Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and fiftieth installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Marvel had to apologize after insulting Superman in a Fantastic Four letters page

STATUS:

True

In the early 1970s, Roy Thomas had Sue Richard, the Invisible Girl, decide to separate from Reed Richards...

Soon after that, Medusa took over as the new fourth member of the team...

Unlike a lot of other stories like this, it did not go away right away. Even when Gerry Conway took over scripting duties, Reed and Sue remained separated and in Fantastic Four #147, Sue even filed for divorce...

This did not sit well with all of the fans and one fan wrote in to complain about the story and there was a response in the letter column that insulted Superman at the time, who had recently introduced Steve Lombard, who had joined the same news broadcast as Clark Kent...

and he would play pranks on Clark that Clark would stymie with his superpowers...

So the letter column mocked the book, as saying that Marvel's "Dull Competition" had no real character conflict, unlike Marvel's...

This caused some complaints, of course, so four issues later, Marvel revealed that Steve Gerber (who wasn't even the writer or editor of the series) was the one who wrote it and they basically just threw Gerber under the bus and apologized for him, while cleverly still allowing Gerber to avoid technically apologizing himself...

It's a very clever bit, overall, as they "apologize" while allowing Gerber to double down on his critique.

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In the latest Movie Legends Revealed - Was Heath Ledger's distinctive take on Joker actually due to him trying to get fired from the film?

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Feel free to send in legends suggestions to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com!