The Letters Pages

If you loved comics in 1961 and wanted to find one other person who felt the same way, you had a problem. There were no conventions worth the name, no shops, no publications about the medium, and no plausible way to locate another reader except by accident.

What there was, in the back of the book, behind the story and before the ads, was a page of letters from other people who had also written in. That page is where modern comics fandom was assembled, and the industry that grew out of it was substantially staffed by the people whose names appeared on it.

Marvel's letters page arrives early in the company's superhero era, in Fantastic Four #3, and the tone is set immediately: informal, first-name, conversational, with Stan Lee answering readers as though the correspondence were a conversation already in progress.

That tone was a commercial strategy as much as a personality. Readers were addressed as insiders, told they were part of something, given nicknames and in-jokes and a vocabulary. By issue #11 the book was devoting space to answering readers directly rather than only printing them, and the pattern held across the line as Amazing Spider-Man, The X-Men and Daredevil launched into the same house style.

The thing that turned readers into a fandom was not the tone. It was an editorial decision at DC to print the writer's full mailing address alongside the letter.

Julius Schwartz's books did this through the early 1960s, in titles like Justice League of America, which had grown out of the team's debut in The Brave and the Bold #28. The consequence was immediate and almost certainly unintended at that scale: a reader in one state could now write directly to a reader in another, without the publisher in the middle.

A letters page with addresses is not a letters page. It is a directory.

Within a year they had built their own press. Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas, who found each other through exactly that mechanism, launched Alter Ego in 1961, generally regarded as the first true comics fanzine. Others followed, including The Comic Reader, which carried news and schedules for an audience that had no other source for either.

Both of those titles are in this database and neither gets a file of its own, because a bibliographic catalogue of comic books does not consider a fanzine to be a comic book. That is the correct call and it is also the whole point: the letters pages produced an entire amateur publishing industry that the professional record can see but cannot quite classify.

Early comics fanzines on eBay ›

Marvel's best idea in this space cost nothing. Readers who spotted a continuity error could write in and receive a No-Prize, which was initially nothing at all and later an empty envelope, sometimes with text on the outside congratulating the recipient on their keen eye.

The rules then evolved in a way that tells you a great deal about the relationship. Eventually you could not win one simply by finding a mistake. You had to find the mistake and supply an explanation that made it not a mistake. The publisher had successfully outsourced continuity repair to its own audience and convinced them it was a prize.

Certain issues generated correspondence that is now part of the historical record of what those comics did to people.

Amazing Spider-Man #121 killed Gwen Stacy, and the letters that followed were furious in a way that had not really happened before, because the convention being broken was one nobody had thought to state out loud. The letters pages are where you can watch readers work out, in public and in real time, that the rules had changed.

The same thing happens around Green Lantern #76, where the O'Neil and Adams turn toward social subject matter produced a genuine argument among readers about what superhero comics were for. And at a smaller scale around roster changes like Avengers #16, which replaced nearly the entire team and reportedly generated a substantial volume of complaint from readers who had just got used to the previous one.

ASM #121 on eBay ›

This is the part that is genuinely remarkable, and it is the reason the letters pages matter beyond nostalgia. For roughly two decades, writing to a comic was a plausible route into working on one.

Roy Thomas went from co-founding a fanzine to writing for Marvel to running it as editor-in-chief. Dave Cockrum, Mike Friedrich, Martin Pasko, Mark Gruenwald, Kurt Busiek and others appear in letter columns before they appear in credits. The editors were reading the letters, the names recurred, and a reader who wrote intelligently and often enough became a known quantity to the people doing the hiring.

There is no modern equivalent. The closest thing would be a comments section that functioned as a recruitment pool for the people running the website, which is not how any comments section has ever worked.

Letters pages thinned through the 1990s and had largely vanished from mainstream monthlies by the 2000s. The usual explanation is the internet, and that is most of it: a message board does everything a letters page did, instantly, without a two-month lag and an editor choosing which three letters run.

But the page itself was also worth money. A letters column occupies space that can be sold to an advertiser or given back to the story, and once the readers had somewhere else to talk, the business case for keeping it evaporated. Some books have brought the format back, usually as a deliberate throwback, and it reads as one.

Not the conversation. The conversation is larger and faster than it has ever been.

What went is the curation and the permanence. A letters page was edited, which meant somebody at the publisher read everything and chose, and it was printed, which meant the exchange survives in the object. Every argument about Gwen Stacy conducted on a forum in 2003 is gone. Every argument conducted in a letter column in 1973 is still in the back of a comic that a collector can hold, bound into the same pages as the story that caused it.

That is why these pages turn up in scholarship about the period and message boards do not. They were printed, so they were kept.

Letters pages and text features are indexed in this record as part of an issue's contents, which means that on a well-indexed book you can see the letters column listed as its own sequence alongside the story, with its page count. The contents listing is where the back of the book becomes visible as data.

This is comics history rather than database output, so the account above follows the commonly documented record, and the article says reportedly where a detail rests on participant recollection rather than paperwork. Every issue referenced has been checked against the files here. Corrections go to the address in the footer, which is, when you think about it, a letters page with the volume turned down.