Here's something I get asked about a lot. It's not that interesting a story but when you've been blogging as long as I have, you eventually get down to telling people what you had for lunch last Tuesday and how you once cut your toenails too short.
Once upon a time way back in the era of the Vikings, we used to buy our comic books at newsstands or at racks in mini-markets or drugstores. They came out Tuesday and Thursday in most areas and if you were a devout fan (as was I), you hurried to the vendor each of those days to grab up the new releases. One day in December of 1969, I did just that and among my purchases of that day was the new issue of The Flash, #195.
I was at the time working on the fringes of the comic book business. I was making my main income writing articles for local magazines but also laboring part-time for a Los Angeles-based firm that was doing mail order merchandising of the Marvel characters. Three months later, I'd be hired by the great Jack Kirby as an assistant for some new comics he'd be editing for DC but on this day, I was just kinda/sorta getting into the comic book field.
Then I opened that issue of The Flash and discovered I was a character in it.
There was a scene of The Flash doing a whirlwind autograph signing at the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon and he was calling out the names of the folks who were receiving these autographs. The comic's editor, Julius Schwartz, had inserted the names of three folks who were frequent contributors to his letter columns: Me, Irene Vartanoff and Peter Sanderson. (All three of us, by the way, wound up working in comics.)
I get asked how I felt when I saw my name in a comic book story. I think "weird" would describe it. I was walking down Pico Boulevard, about a half-block from the Pico-Robertson newsstand — which amazingly is still there, though it's moved a hundred yards and no longer sells comic books. I just stopped and stared at it and told myself I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. And I remember looking around at the people passing me and realizing how little this would matter to any of them. But it meant a lot to me.
It was very much like the sensation I'd had a few years earlier when I bought a copy of Aquaman #28 and while standing in line, waiting to pay for it and other comics I was buying that day, flipped through the issue and found they'd published a letter I'd sent in. I loved comic books and to see my name in one was an odd, appropriate moment of bonding with them. In an odd way, those two moments — having my name in a letters page and having it in a story — were more exciting than a year or two later when I actually started writing comics professionally.
And by the way: The letter column in Aquaman #28 also contained a letter from Irene Vartanoff. Hi, Irene! And hi, Peter Sanderson! Do you both still have your autographs from The Flash? I have mine and I treasure it even though he spelled my name wrong. I guess that's what happens when you do everything in a hurry.