Originally published at Scott Edelman. Please leave any comments there.

Sean Howe posted a moving Fred Hembeck strip today over at his Marvel Comics: The Untold Story Tumblr. It seems to have been originally published in 1986 on the occasion of Marvel’s 25th anniversary, but it’s still relevant 27 years later.


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Since I’m always bitching to you when I see fine art interpretations of comics go for big bucks while images by the artists who toiled in the field go for peanuts-as when I complained that a pop artist’s version of Green Lantern sold for 7,723 times more than one by the man who created the character-I owe it to you to share that for once, the ( Read more... )

Well, that was fast! Less than an hour after putting out the call, I had scans for all the Captain America and Black Panther letters pages I wrote while at Marvel back in the ’70s.

So what will they reveal? Was there truly an orchestrated effort by us staffers, as some have claimed, to use the letters columns to sow seeds of dissatisfaction with ( Read more... )

Do you have easily accessible copies of Captain America 202, 203, 205-207, or Black Panther 2? Are they reading rather than slabbed copies? Would you be willing to scan the letters columns and send me .jpgs?

If so, you might be able to help me dispel a Marvel Comics myth.


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Over at the Kirby Museum, Robert Steibel has something to say about a post I wrote a year back which explained how, when I was working for Marvel in the ’70s, I disliked the work Jack Kirby was doing upon his return there, and how I dislike that work still. By work, I don’t mean the energetic as always images Kirby was drawing, but the text he ( Read more... )

I recently ran across an interview I did way back in 1976 for a newspaper called Compass, and while I’m surprised by what I’ve forgotten since then, I’m also a little surprised by what I remember now that I didn’t seem to remember then.

Let’s see what those forgotten facts are/were, shall we?


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I headed to Manhattan Saturday for a visit to the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery so I could see for myself those Sharon Moody paintings which had so ticked me off three weeks ago. Would experiencing the real-world art hung on a gallery wall, as opposed to seeing them diminished into relatively small .jpgs, change the way I felt? Would attempting to ( Read more... )

Some who’ve read my recent posts “A few words in defense of Jack Kirby, Sal Buscema, Irv Novick, and other anonymized artists“, “A few further thoughts on the artwork of Sharon Moody,” “Brian Bolland’s brilliantly blistering rebuttal,” and “Why a comic book isn’t a Hershey’s bar” seem to have gotten the erroneous impression that I’ve have a thing ( Read more... )

I was reading the December 12 issue of the New York Observer when I spotted something that irked me.

Now understand, finding something in the Observer that offends me isn’t at all unusual. Not an issue goes by when I don’t discover something to offend me in the salmon-colored pages of this snide, smarmy rag, which encapsulates just about ( Read more... )

I’d thought enough time had passed that I could forgive Jack Kirby. But I just learned I was wrong.

I was on staff at Marvel Comics in the mid-’70s when the King returned and tried to pick up where he’d left off. At the time, as I sat there in the Bullpen with my blue pencil and proofread the original art for some of his initial issues of titles ( Read more... )