wow...coincidence?

And who the heck is Irene Vartanoff anyway?

Irony.

A frequent DC letterhack of the day.

I also stumbled across a letter in SUB-MARINER from Bob Harras, a while back, ripping into Namorita as a terrible character idea.

kdb

http://www.challzine.net/20/20juliemike.html

(parts relevant to this thread)

>> JULIE SCHWARTZ:
THE MEMORIAL SERVICE
Mike Friedrich

... Perhaps the most satisfying moment of the event personally was discovering that my own life-long pen-pal, Irene Vartanoff, had come up from Maryland to attend. She and Guy Lillian were "introduced" to me by Julie through his letter columns around 1965 and I've stayed in touch with both of them through correspondence and very occasional visits ever since. It was Guy who first called me within hours to let me know of Julie's passing. Seeing Irene completed a circuit.

Although I'm barely a footnote in Julie's career, as the first [1967] of the baby-boomer writers he hired, in the life story where I'm the star, Julie was the one who published 50 teen comments of mine in his lettercols and then gave me my first job.

My letter-writing began around the time the "new look" Batman was introduced, though I'd been a fan of Julie's for two or three years before then. A couple of years later it turned into a bit of correspondence as Julie began to send short replies.

As I grew during high school my comments began to contain suggestions for how stories could have been improved. As I neared my summer vacation in 1966 I off-handedly wrote asking if I could try writing a script. Julie quickly affirmatively replied and just as quickly rejected my first effort, an Elongated Man story.

... Undeterred I continued to submit ideas and scripts, and the following spring [May 10, 1967] he bought my first one, a Robin, Boy Wonder story that eventually saw print in Batman #202 ... <<

(Oh how I wish he had been deterred ...)

Did Aunt Harriot appear in the comic? I thought she (and Chief O'Hara) were only in the TV series?

Aunt Harriet joined the cast in the comic a year or two before the TV series began.

Yikes!

Fans turned pro....it always ends badly.

Let's be fair to the guy, he does have a point: Batgirl is just unbelievable as a character. She has no place in Batman's world (or as I like to call it "A world as real as our own")

What I find harder to accept, is that Commissioner Gordon has a grown-up daughter! Really stretches literary license.

Quite.

All right, guys, you don't want any biker librarians mad at you now....

Of all the things to point out, right?

Mike Friedrich is supposed to be someone famous?

Yes. He's internationally known as "No, the Ghost Rider creator is Gary Friedrich. No relation"

He had a long (and sometimes uneven run) on Iron Man. I do vaguely remember one of his stories about a guy called The Masked Marauder who for some reason thought out of all the cities on America, it was in his best interest to nuke Detroit.

Also as "I wrote even preachier terrible JLA stories than Denny O'Neil".

His Iron Man stories were pretty preachy, too. His artist on IM was mostly George Tuska.

See Superman Returns. Even when a pro turns fan it can end disasterously.

After Denny O'Neil broke Gardner Fox's Justice League into pieces, Friedrich reduced those pieces to dust, which made for a great foundation for Len Wein to build upon.