Before the comic-book line edited by Stan Lee was even called Marvel Comics, it thrived on feedback from its young readers. When I set out to read all 27,000 Marvel superhero comic books published from 1961 onward, for my book All of the Marvels, I didn’t realize how fascinating old comics’ letters pages would be as historical artifacts.
The first letter column to appear in one of the company’s 60s superhero titles—1962’s Fantastic Four No. 3—was partly a plant: the “S. Brodsky” credited with one of its letters was Sol Brodsky, who had inked that issue. At least some of it was for real, though: 13-year-old Alan Weiss, who also had a letter printed in that issue, went on to draw comics for Marvel in the mid-1970s.
