ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS about the comics of Marvel's formative years is how Stan instinctively understood how to connect with his audience. Every bit as important as the exciting scripts and art of the comic stories were the Marvel editorial pages, starting with the letters pages which would soon spin off the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins. The Marvel Bullpen Bulletin pages started in some November 1965 cover-dated Marvel comics (above is the first one to appear in Amazing Spider-Man , issue 31) ... but the foundations for this were laid much earlier in the letters pages that began in early 1962. Editor Stan Lee would evolve and build on the way he talked back to his readers and finally make a feature of it, a page that many fans (including myself) would read before the story. The first Marvel letters page was in Fantastic Four 3 (Mar 1962). When you think about it, that's pretty soon after Stan made the conscious effort to up his game and do something a bit more engaging than Godz...
BACK IN THE LAST CENTURY I earned my living in the magazine business ... and the prevailing wisdom at the time was that you didn't ever - under any circumstances - mess with the magazine's logo. In fact, any kind of change to the magazine's masthead was frowned upon, and even re-branding exercises were viewed with much suspicion. In the last entry in this blog, I looked at the many times that Marvel Comics changed their magazine's logos during the 1960s ... it all seemed so much easier then. But even less acceptable was the idea that you could transform the comic's logo for just one issue for, oh I don't know ... Dramatic Effect. From a marketing perspective, that's an even bigger risk than changing the logo as part of the natural evolution of a magazine's masthead Strangely, though this blog focusses on Marvel Comics, and I've always maintained Stan Lee was far more willing to experiment with different approaches to comics and storytelling than his...