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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 13:08:33 GMT -5
Thank you, Cody. I really miss letters pages (I know some publications have them). Reading that now will give me an insight into how the readers of the time felt about the comic. That's priceless. More correctly how editors chose to present how readers felt at the time, or how interns creating letters to fill the letters page with the perception that editors wanted felt (or said they felt) about the book at the time. Letters pages were essentially editorial pages curated by editors crafting a PR tool. A true reflection of how readers felt was an exception, not the rule. -M But can a blanket statement like that possibly apply to every book of every era put out by every publisher? What you describe certainly doesn't apply to the letters I have memories of that were sent to DC Comics' Star Trek and Star Trek: TNG books. I remember some of those letters being rather robust and argumentative - and not at all a PR tool. Don't take my word for it. Track down those issues and read some of those letters. Blanket statements are, by their nature, too broad a brush to paint with.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 13:22:50 GMT -5
I knew several letter writers as part of the fandom circle around the LCS I went to in high school. Most were older gents who graduated from sci-fi fandom into comic fandoms like the owner did, and were his friends and mentored younger collectors at the shop. They were veterans of home-made zines and fan correspondence discussing the books and comics they loved with fellow fans outide the parameters of the books letter pages, but they had also written hundreds of letters of comment to Marvel, DC. Charlton, etc. over the years (some had started writing in to EC). Many had multiple letters published (dozens in most cases). To the man, they basically said that about 90% of the letters they had printed were altered or cut by the editors before publishing, usually to give them a more positive spin. One guy had a strategy of starting with something positive to get the editors attention, then issuing his criticisms and complaints and said every letter he had ever sent that had been printed had been "trimmed for length" right after the positive comments ended and all the negative comments wound up on the cutting room floor. Most of them stopped writing loc in the early to mid 80s as they were tired of decades of frustration and misrepresentation of their actual views. They also knew a lot of guys who would essentially write flattering letters no matter how they actually felt about the books as a game to try to get their name in print on those letters pages making the whole thing a bit more disingenuous.
The surge of indy publishers in the 80s with their letters pages and the advent of things like CBG and Amazing Heroes with robust letters pages discussing current comics forced the hand of some editors at the big publishing houses to change how they did their letters pages leading to things like those Star Trek letters pages, but many continued with their ham-fisted construction of letters pages. The rise of a number of letter-hacks to prominence also changed the game a bit, folks like "TM Maple", Uncle Elvis Orten, and others raised the game on letters pages in some places.
-M
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 13:40:02 GMT -5
What you describe is certainly factual. I've seen such letters, myself. There were quite a few DC letters I saw which seemed just to be an extrapolated version of "I think your comic is cool..." And, of course, there'll be people who simply want to get their name on a letters page. In fact, years ago, a video game magazine (UK), which used to give a game away to the "Star Letter", did put out an editorial that stated they wanted thoughtful, thought-provoking letters that had something to say; they stated that a simple "Your mag is cool, do I win the video game?" letter wasn't good enough.
And there are ways to cut letters that take away the context, whether we're talking about a music magazine or superhero comic.
But in the decades that comics have been published, I guess it depends on the publication. Some UK comics have had readers who aren't shy about expressing their views. Some of DC's Star Trek titles featured letters which actually had me sympathising with the editor/whoever answered the letters column. Some seemed particularly harsh. Even the non-harsh ones were robust.
I guess you'll find many kinds of letters. As a very young child, my letters were usually along the lines of, "Can Superman fight Captain Boomerang?" or "Is Hulk stronger than Juggernaut?" As you get older, you articulate things a bit better, so I would write letters about other aspects. I did get a letter printed in a UK Marvel comic (not that long ago), where I conveyed my appreciation for not only the writers and artists of the modern Silver Surfer book, but also the colourists and letterers, too. I would hope my words might have made people think more about the contributions made my colourists and letterers.
Again, though, what you have stated is factual. I can appreciate those who felt their views were being misrepresented. Hell, a letter I got published in a local paper (about politics) was hacked so much, I don't feel it conveyed half of what I wanted to say.
I just feel that there are good letters pages out there - and have been since time immemorial. What constitutes a good letters page? Maybe that's a topic for another time. I appreciate the wide range of readers out there. The 10-year-old may just want to ask whether Spider-Man is stronger than Captain America while the 40-year-old might want to explore the political themes of a Captain America tale. For me, it's like anything, you'll find both good and bad. I enjoyed reading those robust Trek letters but I can also be impartial and state that there are some DC letters I read during childhood that did seem to be nothing but praise.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 13:49:55 GMT -5
But even those "good letters pages" are a choice by the editor how he wants to represent his book. Having the book seen as open to criticism is also a PR tool, just a different choice by the editor how he or she wants to represent their book in the court of public opinion. Everything in those letters pages is filtered through the lens of the editor, whether it is altered or not. The editor chooses what to print, how to print it, etc. even if their approach is hands-off to altering loc and presenting positive and negative views, it is still how the editor chooses it to be, not an unfiltered view of how fans/readers of the time felt. It's curated and that introduces editorial bias, no matter what that bias may be.
