Jim Shegas writes that neither I nor Scott Edelman wrote the first solo Falcon story…
Actually, the first Falcon solo story was by Gary Friedrich and Gray Morrow in Captain America #144. It was produced during Marvel's brief flirtation with 25-cent double-sized comics. They changed their minds after only one month and went back to the regular format. This story had its start as a backup story to an extra-long Captain America lead story. While the double-sized story was being produced for issue #144 they found they needed to chop it into two parts with the rest going into #145. John Romita was enlisted to make some alterations to the Falcon story's first and last pages to make it fit to insert into the (now-shortened) Captain America story in #144 as a "Chapter 2" instead. But it is to all intents and purposes a separate Falcon story.
I remember that story. John Romita did more than "some alterations" to the first and last pages. And I remember it because I met Gray Morrow at a comic convention shortly after it came out and he was still quite upset that someone had ordered so many redraws, not to alter the story but because they just didn't like the way he'd drawn so many of the faces and figures.
He was not angry so much as hurt and puzzled that they felt they had to do that to a guy who'd been in the business for so long. He was another one of those artists — I could make a lengthy list — who was brimming with talent and had so much to offer…but the business never knew quite what to do with him.
Okay, I hereby remove myself from any position of authority on what the first Falcon solo story was. If anyone wants to know for sure, don't ask me.
Frank Balkin wrote me to say…
I can't speak for other comics fans, but I started reading at 8 years old in 1976, and I enjoyed back-up features. I didn't feel like "Well, I bought Detective Comics for Batman, why am I not getting 17 pages of Batman?" I thought, "Wow, this Elongated Man character isn't as interesting to me as Batman but he's fun to read about, too."
Yeah, that was how it was when I started reading comics. My first super-hero comic was Action Comics #250. Half the comic was Superman, a fourth was Tommy Tomorrow and the rest was Congorilla. I enjoyed them all and I think I enjoyed the sheer variety…but that was long ago. Folks who've analyzed sales figures more closely than I ever did came to the conclusion in the seventies that readers didn't feel that way about their comics.
They likened back-up features to if you bought a can of corn, got it home and opened it and discovered it was two-thirds corn, one-third peas. I'm not sure they were right but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.
Meanwhile, Michael Grabowski wrote about some back-up stories from my past…
Funny you mention back-ups in comics featuring other than title characters. I was still a single-digit aged comics reader when Hanna-Barbera comics stopped coming from Charlton and started coming from Marvel, and it was in one or more of those that I first noticed your name, and I believe I even wrote you a fan letter then! I may never have sent it, but I loved the line "Elbow macaroni sits on a poodle's nose" in what I think was a Fred Flintstone spy adventure. (My thinking was that they would never run a letter from me in The Amazing Spider-Man, but there couldn't be nearly as much competition to get in an H-B comic.)
I bought several of those Marvel/H-B comics from 7-Eleven, but rarely in consecutive order. But what really bugged me was the way each comic had a back-up story featuring other characters that set up the lead story in that other character's next comic. For instance, the Fred Flintstone spy story was probably set up in the back of Yogi Bear or Dynomutt. Thankfully, the lead stories never seemed to depend on the other comic's back-up intro, (Nice editing, there!) but it was always frustrating getting a little hook to find another comic the next month, which I never quite made happen. (I don't know why that never bugged me when hero comics had regular cliff-hangers if I never found their part 2s on the spinner rack.)
Yeah, the guy who set up that deal — who knew as much about comic books as I do about Evolutionary Culturology — had this brainstorm. Each issue of the Yogi Bear comic and the Flintstones comic would have a three-page back-up story of the other, teasing the next issue coming out. Same deal with the Scooby Doo and the Dynomutt comics. It was a bad idea, I thought, but we were stuck with it.
If you sent that letter, you wasted your time. The only address in the comics was Marvel's address in New York and they did not forward any mail to us so we did not do letter columns. A person who worked back there told me they got some and threw them away. Perhaps the thrower-awayer was the low-level individual then on staff at Marvel who let me know in no uncertain terms that he was very upset the Hanna-Barbera comics were being produced out of the Hanna-Barbera studio in Hollywood instead of out of the Marvel office back east. That meant he couldn't work on them and that bothered him a lot. He also told me that the day would come when he would run Marvel Comics…and he got about as close to that goal as I did to sleeping with all the Golddiggers on The Dean Martin Show.
Lastly, my buddy Phil Geiger was the only person who wrote to tell me…
You've probably had dozens of people tell you by now, but yeah, DC just started doing back-up stories in a lot of their books again. For example, Bibbo in Superman and Midnighter in Action Comics.
Duly noted. Hey, is anyone doing letter columns these days? I don't see a lot of current comics but the ones I see don't have them. I'm about to compose a letters page for an upcoming Groo comic, the on-sale date of which will be announced in the next week or so. How alone am I in taking the time to do these?