The other question put to me by Adam J. Elkhadem concerned Marvel's official, company-run fan club in the sixties, the Merry Marvel Marching Society…
I was absolutely awestruck to see you cited in Stan's Soapbox proposing the various M.M.M.S. acronyms in the pages of Fantastic Four. What a neat early claim to fame! How did you come up with these and what was it like to see your suggestion printed and later adopted?
I started writing a reply to Adam and experienced a wave of déjà vu. Suddenly, I was telling myself, "You've written this before" and I realized that, damn it, I had. I wrote about it here.
To it, I'll add that (a) I tend not to run into Stan Lee much these days and (b) that it was always a thrill to pick up a comic book at a store and find that a letter of mine had been accepted for publication. Obviously, it was a bit less of a thrill each time it happened but as I then had every intention of becoming a professional writer — or at least trying to become a professional writer — it was nice to feel I could at least get stuff I wrote published, sans pay.
And it was less of a thrill the few times — maybe more than a few — when what was published with my signature was not exactly what I'd written; when someone at DC or Marvel had decided my letter needed a rewrite to perhaps invert what I'd said or make a joke letter sound more like a serious statement. I finally stopped sending in letters for that reason.
And in hindsight, it was even less of a thrill than that. When I got into the business, I realized that it wasn't all that big a deal that some editor (more often, an assistant) had chosen my letter to be printed. I'd thought what I'd sent had stood out from a pile of a couple hundred submissions. Turned out, it was more like they needed eight letters to fill the page and they'd received twenty or so, half of them incoherent or saying next to nothing…and one or two in Crayola®. It was no great achievement to stand out from that stack.
So I guess I was thrilled at the time but I learned I shouldn't have been. And that included the ranks for the Merry Marvel Marching Society.