-M
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 13:59:04 GMT -5
True though that may be, that may be unavoidable. If I was editing any kind of letters page (newspaper, magazine, comic), bias, conscious or otherwise, would set in.
Could the UK and US be different? (After all, you guys have your steering wheels on the wrong side!). Example: the UK Marvel titles are 100% reprints. And yet, over the last 2 years, many letters, including from myself, have been rather negative about Deadpool's ubiquity. The current UK Spidey title (Astonishing Spider-Man) has a letter from a reader telling the editor that he will be cancelling his subscription as he feels Deadpool has too much of a presence in the title (the title often reprints Spidey/Deadpool appearances). That's a rather robust letter. Sure, it's all curated, but hard to see how a letter like that benefits an editor's bias. After all, he's printed a letter from someone who has stated they are cancelling their subscription!
Perhaps the "rules" are different for reprint titles which, after all, can only reprint what Marvel US has already published.
I suppose one area where comics differ is that letters are about the content of the stories. What I mean by that is, letters sent to, say, a rock magazine are not going to be about the magazine itself most likely. They're going to be letters about rock bands, albums, singles, why KISS are the greatest, etc. A magazine about fixing cars is going to just be questions about fixing common problems or comments about a particular car and the problems a driver has been having.
Comics are more personal with their letters. They are about the comic itself and I guess any editor will take it personally and have a certain bias. The editor of a car mechanic magazine isn't going to have any issue in printing an unfiltered letter about why the Toyota Aygo has been beset with problems, but a comic editor might not want to publish too many letters that "berate" the writers, artists, letterers, etc.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 14:03:25 GMT -5
True though that may be, can that ever be unavoidable? If I was editing any kind of letters page (newspaper, magazine, comic), bias, conscious or otherwise, would set in. Could the UK and US be different? (After all, you guys have your steering wheels on the wrong side!). Example: the UK Marvel titles are 100% reprints. And yet, over the last 2 years, many letters, including from myself, have been rather negative about Deadpool's ubiquity. The current UK Spidey title ( Astonishing Spider-Man) has a letter from a reader telling the editor that he will be cancelling his subscription as he feels Deadpool has too much of a presence in the title (the title often reprints Spidey/Deadpool appearances). That's a rather robust letter. Sure, it's all curated, but hard to see how a letter like that benefits an editor's bias. After all, he's printed a letter from someone who has stated they are cancelling their subscription! Perhaps the "rules" are different for reprint titles which, after all, can only reprint what Marvel US has already published. I suppose one area where comics differ is that letters are about the content of the stories. What I mean by that is, letters sent to, say, a rock magazine are not going to be about the magazine itself most likely. They're going to be letters about rock bands, albums, singles, why KISS are the greatest, etc. A magazine about fixing cars is going to just be questions about fixing common problems or comments about a particular car and the problems a driver has been having. Comics are more personal with their letters. They are about the comic itself and I guess any editor will take it personally and have a certain bias. The editor of a car mechanic magazine isn't going to have any issue in printing an unfiltered letter about why the Toyota Aygo has been beset with problems, but a comic editor might not want to publish too many letters that "berate" the writers, artists, letterers, etc. One of the things the internet could be, is a place where a true reflection of what fans/readers think of something is, uncurated by an editorial hand, but it has failed miserably in that. As for the UK/US divide, my thought is that the UK publishers are just that, publishers not content creators so they are trying to gauge fan response as to what to include in their publications. The dual role of content creator and publisher alters things as you are not curating the contents of a title to sell, picking what is popular, but creating content and trying to shape people's opinion of the content do that it will sell. A different goal requires a different strategy how to curate letters of comment. -M
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Post by rberman on Oct 1, 2019 14:24:47 GMT -5
To no one's surprise, editors skew towards positive and thoughtful letters over spleen-venting fanboy rants. When I think of lettercols that fostered a sense of community with the fan base, the first one that came to mind was Ryan North and Erica Henderson's work on The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. They ran two pages of letters each issue, and both the writer and artist responded, riffing off of the letters and each other. They also encouraged photo submissions of cosplay, themed handcrafts, etc. Colleen Doran printed long (complimentary) letters and lots of fan art submissions (again, on multi-page lettercols) in her early 2000s issues of A Distant Soil. I believe the painting below is of Doran rather than of one of the characters.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 14:36:09 GMT -5
To no one's surprise, editors skew towards positive and thoughtful letters over spleen-venting fanboy rants. When I think of lettercols that fostered a sense of community with the fan base, the first one that came to mind was Ryan North and Erica Henderson's work on The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. They ran two pages of letters each issue, and both the writer and artist responded, riffing off of the letters and each other. They also encouraged photo submissions of cosplay, themed handcrafts, etc. The guy from Dayton pictured with his daughters is a regular at one of the local shops I visit occasionally and I see him on the con circuit frequently. He also writes stuff for TwoMorrows (he did an interview with Stan Sakai), so he is in many ways an industry insider (or at least has an inside track of being known to industry insiders) rather than being a random fan who gets his stuff chosen to be published. Every time he has a letter published or an article accepted for a 'zine, it's all over the facebook landscape of shops and con pages here locally boosting sales of the books by fellow fans buying stuff by the "local fan done good" kind of thing, so its actaully become a bit of a cottage industry within the local comic scene here. -M
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 14:42:48 GMT -5
My thoughts on letter pages:
@taxidriver1980 I too liked the letter pages! They were a sense of "community" in the pre-internet days. I liked letters by certain writers like TM Maple and others.
