Letters From Marvel
Letters From Marvel
Aug 13As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Mark Gruenwald, here’s a few pics of the package I received from Marvel Comics back in 1992 to thank me for writing a letter to Quasar.
The envelope in which it arrived, featuring an awesome Spidey address label.
The letter from Kelly Corvese, on equally cool Marvel letterhead. Sure, it’s a form letter, but who cares when the package also contains…
…this? Page 31, issue 32 of Quasar…as Corvese mentions in his letter, it probably has next to no value as a collectible, but it’s one of my more prized possessions.
Click on the pic for a slightly larger version. You can read the actual letter I sent in, which is alternately amusing and embarrassing to me.
For the historical record, here’s the paste-up I received from ANOTHER letter I wrote in to Marvel, this time commenting on some Todd McFarlane issues of his adjectiveless Spider-Man title.
That letter features some truly, truly lame jokes on my part. I cringe.
Psst … Kelly Corvese is a man.
Just FYI.
Very cool stuff, my man.
Thanks Pj…and thanks for the tip on Kelly. I’m an idiot.
Hi Matt,
Glad that meant so much to you. I knew that letter column would do more good in your hands than getting dusty in a navel flat file.
Cheers!
Kelly Corvese
…I meant “Marvel flat file!”
Kelly–Thanks for stopping by! It sure did do more good with me than in a flat file…OR in a navel, for that matter. It was an awesome thing to get in the mail as a 15-year-old.
You’re not an idiot. I just read all of those “Pro-Files” on the Bullpen Bulletins pages of Marvel comics in the ’80s. Plus, I think his caricature might have shown up in What The–?! or Marvel Age or something.
Wow. I was a real Marvel Zombie back then, huh?
Oooooh, those pages are awesome. And an official artifact of pre-computer typesetting and layout – those bring back memories of running newpaper articles through the waxer and pasting them by hand.
sigh
Good times.
Thanks for posting those Matt!
I have those memories too, from working on the high school paper–in fact, at the time, I think I was amazed that this high-end publishing company was using the same tools I was to put together their books. Similar paste-up board, everything.
The scary thing is that I’m not that much younger than you guys and all of the pre-press stuff for my paper was completely digital. How quickly it vanished, you know?
I can attest that the changeover was pretty quick. When I started writing for the campus newspaper in college (1988) they were just starting to use Macs to do the layout, which they still had to print out and pasteup for the printer. Three years later they were just taking a disc with each week’s issue down to the printer.
Rich, I think my high school paper was in on the tail end of that transition; I do remember doing layout in QuarkXpress on a Mac, but then also printing out the pages and cutting them up and gluing them onto pasteup board. (It was an all-boys Catholic high school so I’m sure updating the newspaper technology fell well behind on the priority list, after football uniforms and altar wine.)