I See Posts Before My Eyes

justinbee asked: We're seeing less and less dedicated letters pages in books. I'm fine with it because I think Tumblr and twitter are much better for creator interaction anyways. But I see a lot of nostalgic readers that miss it. Do you guys get a lot of complaints/requests to keep including them? Do you leave it up to the creators?

brevoortformspring:

These past two or three months, we’ve sold out our ad spread, meaning that we haven’t had the space to do letters pages. Some series, such as MIGHTY AVENGERS and LOKI, have been doing letters pages for those issues online at Marvel.com. But at some point, in all likelihood, the ad situation will loosen up again, and we’ll be able to do further letters pages within the books again.

If I recall my comics history, the letters page was a dodge to get the required number of text pages in a comic to allow them to qualify for a cheaper postage rate for subscriptions. It’s also why many comics were renamed from other titles and kept the numbering - the documentation to get said lower postage rate was expensive, and it paid to pretend a new title was just an old title re-named, so you could re-use the same permit.

There’s always been a cachet to making it into the lettercol, one which is somewhat diminished by the ease of sharing your opinions on the electric-type internet.

I wrote this a while back when DC briefly brought back their letter columns.

On the return of a nigh-extinct mode of fannish communication