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Bullpen Bulletins: Stan Gets Political

BACK IN THE MID 1960s, just as I was in the process of becoming the Marvel Fanboy I remain to this day, we didn't have comics websites, or YouTube videos or even mimeographed comics fanzines to tell us what was going on. All we had was Stan Lee's ingenious "Marvel Bullpen Bulletins", giving us glimpses inside the Marvel offices and snippets of information about what we could expect to see this and next month from Marvel. The very first published Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page, from Journey into Mystery 122 (Nov 1965). At the time, Stan was making announcements about various Marvel Comics in text boxes, often yellow, on the various letters pages. This would be replaced by the Bullpen page, but the earliest examples appeared to be a mix of the two. The Bullpen page made its debut in Journey into Mystery 122 (Nov 1965), which was on sale on 2 Sep 1965. This was a week before the December issues of Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man , often cited (wrongly) as carryin...
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Bullpen Bulletins - How it all started

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...
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United Colours of Commando-dom

BACK IN THE 1960s,  I had begun reading American comics by first discovering DC editor Julius Schwartz's re-tooled versions of The Flash and Green Lantern, and the ultra-smooth Michelangelo-inspired art of Carmine Infantino. In pretty short order I discovered Justice League and the other superhero titles. Superman and Batman I'd already been familiar with via the black and white annuals that were available in the UK around the time. Of course, like all comics of the time, the company's other titles were heavily cross-promoted in the books I picked up. Mostly the superhero titles advertised other superhero titles but, occasionally, an ad for a science fiction comic or a war book would show up in the comics I bought. As attractive as the DC house ads were, with their terrific Ira Schnapp design, I wasn't in the slightest interested in war comics, so I wouldn't experience the grandeur of Joe Kubert and Russ Heath art until much later. However I wasn't interested i...
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I said, Don't Mess with the logo!

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...
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Astonish: The Rise of Giant-Man

I HAVE A SPECIAL affection of the Marvel character Giant-Man, not least because he was the first ever Marvel character I came across in the winter of 1963/4. I was still in primary school and we'd been dragged off one cold morning to play football in Charlton Park, some distance from my school. I was never a fan of football, so I was more interested in a colourful American comic one of the kids had. The front cover showed a guy in a red costume trying to catch another green spinning guy, appropriately called the Human Top. The first Marvel Comic I ever saw back in the 1960s. Kirby's bird's-eye view of the action meant it wasn't immediately apparent to me that the guy in the red costume was a giant, but I figured it out once I opened the book. I leafed through the comic, noted that the red guy was called Giant-Man and could grow in size to about ten-foot tall, then handed the comic back. I pretty much immediately went back to my then-preferred DC comics - Flash , Green L...
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Messing with the Logo - A 2000AD Interlude

A COUPLE OF HUNDRED YEARS AGO, I was paid to interfere with the work of others, as member of the editorial team on 2000AD, a British weekly comic that featured mainly science-fiction oriented action stories. Later, I was briefly the Editor, a post I never sought but was rather thrust upon me - though that's a story for another time. The Galaxy's Greatest Comic has had a long tradition of both evolving and messing with the logo, much of it on my watch, but also stretching back to the dawn of time when 2000AD first began. The original dummy for the comic had the logo rendered as "AD2000", although there's no evidence to suggest that this was intended to be its final title. Dummies were produced as a matter of course for any new magazine back then as a way of demonstrating to interested parties - management, marketers, distributors - what the  final product might look like. In the US comics industry, they called them "ashcans". The final render of the log...
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