A person who asked to remain anonymous sent me this…
You recently mentioned how thrilled you were to see your name in print for the first time in a comic book letter column. I'm fairly certain that you're referencing the attached that appeared in Aquaman #28 in 1966.
Having to spoken to a lot of fans of "Silver Age" books, many have said that in trying to get a letter printed, they deliberately chose titles that they deemed less popular, hence figuring they had a better chance of being selected. Do you recall if that was your strategy back then, in targeting Aquaman? And was that your first letter, or had you sent in some previously that didn't get printed? And did you share this accomplishment with friends and family at the time, or did you keep it to yourself?
I sent a lot of letters in to comic book letter pages and I'm going to guess that the one you mention — indeed my first to make it into print — was my eighth or ninth attempt. Eventually, most of the letters I sent were getting into print but at first, the ratio wasn't that impressive.
I never had any strategy about which titles to write to. What I did though was to submit the kind of letters they seemed to be printing. If the editor of the comic in question published mostly short letters, I sent short letters. If he selected longer letters, I sent longer letters. If he seemed to like critiques, I sent critiques…and so on.
As I may have mentioned here someplace, I stopped because of a couple of incidents where someone (the editor or an assistant) edited or just plain rewrote my letter and changed its meaning, in one case turning a negative review into a positive one. In a couple of other instances, I wrote something sarcastic and/or silly and it got rewritten in a manner that suggested I was serious. It seemed to me that since I wasn't getting paid for my writing, they shouldn't be doing that to it.
Later when I got into the industry — and was actually assembling letter pages myself — I became somewhat less proud of having had so many of my letters chosen for publication. I learned how few letters most comics got and how unpublishable 75% of them were, especially if you wanted to promote the notion that your comic was read by older, erudite consumers. That explained (though in my mind, did not excuse) the rewriting of letters and the publication of bogus letters, which most comics did at times. It further explained the elimination of most letter columns in comics over the years.
At almost every convention I attend, someone compliments me on the letter pages we run in the Groo the Wanderer comics. I always thank them and then ask if they can name another current comic book that even has a letter column. And they usually can't.
