I am informed by (so far) "Garrett," Pierce Askegren, Ryan Mead, Mike Zeidler, Merlin Haas, Craig Wiener, Jim Guida, Hurricane Heenan, Ed Coyote, Don Porges, Johnny Achziger and some guy named Marv Wolfman that once upon a time, a Three Musketeers bar consisted of three sections of nougat — one chocolate, one strawberry, one vanilla. The "musketeer" connection to such a confection was that in advertising, three musketeers would use their expert swordsmanship to trisect the candy bar so that each could have the section with his favorite flavor. Over the years, the bar turned into one chocolate-filled lump but the name remained. I don't understand why you change a product that much and don't rename it but, hey, there are plenty of things in this world I don't understand. Like all these people who claim they like candy corn.
Speaking of candy corn, several of you sent me links to this article over at The Onion. That's only part of it.
One day back in 1967, I was home from school with the flu and to pass the time, I decided to write some letters to comic book letter pages. This, of course, was back when comic books had letter pages.
Back when they did, I sent in a lot of letters and amazingly (for a time) had about 85% of them selected for publication. I told myself with grand pride that obviously, my prose was of such wit and insight that it stood out from the piles of what must have been hundreds, even thousands of letters. That track record stopped being so amazing when I started working in comics and saw the volume and quality of the mail that was received. Even a comic selling 250,000 copies only received about 25 letters, of which maybe eight might be printable, some with judicious rewriting by the editors. The rest were in Crayola® or said nothing deeper than "I love this comic!"
But I didn't know that back in '67. I just knew it was fun to open up a comic book and see your words — and better still, your name — staring back at you. So in a moment of fever-induced inspiration, I wrote the following letter and sent it off to Stan Lee. Months later, I was surprised to find it not in the letter page of one Marvel Comic but in Stan's Bullpen Bulletins page, which meant it ran in every Marvel that month. You can click on the image below and see a scan of the printed page or you can just read the transcript that follows it…
Click above to see the entire page
STAN'S SOAPBOX!
While we're waiting for your letters telling what you'd like us to editorialize about, we thought you'd get a charge out of this note which we just received:
Dear Bullpen: Enough! I have sat idle too long! I have watched the M.M.M.S. turn into disorganized chaos. (And that's the worst kind!) As a solution, I suggest we have some officers. By buying his first Marvel mag, a fan is automatically entitled to the rank of RFO (Real Frantic One). His first published letter elevates him to QNS (Quite 'Nuff Sayer). A no-prize raises him to TB (True Believer). Each additional no-prize raises one level: From JHC (Junior Howling Commando) to RH (Resident Hulk) to AAT (Associate Assistant Thing) and finally to the penultimate, the utmost status a fan can attain: MM (Marvelite Maximus)! Naturally, the artists all have the rank of DDD (Definitely Dizzy Doodlers), the editorial assistants are IPR (Illiterate Proof-Readers), art associates are VOD (Victims of Doodlers), the letterers are IWP (Indefatigable Word Placers), and Stan himself is at the summit – MEO (Marvel's Earthbound Odin). Each person would use his title at the start of his name – as I've done. (Signed –) RFO Mark Evanier
Y'know something, gang – we kinda dig Mark's idea. Let us know how it hits you and maybe we can really get the thing rolling! Fair ‘nuff?
And sure enough, they modified my titles a bit but soon, there were official ranks of Marveldom. To this day, when I run into Stan Lee, he rarely fails to mention that I came up with that and he treats it like it's the only important thing I've done in my life. Which it may well be. (The letter, by the way, was somewhat edited…as were most letters I had printed in comics back then. I don't believe I even knew the word "penultimate" at age 15. One of the reasons I stopped writing letters to comic books was that they were often rewritten, sometimes to the point of significantly altering my intended message.)
But it was not to be my only time in the Bullpen Bulletins. In 1970, I worked for a while for an outfit called Marvelmania International, which was selling posters and decals and other merchandise of the Marvel characters. Well, let me amend that: The mail order firm, which was disguised as a fan club, was taking orders for such items and cashing the checks, and once in a rare while, they'd actually produce an item and ship it out. But a lot of kids were shamelessly ripped-off and when it became apparent that this was happening, I quit, as did my friend Steve Sherman, who was also working there. A few months later, the guy who owned and operated the company upped and vanished to avoid a legion of creditors, and has not been seen since.
