In any case, though I’m 100% certain where I encountered those issues, I can’t say for sure when I encountered them. Only that it wasn’t September 10. Because school had not begun, it was still summer, and in any case, though both books were cover-dated September, comics always went on sale in advance of their cover dates, that date only being an indication to the retailer when comics should come off sale.

And yet … (more…)

Those who’ve visited me at home know I’ve evolved into the opposite of a hoarder. I’m doing my best to live a stripped-down life. But I’ve made an exception for all the paperwork I collected at Marvel Comics in the ’70s, because I think it doesn’t really belong to me; it belong to you. And while digging through a file folder in search of something I’ve yet to find, I instead found something, well, marvelous.

Sometime during my years in the Bullpen I discovered a dozen or so carbon copies of descriptions of Marvel’s central superheroes buried in the back of a file cabinet, barely visible because the sheets had slipped between the drawers. And you know me—I made sure to keep my own copies, of course.

Because the pages only referenced the earliest of Marvel’s characters—the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, etc.—and because all of the references as to which famous actors’ voices we should imagine coming out of their mouths were of a previous generation, I always assumed these were written by Stan Lee. The only other person I could possibly imagine having been responsible for these based on when they were discovered is Roy Thomas, but I’m pretty sure that if he had created these, he’d have come up with a more contemporary set of actors.

There’s also the fact that (though I’m no typography expert) these seem to have been written using the same typewriter on which Stan composed his Soapboxes for the Bullpen Bulletins pages. (more…)