It’s been almost two years now since I began doing a series of writings on here about the times I sent letters to comics and they were printed. I posted one and then never posted about another.

There are reasons for that. There’s one I want to save for later in the series, and the one I specifically wanted to do next is in a comic I no longer own and can not find a scan of. So I was thinking “what other comics did I have letters in?” and the answer was “didn’t I get one into Walking Dead?”

Spoilers: the answer is I don’t think I did get one into the Walking Dead comic. I did WRITE a letter to Walking Dead, and I guess at some point my memory decided it had been printed, but having spent some time last year checking, I don’t think it ever actually was. But hey, I can still talk about it.

Zombies movies were one of my favourite kinds of horror movies as a kid. I enjoyed the Romero movies maybe while I was younger than I should have, and Return of the Living Dead was a truly formative experience for little PDR. By the late ’90s I felt that zombies were losing ground in the public consciousness, so when they made a huge return in the early 2000s I was elated. Things like 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead pleased PDR greatly. The Walking Dead comic was part of that resurgence of zombie media and, though I didn’t learn about it right away, when a friend told me of its existence a year or so in, I went back and became a loyal reader. On one occasion, I also wrote a letter (presumably be email at this point).

I must have been around 24 when this occurred. I don’t remember exactly what issue I was responding to, but I know it was the one that ended with two young girls being decapitated. The cast was trying to make a home in a prison and the two of them had gone off on their own to give each other haircuts, only to be found at the end of the issue dead. It was supposed to be a shock that they weren’t killed by zombies, but by a person who was probably still among the survivors! Uh oh!

The reason I remember that is that in my letter I made a joke about how they had messed up giving each other haircuts and decapitated each other by accident. Mildly amusing at best, but also the only thing I remember about the letter. I presume it was full of compliments. I doubt I had any questions. Asking questions would have felt like hassling them and I wouldn’t have wanted to hassle them.

Anyway, I continued reading Walking Dead for years after that, but never wrote again. Maybe I never wrote again because my first letter hadn’t been printed, but at some point I got it into my head that it HAD been printed, so it doesn’t seem likely that I actively avoided it for that reason. I think I just didn’t write again because it does feel like a hassle. It’s stupid, given that the letters pages are there for a reason, but it does take a surge of mental effort on my part to get over the idea that the creatives would rather not hear from me. It’s so much easier to just not try to connect, even if sometimes its a shame we don’t.

I still like zombies well enough, though they don’t light a fire in me the way they did when I was younger. I didn’t follow the Walking Dead television show for much beyond the first season, and I understand there are now a couple spinoffs which I’ve not seen at all. There are sequels to 28 Days Later and roughly a million zombie video games. Whatever fear I had that the genre was disappearing in the ’90s was simply incorrect. It’s here to stay. It’s here when I need it, which is only occasionally, but I’m still glad it’s there.

If one were to find a copy of Marvel’s comic Blaze volume one, number five, with the cover date of December, 1994 they could turn to the letters page and find a trace of PDR.

This was a reply to the first issue of the book. I would’ve been possibly twelve but more likely thirteen when I read that first issue (it was released in June, but what are the odds I got to it before July 18th, which is my birthday?) and for a reason I will bring up later, I was moved to write in.

It’s weird that I decided to address the letter to Icebox Bob, the villain of that first issue. I also claimed this villain was the greatest thing ever, and maybe there was some honesty in the my enthusiasm for the character. I like horror villains and did back then too. But if it is true enthusiasm, it certainly isn’t enthusiasm that carried me into continuing the book. I did not read another issue of the book until I found issue five in a back issue bin around the year 2000 and discovered that my letter had been printed. As far as I can remember Icebox Bob was a pretty generic horror villain, some kind of ghost serial killer or something, probably one who laughed and made quips like the Joker. That was the style at the time. I have no idea what ever happened to the character, but I remain somewhat fond of him just because of this letter.

I also feel the need to question my claim here that I had “always been a fan of Johnny Blaze.” I didn’t get into superhero comics until I was ten. While I fully admit that three years at that age mean a helluva lot more than they do at my current age, those three years were certainly not filled with me being a huge fan of Johnny Blaze. I’d probably read a few of his appearances in the then-current Ghost Rider book, and I could believe I’d seen some old guest appearances in Marvel Team-Up or something, but I’d expect most of what I knew about Johnny Blaze I got from trading cards and reading the Marvel Handbook. I probably liked Blaze fine, but he wasn’t my second favourite character (I have no memory of who the first would have been at that time. Darkhawk maybe if the timeline works out?).

But why was I overselling my enthusiasm for the book and characters? Because of what is not included in the letter as printed. In the first issue of Blaze, the only one I bothered to read, they mentioned that they wanted suggestions for the title of the letters page. I wanted to get that, to make a suggestion that would be emblazoned on the book that, I assumed, would go on forever. The fact that they didn’t even include my suggestion shows how good it was. If I remember correctly, which I admit isn’t necessarily the case, my suggestion was “Blazing Pens”. The winning suggestion that got to be the name of the letters page was “Writing Shotgun”. I admitted when I was twenty and I admit now, that is much better than my idea.