Before that happened, back when we and everyone still thought the company was legit and functioning, Steve and I paid a visit to New York City and spent a few days hanging around the Marvel offices, meeting everyone and gathering material for the "club" magazine. This was in July of '70 and even though we, like everyone else who ventured near Marvelmania, never got paid what we were owed, there were certain perks to our association with it…not a lot but, hey, you take what you can get.
One was that we spent a few hours with Stan Lee and he stuck a little notice in the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins, which appeared in every Marvel title each month. Some of the later Bullpen pages were written by others imitating Stan but he wrote this one, which ran in comics dated January, '71. I know because I saw him sit down at the typewriter and begin banging it out in his inimitable style, which included forced nicknames and chatty familiarity. No one ever called Steve "Stevey" and no one else thought we were young, zingy with-it guys but, hey, he's Stan Lee. If he says you're young, zingy and/or with-it, you don't ask questions. Here's the way it appeared in all the Marvel books a few months later. And whether you click on the image to see the scan or read the transcript that follows, take note of the item after the one about Steve and me…
Click above to see the entire page
ITEM! Just thought you'd like to know – the outspoken young fan who gave us the idea for the Ranks of Marveldom a few years ago (R.F.O.'s, F.F.F.'s, etc.) is now a full-fledged editor, turning out possibly the greatest fan mag of all for our own MARVELMANIA INTERNATIONAL! His name's MARK EVANIER, and he and his assistant editor, STURDY STEVEY SHERMAN, came to visit us the other day from sunny California where Marvelmania has its headquarters. They're a couple of young, zingy, with-it guys, and after yakkin' it up with ‘em for a while it's easy to see why MARVELMANIA has become the toast of fandom! They were in town to attend the famous ComicCon '70, and speaking of conventions —
ITEM! We just have to tell you that our first open meeting of the ACADEMY OF COMIC-BOOKS ARTS, held during the summer, was really somethin' else! One of the cleverest entertainers of our time, none other than WILL JORDAN, the great monologist and impressionist (you've seen him break up the Ed Sullivan show a zillion times), provided some of the most hilarious routines we've ever howled at. Our most heartfelt thanks to Will, and to all the panelists and guests who made it such a memorable and meaningful affair.
Most of the comics Stan worked on in the sixties have been praised to Asgardian proportion and I certainly agree there was wonderment aplenty in there. But I also really liked the friendly editorial "voice" he established in his letter columns, house ads and especially in the Bullpen Bulletins. He put himself on a first-name basis with the readership at a time when the rival DC editors generally came across not only as adults but stodgy adults. He simultaneously bragged about the greatness of Marvel and expressed such humility that when they screwed up, as they occasionally did, you were willing to cut them a lot of slack. I will never forget the issue of Tales to Astonish where in the letter page, Stan admitted that the Giant-Man story had been done in such a rush that he wasn't sure it made a lot of sense (it didn't), nor will I forget the way he made it sound like he and the Mighty Marvel Bullpen lived to serve us 14-year-old consumers.
And there's a reason I included the item after the item about me. While I was in Stan's office that day in 1970, he got a call from Jim Warren, publisher of Creepy and Eerie. They were on the planning committee for the Academy of Comic Book Arts, a group that was then trying to elevate the form in cursory ways. Warren was calling to say he'd arranged for Will Jordan to entertain at the upcoming meeting and Stan replied, "That's great! He'll be terrific! Good work, Jim!" Then Stan hung up the phone, turned to me and asked, "Who's Will Jordan?"
I explained that Will Jordan was a comedian-impressionist who was best known for his appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, and Stan proceeded to write the entry you see above, talking about how great Will Jordan was, and how great he'd been at the meeting…which took place after this page went to the printer. Some would call this a bit of trickery but I thought it was a fine example of Stan's imaginative writing. Anyone can write a report on an event after it happens…
My friend Carolyn was just reading this here weblog and she pointed out a funny typo that I made which I'm not going to correct. In the previous message here, I referred to a certain candy bar as "Three Mouseketeers." That's wrong. Actually, the candy bar I never liked was named "Three Musketeers" — and by the way, I never understood why they called it that. What in the name of Douglas Fairbanks do musketeers have to do with "whipped, fluffy chocolate nougat covered in rich milk chocolate?" The name "Three Mouseketeers" is stuck in my head because it was a wonderful little comic book feature, written and drawn by the great Sheldon Mayer. It debuted in 1944 in a DC comic called Funny Stuff and it wasn't until 1956 that the three mice — Patsy, Fatsy and Minus — received their own book. It was, like everything else Mr. Mayer did, a very funny funnybook.
