Tony Isabella tips his thanksgiving cap to Roy the Boy Thomas, and, along the way, provides some insight into the "Marvel method" of assembling a lettercol (among other things), back in the early seventies...
Now, obviously, anytime anyone mentions a comic book letters page, I will be there, taking notes! Take this passage, for instance:
The first thing I did on my first day at Marvel in 1972 was to write a letters page for TMWOM. Sol gave me a package of fan mail from England. Out of the fifty-plus letters, there were maybe six or seven that were usable. Clearly, our British readers were much younger than our American readers.I never received what I would have considered enough useable letters from the U.K. In retrospect, I should have run more of the letters I did receive and aim the columns directly at those younger readers. Instead, I tried to "elevate" the columns to the level of our American comic books.
It eventually became easier to write the letters myself. I'd take a first name from this British reader, a last name from that one, and bug Glynis for the names of likely cities from which these letters could have been received.
Oh, the irony. Roy Thomas knew of me - first and foremost - from the many letters I sent to Marvel as a fan. Now I was getting paid to write fan letters.
There came a time when my duties expanded to the point where I could not continue writing the British letters columns and handed them off to the London office. This issue's edition of "The Mighty Marvel Mailbag" doesn't read like anything I would have written at the time. The use of words like "bookstalls" and the inexplicably- hyphenated "Bull-pen" confirm this conclusion.
I love it!
Ever since I started telling people that I wanted to write a dissertation on silver/bronze Marvel lettercols, I've gotten three types of responses:
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