Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.

If you were a fan of Marvel Comics in the 1970s, then you will undoubtedly be familiar with the peculiar little bit of marketing that Marvel used to do on the bottom of their pages. Comic books had long been using the margins on the bottom of the page to tell readers that the comic book story is continued on the next page, but obviously the margins theoretically could be used for other things.

The first time that I saw the margins used for ad copy was in 1962, when Stan Lee would promote his new titles (the Fantastic Four, the Hulk and Amazing Adult Fantasy) in the margins of his other anthologies. Here, from Strange Tales #98, you can see promos for all three titles...

The ad copy looks like someone just tossed it in there, doesn't it? It must have been Lee, because, well, who else would be doing ad copy for Marvel titles at the time?

This stuff went away for the most part before popping up again in the early 1970s. I asked Roy Thomas about it and he explained to me that Stan Lee asked him to do them. He believes that Stan probably showed him some samples to show him what he wanted. Thomas then wrote a bunch of them before passing the task on to others.

I asked Tony Isabella about it and he recalled that he definitely wrote a lot of them, both on books that he was personally writing and also on other titles. He wasn't sure, though, precisely who else wrote them around this time.

Here are some samples of how they were traditionally done by 1973, one ad on each page, so that it forms sort of one large ad. This is from Avengers #108...

Okay, so we know that Stan Lee wrote them. We know that Roy Thomas wrote them. We know that Tony Isabella wrote them. But did it ever become, like, a permanent gig for any Marvel staffer?

As it turned out, that appeared to be the case around 1974.

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I asked Scott Edelman about it and this is what he had to say:

I have no idea who wrote them before I arrived on the scene in the Bullpen from the British reprint department, but during much of my time there, it was me!

I don’t remember exactly how or when the task was handed over to me — I assume it had to have been Len who gave me the assignment -- but I would interview the writers about what they had planned and create catchy write-ups, the same way I wrote the Bullpen Bulletins pages (save for Stan’s Soapbox), the copy which appeared on top of the splash page of comics, and other promotional materials.

As you can see from Edelman's era, he made them a bit more specific to what was actually going on in the comics, since he asked the other writers what was going on in their books. Here are some examples from Daredevil #117, which also sees the ads now just on a single page each...

In his Ethics column in Comics Journal #99 in 1985, Edelman also described the ads, "I wrote what were called bottom lines, those mini-ads that appeared on the bottom of each page, which were Marvel's version of billboard eye pollution, such as "It - the Living Colossus - and Fin Fang Foom! Together again for the first time," and "If you buy a humor magazine and its'd dumb - that 's Crazy!" in the belief that every blank space should be an advertisement."

Of course, Marvel recently returned to using the bottom lines, with Ryan North making them a big part of his Unbeatable Squirrel Girl stories and then during Marvel Legacy, they popped up again, as well.

Good stuff. If any other writer of those "bottom lines" wants to take credit, feel free to let me know and I'll add you in there (brianc@cbr.com)!

Thanks to Scott, Roy and Tony for the information! Scott went above and beyond! Be sure to check out Scott's podcast, Eating the Fantastic, where he interviews famous science fiction and fantasy writers, as well as comic book writers!

I'll probably re-visit some of Scott's other "anonymous" work in the future. He did a lot of it for Marvel!

If anyone else has a suggestion for a bit of comic book history that you'd like to see me write about, just drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!