At the time, Mr. Disney's Mickey Mouse Club was the number one kids' show on television and one wonders if someone at DC decided to launch the comic figuring that the name "Mouseketeers" (which was what they called Annette and Cubby and all the rest) now had some extra appeal in the marketplace. By then, Mayer was doing his acclaimed comic, Sugar and Spike, and for a while, he attempted to do both books. Eventually though, the workload was too much for him and he reluctantly gave up the Mouseketeers as it was less of a personal work — though it is said he still felt like he was giving up one of his children. An artist named Rube Grossman handled the mice thereafter, sometimes writing his own stories, sometimes drawing scripts by Sy Reit. I thought they did an adequate job of aping and occasionally equalling Mayer's work but the readers apparently sensed the difference as sales promptly plunged to cancellation levels. Years later, DC revived the title with Mayer reprints but it got lost amidst a line of super-hero and war comics. That was a shame because it was a good comic book — and a much better treat than that awful candy bar.
At the risk of coming off like the Ebenezer Scrooge of a different holiday, I have to say: I really don't like Halloween and never have. Even as a kid, the idea of dressing up and going from house to house to collect candy struck me as enormously unpleasant. I did it a few times when I was young because it seemed to be expected of me…but I never enjoyed it. I felt stupid in the costume and when I got home, I had a bag of "goodies" I didn't want to eat. In my neighborhood, you got a lot of licorice and Three Mouseketeers bars and Jordan Almonds, none of which I liked.
And of course, absolutely no one likes candy corn. Don't write to me and tell me you do because I'll just have to write back and call you a liar. No one likes candy corn. No one, do you hear me?
My trick-or-treating years were before there were a lot of scares about people putting razor blades or poison into Halloween candy. Even then, I wound up throwing out just about everything except those little Hershey bars. So it was wasteful, and I also didn't like the dress-up part of it with everyone trying to look maimed or bloody. I've never understood why anyone thinks that's fun to do or fun to see.
I wonder if anyone's ever done any polling to find out what percentage of Halloween candy that is purchased and handed-out is ever eaten. And I wonder how many kids would rather not dress up or disfigure themselves for an evening if anyone told them they had a choice. Where I live, they seem to have decided against it. Each year, I stock up and no one comes. For a while there, I wound up eating a couple bags of leftover candy myself. The last few Halloweens, I've switched to little boxes of Sun-Maid Raisins, which are a lot healthier if I get stuck with them. Maybe I ought to switch to candy corn. That way, I wouldn't have to worry about anyone eating it. And if no one comes, I could just keep it around and not give it out again next year.
Over at Comic Book Resources, Budjette Tan is beginning a series on the Filipino comic book artists who flooded into the U.S. industry in the seventies. Here's a link to Part One.
Here are two more messages on this subject of whether you have to be dead to get on a postage stamp and if so, for how long. This first one comes from someone who signs his message, "MichaelRbn"…
I think the reason for the timing of the ten year rule is actually pretty simple. If you read the information provided in the Postal Service website to which you previously linked, it appears that it was part of the transition that occured circa 1970 when the old Post Office Department was converted into the new U.S. Postal Service. Part of the reasoning for that change was an attempt to remove some of the worst aspects of political patronage from what was considered an antiquated Cabinet Department and have the Post Office become an efficient modern corporate entity. Now, it is not my intent to defend that thesis here and now. It's fairly irrelevant to the question at hand. But a side benefit of the change was supposed to be to minimize the situation which existed where often times Congress would pass resolutions (or even laws) requiring the Post Office to print stamps for a favored industry, cause or person. And there are often instances where the ten year rule is used to fend off campaigns for stamps to be issued immediately after some momentarily popular individual's death. I doubt very much anyone deliberately created the rule to slight Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was honored along with RFK with a stamp right after the ten year period elapsed in 1979).
And this one comes from David Goehner…
Yep, there are kids pictured on the "Great Depression" stamp from the 1930s "Stamps of the Century" set who were indeed alive when the stamp was issued in 1998. The stamp uses the famous 1936 picture taken by Dorthea Lange of Florence Owens Thompson with three of her children. Through some brief online searching, I located a fellow named Roger Sprague, who is a grandson of the woman pictured and apparently offers himself for lectures about the Depression. He confirmed that two of the children were still alive when the stamp came out (but didn't specifically clarify whether or not they are still alive, although since he mentioned the date of death of just one of the children, it seems reasonable to assume that the other two are still alive today). Roger also offered some insight regarding how the stamp people got around the "people who are still alive" issue. Here are a couple of lines from his message to me this morning:
At the time the stamp was issued, both Katherine and Norma were living. If you look at the photo again, you will see a baby in my grandmother's arms near the lower right. This child is my aunt Norma, age 1 year. Katherine is the child on my grandmother's right shoulder, and my mother Ruby is on her left shoulder. My grandmother, Florence, died in Sept. 1983 at age 80, my mother, Ruby, died in Feb. 1990 at age 60. Congress was lobbied to allow for the photo to be turned into a stamp even though two of the persons were still living. Actually, the only living person whose "face" appears in the photo is my aunt Norma's, and no one, I'm sure, would recognize her from it.
