I feel like I've read comic books for all 68 years and five days of my life but I probably started around age six, commencing with Disney-type and segueing into super-heroes and other adventure books. By the time of my segue, a few of the DC comics I read were featuring letter columns and before long, most of them did. I began writing in to them and one day when I purchased an issue of Aquaman, I discovered a letter of mine had been selected for publication.
I told that story here but I didn't tell you when it happened. The comic was Aquaman #28 and records show that it went on sale on Tuesday, May 3 of 1966. That was a life-changing day for me. The letter was stupid and of course, I didn't get paid for it…didn't even get a free copy of the comic book…but that wasn't the point. Something I had created on my little manual typewriter had been published.
Three years and two months later, I made my first real sale as a professional writer and I can trace, though possibly not explain, a mental connection from one event to the other. And in some ways, what I do now is the same thing as what I did with my letter-writing then. The output now is longer and, I fervently pray, better…and I usually get paid. But it's still just me sitting at a more expensive keyboard writing something that I hope someone will want to publish or produce.
A lot of folks who began writing comic books in the late sixties and seventies wrote to comic book letter pages before that…which makes it odd that if you read comics these days, you may never see a letter column in any of them. And the few that are there seem to be written by some intern who had about as much to do with the creation of that issue as you did.
The exceptions are few and I'm not sure how many comics ever have them at all but there aren't many. One main reason they had them in the first place is that comics which sold any of their copies via subscription had to contain a page of text to get a good postage rate from the post office. Before letter pages, they wrote text stories that almost no one read.
Letter pages were more popular with the readers and those creating those comics liked the (mostly) praise they got and some of the suggestions therein. Also, you could pay someone next-to-nothing — or in the cases of some I've assembled, nothing — to assemble one. Those arcane postal regulations went away and so did most subscriptions…and eventually, so did letter columns. But I still kinda like them, especially when you're writing to, as I often could in the sixties, the editor or someone actually involved in the making of that comic book. Call it loyalty to something that once served me well.
We had them for a long time in the various Groo comic books and a lot of people clearly liked them. They liked writing the letters, they liked seeing if theirs got published, they liked seeing them in print…they even liked how I sometimes insulted them in my responses. We didn't have them in the last few Groo projects and I've decided it's time to change that.
This summer, the long-awaited Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series is coming out from Dark Horse, followed closely by another four-issue Groo mini-series which is already well into production. I expect there will be a lot more of this stuff coming out next year and I want to have letter columns in every issue. That means I need letters. That means you need to write them.
Want to see your letter published in a Groo letter page? Then you'll need the address: letters@groothewanderer.com. Once again, that's letters@groothewanderer.com. No physical mail because that would mean either my assistant or I would have to retype it. If you can read this, you can send e-mail and I can cut 'n' paste.
Tell us any silly thing that relates, however remotely, to Groo the Wanderer or his dog or Sergio or anything dumb…but stay away from current events. When these books go to press, they don't come out for a few months after and the way current events are going these days, what's funny in April may be tragedy by July.
There's no pay but you get to see your words in print and I'll probably write something rude in reply…and then there's this: Each issue, I'll pick the cleverest letter and the person who sent it in will receive a tiny original sketch of Groo by Sergio Aragonés, signed by Sergio and me.
It's the least we can do…and I'm not being gracious when I say that. I mean it really is the least we can do except to send you absolutely nothing, which is what we've done in the past. So write. Tell us how Groo comic books have changed your life…or that they haven't, in which case you should be sending us something minimally thoughtful instead of the other way around.