Marveling at Scott Edelman's Anonymous Marvel Writing

CBR

By Brian Cronin

Published Feb 9, 2019

If there was a piece of Marvel writing in the mid-1970s that didn't have a name to it, there is a very good chance that Scott Edelman wrote it!

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

Yesterday, I wrote about Marvel's "bottom lines," those little ads for other Marvel Comics that were featured on the bottom of the pages of various Marvel Comics of the 1970s. I noted that these "bottom lines" were written by a number of Marvel writers and editors, from Roy Thomas to Tony Isabella to likely countless others. However, one of the main writers of these sorts of things when he got on staff at Marvel was Scott Edelman, who was a longtime member of Marvel's edtiorial staff (who also wrote a bunch of comic books, as well).

Once I featured Scott's "bottom line" work, though, he was telling me about all of the OTHER anonymous writing work that he did for Marvel.

Now, don't get me wrong, many, many Marvel writers have written anonymous promotional material for Marvel over the years. So long as they have had promotional material in their comics, someone has to write it, ya know? Only in the most recent years have some of these promotional material started to get credits on them.

So Scott certainly wasn't the only one to write these things (Tony Isabella, for instance, noted to me that he did all sorts of anonymous writing for Marvel just like a bunch of other people. He explained, "Among the other anonymous writing I and others did were, for a time, writing blurbs to run at the top of every page of the British weeklies. Apparently, that was common in the homegrown Brit weeklies and our UK partners wanted us to follow suit. I don't think we did them for long. I'm fairly sure I had some other folks writing them as well, but I can't recall who.").

Scott, though, wrote a lot of material during a period where people are particularly nostalgic about that time, so I thought it would be fun to spotlight some of the anonymous writing that Scott did (all courtesy of his fascinating blog, named appropriately enough, scottedelman.com).

BULLPEN BULLETINS

Stan Lee would write his "Stan's Soapbox," but Scott would handle the rest.

Notice the top bit? It was part of this hilarious bit where Scott would circle through the entire alphabet in his intro over two year's worth of books! I wrote about that here.