In this post the other day, I told the story of how I wrote the first solo story of the Marvel Comics hero, The Falcon. Well, I thought I had. Turns out it was the first book-length story to feature the character. My pal Scott Edelman wrote, as one of his first jobs in comics, a short Falcon tale that appeared in Captain America #220, four months before mine saw print. Scott notes in an e-mail to me that…
My story was created as part of a different initiative to solving the lateness issue than yours. Rather than slotting in an entire fill-in issue to allow a title's regular creative team to catch up, back-ups allowed that team to deliver a shorter lead story, with the issue filled out by a back-up, giving that team some breathing space, though not as much as a full fill-in issue would have.
These back-ups gave many beginners the chance to show what they could do, and I wrote 5- and 6-page stories not only about The Falcon, but about The Vision, Nick Fury, Spider-Man, Hawkeye, and many others as well.
Do comics even do back-up stories anymore? I know they went outta fashion in the seventies. Folks like Len Wein and Dick Giordano occasionally theorized that readers resented them; that if you bought an issue of Batman, you wanted an issue of Batman and would feel cheated if you got two-thirds of an issue of Batman and then there was a Batgirl story in the back. Even worse was a back-up story that in no way connected with the lead feature…
…although when I did the Blackhawk comic for DC in the early eighties, Len (my first editor on it) and Dick (then the Exec Editor at DC) wanted there to be an occasional back-up feature called "Detached Service Diary." It was a recurring feature of previous Blackhawk runs and it consisted of solo stories of the members of the Blackhawk squadron.
We did not do it for deadline reasons. In a way, we did it to please a couple of artists who loved Blackhawk and wanted to draw some stories of it. For much of the time I did that comic, it was not only the only DC comic with back-up stories, it was the only DC comic with stories under book-length. This led to an interesting situation where the back-up stories in Blackhawk were solving deadline problems for other DC comics. I'll have to tell that story here one of these days.
Anyway, Scott Edelman wrote the first solo story of The Falcon. I am pleased to pass that distinction on to him.