COMIC BOOKS No more letters to superheroes? Say it isn't so

DC Comics recently removed the letters page from all issues.
By HANK STUEVER
WASHINGTON POST
Geekdom used to be so lonely, and that's why kids -- and grown-ups -- wrote letters to comic books. It was possible to walk to school via the longer (and safer) path and eat your lunch alone and think you were the only person in the world who was drawing panels of the Justice League of America on the back of your history folder.
Beginning about 45 years ago, hard-core fans started to send in letters on sheets of notebook paper. They would praise superheroes, but also take umbrage with story arcs or abuses of mutant powers, point out tiny inconsistencies in the canon or decry supergaffes.
DC Comics recently announced the end of its letters-to-the-editor pages in all of its titles, more or less admitting that no one was really taking the time to write and mail letters to superheroes anymore.
Unique responses
No amount of back-story better initiated newcomers -- particularly kids -- to a comic book's complexities than the trivial, almost anal-retentively Talmudic response of fans each month on the letters page.
If the panels showed you what a superhero did with his life, the letters were a permanent record -- now forever sleeved and boxed away in the acid-free cardboard of fetishistic collectors -- of how superheroes made us feel.
"Dear Stan and Jack," wrote someone named Murray Bishoff of East Moline, Ill., in the March 1967 issue of Marvel Comics' "The Mighty Thor," addressing dons Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. "What hath ye done? 'Thor' is the best comic that you sell, so don't ruin it."
Bishoff, who could have been 12 at the time or 36 (it's hard to tell), signed off his long letter with the brash Marvel fans' salute, first coined by Stan Lee: " 'Nuff said!"
Not nearly 'nuff can ever be said when it comes to the unique obsessions that propel comic book fans. They're in a constant, simultaneous state of both thrall and letdown.
New outlets
DC's decision to kill off letters -- and with Marvel Comics inclined to do the same -- is a surrender to the far superior powers of the Internet. Fans haven't complained about the loss; they're too busy flaming each other on comic book Web sites.
Online, thousands of comics fans -- most of them using clever pseudonyms -- are joined in a steady, more satisfying fray of criticism, debate and adulation. No longer marginalized or lonely, they swarm by the tens of thousands to annual comic book mega-conventions in San Diego and Chicago, where creators from Marvel, DC and other publishing houses await their probing comments. Fans have forged a direct link to writers, artists and editors, many of whom respond online to questions within a day.
At Marvel Comics, only one current title is featuring any letters from readers -- "X-Statix," a new addition to the copious "X-Men" family of titles, and one that drives its readers into a froth of advice and opinion.