I'm going to omit the name of this questioner because I'm not sure if the following message I received is a joke or not. I don't want to embarrass him if it isn't…
Mr. Evanier, there is a character in Spider-Woman #8 named Marcus Evanier. Is that a coincidence?
Yes, it's a sheer coincidence that the writer of that story — my longtime friend Marv Wolfman — named a character that. And boy, was he shocked when I pointed it out to him. He said, "Oh, my God, Mark! I forgot that was your name!" And he even got it wrong because my given name is Mark, not Marcus. You'd think that someone in the Marvel offices, or at least my friend Al Gordon who inked that story, would have pointed out that Marv had accidentally used my name for a character.
Seriously: This is a practice that is sometimes referred to as "Tuckerizing," named for the science-fiction writer Wilson Tucker, who liked to insert his friends' names into stories. I'm sure he wasn't the first writer in history to do this. It probably went back to cave paintings. But just as he used others' names in his story, someone decided to use his name in their vocabulary by referring to it as "Tuckerization" and the term caught on in some circles.
Writers have been known to argue about whether it's distracting and therefore injurious to a story. Me, I think it depends if your friend's name is Bob Johnson or E. Sneed Entwhistle. I often come across a character name in fiction and think, "That's the author Tuckerizing!" I've done it in a few things I've written but I try not to do it when it's likely to make readers or viewers react that way.
This was not the first time I found myself in a comic book. Julius Schwartz, then the editor of The Flash, once stuck my name into a story. In that case though, readers were supposed to recognize my name from his letter columns. By coincidence, both stories were lettered by John Costanza. It's kind of fun at times but I think it's often overdone and, like some others believe, distracting.
