You know what's missing from comic books these days? Letter columns. In my day (read this sentence in the voice of Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man, who I think was him imitating Lionel Barrymore), comics had letter columns and readers would write in and either point out errors or ask questions or critique the previous issue. And then the editor (or someone impersonating the editor) would reply…and it made for a nice interaction. Julius Schwartz's in his DC books were especially good, while over at Marvel, the ones composed by Stan Lee (or sometimes, "Stan Lee") were as much a part of some books' appeal as the stories, themselves.
That all started to go away in the seventies. For a while, we had letter columns but it wasn't the editor who handled them. It was some kid in the office…some assistant to the assistant or something. In a few books, it was even me. That wasn't as much fun as engaging in a dialogue with the actual editor or even someone pretending to be him. Then at some point, comics just stopped having letter columns at all. Groo the Wanderer, which I work on, was one of the last holdouts. We had a letters page long after most comics didn't bother.
I used to jest that this was because we truly cared about our readers, whereas other comics didn't. That caused an editor at one of the companies to get real, real angry at me…though apparently not angry enough that he decided to prove me wrong and add letter pages to his comics. That, he did not do. Soon after, I stopped doing the joke not because I feared him but because when Groo shifted from monthly publication to the intermittent mini-series format, I stopped receiving a steady flow of letters. I suppose I could have made some up. A lot of letter pages used to do that…more than you'd imagine. But I have integrity I haven't even used yet.
Well, I've decided it's high time to get back into the letter column business. We have a new Groo mini-series starting and I'm cobbling up a letters page for it. Wanna see your name and letter in Groo? Send both of those things to letters@groothewanderer.com. I'll repeat that address for those of you who are slow of mind: letters@groothewanderer.com. It pays nothing and if you heckle us, we heckle you back…and we have home court advantage so watch it.