@mrp who cares that the letters were edited to make things look more positive? That didn't (and still doesn't) ruin my enjoyment of them. They still provided a glimpse (although biased) that there were other fans out there across the country and the world.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 15:05:28 GMT -5
My thoughts on letter pages: @taxidriver1980 I too liked the letter pages! They were a sense of "community" in the pre-internet days. I liked letters by certain writers like TM Maple and others. @mrp who cares that the letters were edited to make things look more positive? That didn't (and still doesn't) ruin my enjoyment of them. They still provided a glimpse (although biased) that there were other fans out there across the country and the world. Even if those letters weren't by fans but by interns creating fan mail at the direction of the editor to fill the letters pages when either there wasn't enough mail at all or enough positive mail to fill the page making that feeling of other "fans" out there a falsehood in some cases? -M
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 15:15:03 GMT -5
My thoughts on letter pages: @taxidriver1980 I too liked the letter pages! They were a sense of "community" in the pre-internet days. I liked letters by certain writers like TM Maple and others. @mrp who cares that the letters were edited to make things look more positive? That didn't (and still doesn't) ruin my enjoyment of them. They still provided a glimpse (although biased) that there were other fans out there across the country and the world. Even if those letters weren't by fans but by interns creating fan mail at the direction of the editor to fill the letters pages when either there wasn't enough mail at all or enough positive mail to fill the page making that feeling of other "fans" out there a falsehood in some cases? -M Still enjoyed them. Doesn't change my views. Did finding out Santa wasn't real ruin all your childhood Christmas memories? Finding out things weren't the way I saw it as a child doesn't ruin it for me as an adult.
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Post by rberman on Oct 1, 2019 15:19:07 GMT -5
The guy from Dayton pictured with his daughters is a regular at one of the local shops I visit occasionally and I see him on the con circuit frequently. He also writes stuff for TwoMorrows (he did an interview with Stan Sakai), so he is in many ways an industry insider (or at least has an inside track of being known to industry insiders) rather than being a random fan who gets his stuff chosen to be published. Every time he has a letter published or an article accepted for a 'zine, it's all over the Facebook landscape of shops and con pages here locally boosting sales of the books by fellow fans buying stuff by the "local fan done good" kind of thing, so its actually become a bit of a cottage industry within the local comic scene here. Makes sense that there would be a geek subculture of TM Maples who are unusually active in epistolary fandom and are a "known quantity" when it comes to the lettercols. I wonder how many of the favored folks getting their work published come from that "frequent flier" subculture.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 15:31:01 GMT -5
A little history of my own personal experiences with letters pages...I never read them and hated them as a kid (same with the Bullpen pages too). I felt they were a waste of space and I would rather have had extra comics pages (at least in some of the DC books later in the 70s you got Hembeck cartoons on the bullpen/editorial pages) or at least interesting ads like the Hostess comic strip pages if you weren't going to get more story. I wanted more adventures, not what other people thought of the book or hype for books I would likely never get because I would either never see them for real or never get my parents to buy them. I wanted every ounce of comic adventure and imagination stirring I could get out of the books I did manage to get my hands on (which were often few and far between). I would rather read the comics themselves than about other people writing about comics.
I didn't start reading the letters pages at all until I was in high school, had a job and my own money, and had found a community of fans at my lcs and even then I preferred the letters pages in CBG and Amazing Heroes to those in the comics themselves. When I did read them it was to see how the views in those letters compared to those of the people I talked with at the lcs, and of course it was there I met the old guard of fans and their stories about letters pages. And the letters usually paled to those I found in the 'zines or to the views I found among the local crowd at the lcs and cons. And the bullpen pages paled to the info and insight I could get in the 'zines as well.
