On editing reprint collections Another of my many dubious distinctions in comics is probably having the edited reprint collections over the longest stretch of time, 46 years now. (Okay, I didn’t do any for decades in the middle of that stretch, but I said it was a dubious distinction.). It’s always been a fun assignment, providing […]
Denny’s gone, brought social conscience to comics. He was a journalist at heart, and knew his obit would have Batman in the lede, but I think he’d have been prouder of this way of looking at his life. Not that he was the first, much less the only one, but damn it he was the […]
When I was a neophyte assistant editor and aspiring writer, there weren’t a wealth of books on writing comics. There were a couple of decades-old pamphlets by the already prodigiously energetic Stan Lee and Bob Kanigher, some of the advice in which was probably as valid as the day they typed it on a noisy […]
For a long stretch the responsibility for the DC Library went to a woman named Gerda Gattel. Gerda was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust years in Germany, and worked at Timely (the Marvel predecessor) in the 1950s, possibly as a letterer, but was caught up in one of their periodic shutdown/layoffs. She came over […]
The death this week of Marty Pasko pulled my mind back to the late 1970s, and the years of our regular poker games. For about five years I sat in a Friday night game, most often hosted in Greenwich Village at the apartment that Marty and I shared for a while and I kept afterwards. […]
My favorite meal with Stan was at Hamburger Hamlet in LA, probably in the early 2000s…his public ‘avatar’ wasn’t on that evening, not even to charm the waitstaff, for whatever reason. He said that Marvel was looking to have him do more editorial work again, and then said “What does an editor do these days?” […]
With the recent run of deaths of comic creators from the generation who worked from the ’50s onward, it occurs to me that depth of emotional reactions from those of us who came into comics may use some explanation. Like so many out there, we had grown up on the work of folks like Steve […]
One of the most distinctive rituals at DC in the early 1970s was the walk down the aisle to get a cover designed. The newsstand was still virtually the only form of distribution of comics in America, and conventional wisdom held that the cover was by far the most important aspect of a comics’ sales […]
Deep into a chronological binge re-reading of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, a project long on my to-do list. I was introduced to the series decades ago by Mark Hanerfeld, my predecessor on The Comic Reader, and read something like the last half of them as they came out and the earlier ones as I […]
The ACTION COMICS celebration volume is hitting stores this week, so I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts about it and my journey with ACTION. In a way, I came to comics through ACTION, as #300 was brought to me by my babysitter when I was 6, the first comic I remember owning. I’d […]