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So a couple of weeks ago I was talking about a Sugar and Spike story dedicated to “Nugget Pete,” a 90-something year old gent who’d been writing in and requesting an S&S story featuring Native Americans.
Well, longtime Ruinite C. Elam popped into the comments on that post to drop in a couple of message board links giving us a little more detail on Mr. N. Pete. Those message board entries were made only days after my own initial posting, so clearly the Nugget Pete zeitgeist was making its way across the comics nerdinet.
The first features a Sugar and Spike letter column containing what seems to be Nugget Pete’s first letter to the series, written back when Pete was but a strapping young lad of 87. And, sure enough, he’s asking for stories with Native Americans. “I suggest you put in something about cowboys and Indians – That never hurt a magazine yet.” …Words to live by!
The second link has another S&S letter column, this time from another fan (this one only 75 years old!) referring back to Nugget Pete’s letter and wondering if that was any inspiration for the grandpa/cowboy character Shelly Mayer introduced into the S&S strip. Mayer’s response, paraphrased: “yeah, probably.”
Anyway, that was a nice follow-up to what was (to me, anyway) an interesting tidbit of funnybook history. Thanks, C. Elam, for pointing that out to me!
From the letter column for Star Spangled War Stories #126 (April-May 1966):
“RK” being “Robert Kanigher,” natch. (Fake letter run to help dissuade similar letters from pouring in, or real reader comment pulled out and used as a lesson in what editors
don’t want to see? No idea.)
From the same issue, an in-house ad that, I can only assume, resulted in the highest sales ever for any issue of Metal Men:
I vote “hotcha.” I mean, who
doesn’t like hotcha?
While the “me am Superbaby!” talk is a little annoying, granted:
…that seems like something of an…extreme response.
BONUS: by using this particular standard:
…count the number of civilized men at the San Diego Comic Con. I suspect there will be an equal number of headbands and neckties.
And now, from Swamp Thing #8 (Jan-Feb 1974), my favorite letter of comment from a Swamp Thing letters page:
Well said.
From the letters column in Challengers of the Unknown #86 (April-May 1978):
The editorial reply:
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d totally be in favor of an “Adventures of Alec Holland” series. In fact, in a way it looks like we might be getting a little bit of that in next week’s final issue of that one series I don’t want to spoil by mentioning that Swamp Thing may or may not have made an appearance in the previous issue.
We’ve had the occasional Alec Holland adventure in the various Swamp Thing titles, usually when he reverts (or imagines he reverts) to human form, like in the last issue of his original series and the couple of Challengers of the Unknown issues which followed up on those plot threads.
And then there was this, Alec Holland’s one and (I think) only appearance in the DC Animated Universe comics, from Batman Adventures Vol. 2 #16 by Ty Templeton, Rick Burchett and Terry Beatty:
Alas, at no time was there an animated universe Swamp Thing to go with our animated universe Alec Holland, aside from some sneaky cameos in the
Justice League cartoons.
As an aside…there sure were a lot of typos in that Challengers letters column. In the scans you can see “there” used in place of “their,” and “permanently” spelled “perminately.” Not shown: “November” spelled “Nobember.” By the way, I was going back through some of my older posts as I was writing this and quickly spotted several typos of my own, so I’m not taking the high road, here.
And if I may quibble a bit with the original letter writer’s point…Holland didn’t spend “his whole life looking like that.” Even in real world time, as opposed to however much time allegedly passed in the comics, Holland had only been Swamp Thing for about six years at that point. So let’s not exaggerate, Guy Who Wrote in to Challengers of the Unknown 30-Plus Years Ago!
It always amused me that, in the old Answer Man columns Bob Rozakis used to do in DC Comics a decade or three back, there would be a non-stop parade of folks asking what their comics were worth, and it seemed like most of the time they were worth about thirty cents to a buck:
Of course, this was a while back, before the comics the readers were most likely to have were given labels like “Bronze Age” and “Copper Age” and priced upward accordingly. But enough questions like this appeared to be submitted that, if memory serves, a separate column was created just to handle the pricing inquiries. I think maybe I once saw a reader ask about a comic that turned about to be, like, five bucks or something.
I like the matter-of-factness response to this next question:
And I like the very
specific nature of this next inquiry:
In the, oh, 30+ years since this was asked,
has Black Lightning made it to the Fortress? I haven’t the foggiest.
I’m also picturing that this was just one of a series of questions the reader sent in. “Has Firestorm been to the Fortress?” “No.” “How about Animal Man?” “Um, not yet.” “Metamorpho?” “Not sure, really.” “Okay, has Johnny Thunder?” “Oh, from the Justice Society? Lemme check….” “No, I mean Johnny Thunder, the cowboy hero.” “…Don’t you have anyone else you can bother?”
• • •
In other news:
from Brave and the Bold #122 (Oct. 1975)
I’m not familiar enough with the Wonder Woman series to know how long this was the name of its letters column:
…but I do know this is an awesome letter o’complaint, printed in issue #209 (Dec ’73/Jan ’74):
And the response, from the above-cited Mr. Robert Kanigher:
I have to admit, I find myself intrigued by what may have been replaced by all the “(CENSORED)” edits. Like “no one, be they Amazon or human can (CENSORED).” Can
what? “Can kiss their own elbows?” Not sure why that would be censored, unless of course it wasn’t “
elbows.”
Anyway…awesome letter. Didn’t see stuff like that in the old letter columns too often. Pretty much par for the course now, in some corners of the nerdinet.