The first letters pages I ever truly enjoyed and looked forward to were those in the proto-Vertigo books from DC-Sandman, Hellblazer, Morrison's Doom Patrol and Animal Man, and then in the Vertigo books themselves like the Invisibles, and others. Mostly books under the purview of Karen Berger either directly or indirectly which fostered a forum of open discussion and avoided the fanboy gush for the most part. But again, these were the exception not the rule.
So I never really enjoyed or (even read until much later in life) the vast majority of letters pages in mainstream Marvel and DC books, and have never really considered most of them an asset to the overall enjoyment of the product itself even before I learned they were curated extensions of editorial viewpoints. Going back and reading back issues I have found the occasional letters page that offered something interesting (the letters from the early issues of Conan the Barbarian, early issues of Warlord, the Archie Goodwin edited Epic books that had letters pages, and a lot of the series by First Comics) but those usually brought elements of discussion of things outside comics themselves to the table and avoided the mold of simple praise pages that I found most letters pages to be. I always thought the vast majority of letters pages were more akin to the hype blurbs you get on the back covers or pre-title page pages of novels than actual content the book offered. More advertising than substance.
These days, if a book has back matter, I much prefer it to be form the creators than the fans-behind the scenes stuff, process stuff, added content like Greg Rucka offered with Lazarus or essays on stuff related to the content by other creators like Brubaker does in Criminal and some of his other books. Extra content that adds value to the actual product.
But that is my own bias. In the end, I found quality letters pages to be few and far between, by far the exception rather than the rule, and most of them leaned towards vapid hype tools of editorial with no more substance than marketing blurbs.
-M
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2019 21:17:35 GMT -5
short version.. I once had a letter printed in the back of Hulk, and they edited it so much that it turned it from a criticism later (my original, hand written letter, started out addressed to Peter David as "Damn you, damn you, damn you". . yes, I was that angry), into a complimentary letter. and they followed it by posting the number to a suicide hotline.
Since what angered me enough to write in was a character finding out they were HIV positive, and then killing themselves.
that was the last time I ever bothered.
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Post by codystarbuck on Oct 1, 2019 22:10:30 GMT -5
I've had a couple printed in indie comics, in the later 90s; so, my experience is different. They were printed more or less verbatim; but, I was writing in praise of the work. One was Mike Grell's Bar Sinister, which was a spin-off of Shaman's tears, printed by the Valiant/Acclaim Windjammer creator-owned line. I'm a big Grell fan and just wrote a letter because I dug the concept. I was amazed it was printed; but, I suspect there wasn't a ton of mail for the new title, given how Valiant barely promoted it. The other was to a self-published title, that had a nice Pogo vibe to it (Tales From the Bog) and had a really sweet little tale inside and I just expressed delight with it and wished them good fortune with it. Again, I think mine was probably one of the few letters they got.
At DC & Marvel, I probably skimmed the pages more than read them. Most were fairly generic. Some of the 70s mi-level books had livelier pages, compared to the big books. Master of Kung Fu had some more literate and thoughtful letters, with a William Wu taking them to task on the depiction of Asians in several letters that were printed. I have no idea what might have been edited; but, there seemed to be honest, if misguided answers fromeditorial and changes did occur, though not to anyone's real satisfaction, for some time (mainly skin tone). I have seen some pages where editors printed criticism only to eviscerate the letter writer for their ignorance and stupidity, or for "Not getting it." cat yronwode could get pretty nasty in some Eclipse titles, though a lot of the letters that received that, as printed, had a fiery response owed. Diana Schutz always had thoughtful letters pages and discussions in Matt Wagner's titles and had a pretty heated back and forth with one regular writer who attacked elements on religious grounds (as I recall). Believe the guy's name was Porta, or something like that.
Mike Gold usually had good letters pages, with pointed criticism and praise, with real answers to them. The Jon Sable series took some lumps after Grell posted a couple of pieces about a hunting trip to Zimbabwe. Grell hunted all of his life; but, there were many who took issue with hunting. Personally, my family has hunted; but, we always consumed what we killed. I have no use for trophy hunting. Grell and Gold answered respectfully and differing POVs were welcome.
The Question usually had thoughtful letters, as did Robinson's Starman. Some books seemed to foster it and editors encouraged it. Others were, as stated, propaganda pages. Kirby was convinced that editors and assistants were loading his books with negative comments to sabotage his books and there has been some talk of people who were there, at the time, that those claims may have been at least partially accurate.
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