The Marvel Comics Bullpen Bulletins Index: September 1974

September 1974

"This last little tidbit isn't exactly chicken-fat, either! Yep, this is the month when the awesome, ultimate Marvel Value Stamp will appear somewhere - sometime - in one (count 'em, one) of our colorful classics!
Nope, we still won't tell you just which of our world-famous super-stars it features: we'll leave you the fun of finding that out for yourself, when you discover it starin' back at you from one of our liltin' letters pages!"

From Captain America, Vol. 1, No. 177

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When I was a kid, there was this series of hardcover juvenile adventure books featuring a character named Jerry Todd. They were something like the Hardy Boys, but they had a lot of humor mixed in with the adventure. And at the very end of each book, the publisher printed letters from the readers as well as responses from the author himself. It was so informal, so warm...it made me feel like I knew these guys and they cared about what their readers thought. I was surprised at the time other books didn't see what a great idea this was. I don't know if I consciously remembered those books when I set out to do the Bullpen page years later, or if I was unconsciously influenced and only afterwards realized where I got the idea from. I do know that talking to the readers informally and indirectly seemed like the natural thing to do."

-Stan Lee
From Mark Gruenwald's Origin of the Bullpen Bulletin

Marvel Bullpen Bulletins': a page of Marvel gossip and advertising featured in every issue of every comic, written in a style that could be characterised as High Hipster - two parts Lord Buckley, one part Austin Powers. Stan Lee was a writer gone Barnum, who'd abandoned new work in favour of rah-rah moguldom. He was Marvel's media liaison and their own biggest in-house fan, a schmoozer."

-Jonathan Lethem

Most of the comics Stan [Lee] 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."

-Mark Evanier

The
Marvel Comics Bullpen Bulletins Index

September 1974

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