So it looks like the score is now one clown and two kids who have appeared on a U.S. postage stamp while they were still alive.
Not much to add to this except that I continue to be amazed at how much info comes in when I post a question here. Thanks to all who wrote. And now I have to go mail some bills using stamps with a picture of an eagle on them. Wonder if that eagle is still alive…
I'm getting a lot of e-mail about this stamp thing. Here's a message from John Hedegor who seems to know what he's talking about…
I have been reading with interest your items concerning postage stamps that seemed to represent waivers to the rule that people have to be dead for ten years before their likenesses are allowed on stamps (Presidents excepted). However, I must clear up a misconception here: the "ten years" rule was not adopted by the CSAC (Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee) until some time in the late 1960s. Until then, there were no limitations concerning a person's appearance on a postage stamp (so long as that person was deceased). During the 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S. issued many memorial stamps to those who had recently died; besides Disney and Hammarskjold, these included
Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay (1957), Ernst Reuter, mayor of (West) Berlin (1959), former Senators Robert Taft and Walter George (1960), Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1960), Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn (1962), Eleanor Roosevelt (1963), and in 1965, Winston Churchill and Adlai Stevenson.
Unfortunately, I do not know precisely when the "ten years" rule went into effect, but since no memorial stamps for non-Presidents have been issued since Disney's in 1968, I will assume it was around 1968 or 1969, when the Post Office underwent a series of reorganizations. Surely King and Robert Kennedy would have been honored had the rule not been in effect then.
Also, Harry McCracken is quite correct that the likeness of circus clown Lou Jacobs was used for the American Circus stamp of 1966. But since his face was used a symbol of circus performers in general, and not as a commemoration of Lou Jacobs specifically, it was acceptable. Many living people have posed, or had their likenesses used for, postage stamps. Other examples include the Drug Abuse prevention stamp of 1971 (a young woman slouched in agony), and, going much further back, the Arbor Day stamp of 1932 (a little boy and girl planting a tree) and a Los Angeles Olympics stamp of the same year (a runner on his mark).
Unlike McCracken, I do collect stamps (as you can tell!) and I hope the above helps to clarify things somewhat.
Yes, it does. And I suppose my lingering curiosity is what it was that prompted someone to say, "We need a ten year rule." Now that you mention it was enacted in the sixties, I seem to remember someone once charging that they instituted the policy to avoid the controversy that would might have erupted had they issued a Martin Luther King stamp then. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case but I wonder what it was.
If you're interested in the art of lettering comic books, there are a number of articles and interviews over at Richard Starkings' Balloon Tales site. Of particular note should be this roundtable discussion in which a number of industry professionals discuss whether comics should be lettered in upper and lower case or ALL CAPS.
According to this report, there are people out there who are complaining that the new Looney Tunes DVD doesn't include such fave WB cartoons as One Froggy Evening and What's Opera, Doc? This is a silly criticism, and one that I suspect is not as widely-held as the news report would have us believe.
Here at news from me, we wander from topic to topic. We started talking about the new Dr. Seuss postage stamp and now I'm printing the following from my pal, Rick Scheckman…
Another non-President who did not wait ten years to be on a postage stamp was Dag Hammarskjold. Dag was at the time of his 1961 death in a plane crash in the Congo, Secretary General of the United Nations. Very shortly after the crash, in 1962, The United States issued a stamp honoring Hammarskjold, however one sheet went in backwards for the second color resulting in a rare sheet of inverted stamps. Stamp collector Leonard Sherman purchased the sheet for $2 at the post office. When he announced the find, the government decided to print millions of the stamp error.
I remember this. Below, we have the stamps in question. The one at top is the way the stamp looked when printed correctly. The one below is the "error" stamp with the yellow plate inverted…
But I just dug up a copy of the most memorable version, which is the one drawn by Al Jaffee for MAD Magazine…
