I'm not adverse / To a little verse.

If you remember last time
I promised you a post in rhyme
Marvel letters where readers chime
In verse and poetry sublime.
And it will not cost you a dime
This post's a steal! Almost a crime!
As sweet as key pie flavored lime
Or parleys, sage, rosemary, thyme
It keeps away the disease lyme
And helps you paramounts to climb
I'll tell you now, I needn't mime
Irish Spring soap takes away grime
And while you're reading this, well I'm
Trying to find a better rhyming dictionary.


Letters to Marvel written in rhyme started fairly early in the Marvel Age...anything to make your mightily marvelous missive stand out among the thousand in Willie Lumpkin's mailbag. Here's one from FF #22 (January 1964):





Here's a bit of doggerel from Avengers #14 (March 1965) in which a mother laments her son's obsessive comic book collecting habit. Later, she tossed out every copy of her son's early Marvel's, except for this issue, which she cut out her letter and put it on the fridge. That fatal financial error is why Mrs. Millard Brown's little boy had to go tocommunity college rather than Harvard! And that boy grew up to be this guy.





The letter column of Avengers #53 (June 1968) contains this ode to Marvel in general and Giovanni Natale Buscema in particular (you know him as John):





Not every letter in verse is a compliment to Mighty Marvel. Mike Towry complains via a poem in Astonishing Tales #8 (October 1971) of the frequent reprints of the early 1970s. Why, Mister Towry, in my day we took reprints and we liked them! (Unless they were of that story where Iron Man met Cleopatra.)





Lee Christopherson of Winona Ryder, Minnesota has written a poem so impressive that Stan declares it Marvel's official marching song! Hooray! (In FF #29)



A few years later, however, Stan came up with an entirely new Mighty Marvel Marching Society song! (At which point Lee Christopherson sued him and gained complete control of Marvel Comics to this day.) Still, it's a catchy melody, Stan:



I'd say something about this four-part quatrain to Fantastic Four #103, but I'm just freaked out by giant looming Ben Grimm. Hey, step back from the lens, ya big galoot!





Now, I'm not trying to say that the only poetry goin' on in Marvel Comics was in the letters page. The bountiful brilliance of the Bullpen meant that we were getting poems inside the comics themselves, even years before Jack Kirby turned a duck into The Demon's head and rhymed everything with the word "Etrigan." Here's an example from Incredible Hulk #102 (April 1968, Greenskin's first issue of his rebooted regular series). The Musketeers Warriors Three have encountered a witchy soothsayer (played in the first panel by Margaret Hamilton, and in the following panels by Ann-Margret) who recounts the origin of the Hulk...in verse:








...which inspires a Marvelite Miss to go for the gold...or, at least a No-Prize...by pointing out some captioning errors about the issue in rhyme! (In this letter in Hulk #105, July 1968):





After X-Men #32 was titled, with a bit of Carrolian whimsy, "Beware the Juggernaut, My Son!," X-Men #35 (August 1967) prints a letter on that issue riffing on the original "Jabberwocky" poem. Nice bit of poetry, huh? Sad to say, nobody ever heard from this letter writer in the comics industry, ever again.



But I kids the Mark Evanier.

And just in case you didn't get the joke, here's Ye Ed. spelling it out for you in a letter in the same issue. Whoa, this looks like Marvel was planning to publish Fables years before Bill Willingham!





Which is not to say The House of Ideas never makes mistakes. Like the hero of at least one of their comics, no matter what they say, they're not infallible. Here's a letter to the editor of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos #52 (March 1968) taking exception the dialogue in a previous issue using the southern "y'all" directed towards one, not several, people.



Letter-writer William Cantey didn't write the poem, and didn't know the author. He might have gotten it years before from a column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where columnist Frank Colby lectures on the exact same lesson but doesn't know the author of the poem either:



By the way, that "Axis stamp" the sidebar column is talkin' about was never an actual United States postage stamp but just a propaganda image (take a look at it here). And it's absolutely no relation to the perennial comic book ad shilling those infamous "Hitler Head" stamps! (PS: They ain't "free." "On approval" is a very nasty trick to play on a little stuffed bull starting a stamp collection!)





Anyway, we've gotten a bit off the point, which is poems in Marvel letter columns. Here's one by another future Marvel superstar, Don McGregor, in July 1969's Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.* #13:

*Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division-Ye. Bullish Ed.




Hey, what do Don McGregor and a little stuffed bull have in common? We've both written a Christmas poem about Nick Fury!

Here's a short but sweet one, monkeyin' around with verse in Marvel's Planet of the Apes magazine (issue #19, March 1976):





And just to show ya that poetry in the LoCs isn't a thing of the past, here's Marvel Editors turning a letter into blank verse, in a relatively recent rhyme from Captain America volume 5, #11 (November 2005):





Yes, those rhymes keep marchin' on. Perhaps it's the inspiration of Stan and the Marvel Bullpen who use famous poetry as titles of or allusions in their stories, or that Roy Thomas will, as we saw yesterday, bust a rhyme at the drop of a Golden Age comic book:





So who do you thank for all this rhyming rhetoric and virtuous verse inside your favorite Marvel mags? Well, Stan the Man thanks everyone...including you!





What? You want more poetry in Marvel letter columns? Make with the click, Nick!