Having mentioned the letter I wrote to the Walking Dead comic that didn’t get printed, I have opened things up so I can write about the letter I wrote to the GI Joe comic that, as far as I know, also did not get printed.

To try to figure out when in my life I wrote this letter, I looked at the covers of issues of GI Joe to see what was most familiar from my childhood. The winners are some Destro-focused ones that came out in 1991. That surprises me because in my memory the GI Joe letter was sent AFTER the one I sent to Blaze, but Blaze was three years later than than these Destro covers.

Still, it’s possible. 1991 is around when I was first getting into comics and GI Joe was a franchise I was familiar with thanks to the cartoons. I could have been drawn to it and misremembered that Blaze was actually later. And I remember the latest parts of my reading GI Joe before dropping off having the Eco-Warriors and searching for them tells me they were in comics in 1992. So I guess I have once again proved that memory is unreliable and I probably wrote this before the Blaze letter.

As for the content of the letter, I don’t remember most of it. Vague praise of the comic, I assume? An insistence that I loved the Joes and they were my favourites that would ultimately be proven untrue when I dropped it in favour of other things? More than likely. The only thing I remember for certain is that I asked that they would use Bazooka more often, because he looked like my father. And it’s true, my father was indeed a white man with a dark moustache. I suppose, if I was ten when I wrote this letter, as I have learned I must have been, I probably gave it to my parents to send and if my father saw that he may have withheld the letter and just told me it was sent. So we have three possibilities: 1) I sent the letter and it was not printed. 2) I sent the letter and it was printed and I’ve just never found out. 3) My father never actually sent the letter.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Writing that letter was a part of my childhood, but GI Joe has simply not lived on in me as a nostalgic franchise. I like some of the designs of the characters and vehicle and stuff, but mostly I just don’t care. Even as an adult I sat down and read the first hundred issues of this comic, and while I could respect what Larry Hama did there, it felt like homework to me and I decided not to continue. It’d be funny to learn that if I had I’d find a letter written by me as a child.

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.

Here’s the inside of my head:

I’m trying to teach myself to be good at making pixel art (I’ve always maintained it was an unconscionable failure that I didn’t make Adventure Dennis in pixel art), so I kinda drew a stream-of-consciouness piece. The results are full of PDR-ness, so I thought I’d make some annotations:

• To begin, the colour scheme is basically that of this website (more orangey than yellow, but close), which I’ll have had for 20 years this year. It’s a pretty important part of my life, even if after all that time I don’t think I’ve managed to make of it what I want it to be. But I’m still going here in this Internet age of social media, how many websites from 2006 can say that?
• It’s a cityscape. None of the buildings here are specific references, really, but PDR is definitely cityfolk and likes tall buildings. I tried to work in a garden of flowers on the rooftop near the beekeeper, but I sucked at drawing it, so instead we have a cityscape that doesn’t show as much nature as I’d like, but I can pretend that’s there and just enjoy the cityness of it.
• I mentioned the beekeeper, and that’s another very PDR thing. Remember when the Internet was a little more innocent and people got into debates about Pirates versus Ninjas? Well, PDR decided he had to be kooky and special and different and chose Beekeepers. But you can’t say I didn’t commit. I have become the world’s foremost reviewer of Fictional Beekeepers, after all. The Beekeeper in the image could be Adam Obianu, my own badass fictional beekeeper, but it doesn’t really matter, it’s just the concept of Beekeepers.
• The person with the beekeeper is nobody in particular, but I’ve come to think that if this is, as I joked, the inside of my head, that’s probably my own self image. Certainly it doesn’t look like me physically, since I’m a big masc oaf, but I do think that if I could choose my physical form at will something smaller and more feminine would be likely, since I already feel like I take up more space than I’d like and I am not especially manly by the standards of society. And she’s friends with the beekeeper. I like friends and I like beekeepers.
• The building the beekeeper and figure are standing on has a little occult symbol on there. I mostly just enjoy designing symbols that look occult (I did it in The Demon of South Gloria as a recent example), but the one in the image I have designed with a story in mind that I’ve not yet managed to tell.
• To the lower left of that occult symbol you can see Mackestry Manor, home to Many Monsters and setting of activity books I’ve made for sale on the Internet. I’ve not had the energy to make more recently, but I intend to get back there at some point.
• On a building overlooking the Manor is a little creature called a skeffix. This little guy comes from a one-page RPG I made as part of a Game Jam, and is standing in for my desire to create games. I mean, I technically HAVE created games, Skeffix for example, but I’d like to have the time to really refine and produce one that I could sell to the world. Maybe this’ll be the year.
• Above the skeffix is my attempt at a duck flying by. I purposely made to attempt to make this accurate to any species of duck because, once again, this is a self-reference. Back before emails and stuff, when I used to send letters to friends, I would occasionally just end them with “and here’s a picture of a duck” and do a little doodle of a duck. It was never meant to be high art, it was meant to be PDR’s way of ending a letter. I just like ducks. Here’s one time I made a Snow Duck.
• To the right of the duck you’ll see some sort of UFO-looking thing, but that’s actually the Hover Headquarters, home to Hover Head and the Team of Superheroes, the stars of a comic I made years and years ago. As far as this image is concerned, that floating base stands in for all my webcomics, including the likes of the insufferable Comical Comedy Rabbit Comics, or the Phone Guys, which has somehow had over 800 strips at this point. The fact that the two comics I have that are still ongoing are the ones I’ve intentionally made difficult is not lost on me. I really ought to revisit Hover Head and try to make a comic that actually works.
• Behind the Hover Headquarters one will note a massive sphere in the sky. That certainly isn’t the sun, PDR doesn’t enjoy the sun enough to include that particular massive sphere. While making the drawing, I got it into my head that this city is on a moon around a gas giant world. No real reason for that beyond my general love of science fiction, but that still counts.
• And finally, streaking across the sky, is a little spaceship designed by none other than PDR at some point under age ten. I don’t remember exactly when, but in elementary school I made a little spaceship design out of some construction toys and I still have it. I use an image of me as a child as my profile image on pretty much all social media because I want that kid’s dreams to come true. And that includes that spaceship. Like the occult symbol, I have a story in mind for that spaceship, and I hope to tell it someday.

As you know, this has been a year of me getting caught up on going to the dentist after several decades out of the game. With each visit I made, I was impressed by the advances in technology that had been made since my childhood, but all the while I felt like something was missing.

Where were the Gleam Team?

I strongly remembered a team of anthropomorphic dental superheroes that existed on stickers and posters and stuff, but searching the Internet I could find nothing about them. Not even people thinking back about them and asking whatever happened to them.

Well, they existed, and today I did a deep dive into the files (aka pile of papers and binders) that I have kept since my childhood and I found the proof!

A sticker showing the team charging out of… a pocket I guess? Like, is it a dental hygienist’s pocket? I guess so. If you’d asked me to describe the team, they would have basically been thus, though in my mind I think they had donned capes, making them more like traditional superheroes. We’ve got a big molar guy, a floss guy, a toothbrush girl, and a toothpaste guy. Probably they had names, though I don’t remember them. Let’s ignore how most of them are tools and one is an actual tooth and just respect them for trying.

Maybe this will end up like my post on Strand-Man, where my site is seemingly the only information on the topic and it gets more hits than anything else on here. Or maybe nobody but me ever had any memory of these guys to begin with. Either way, I’m doing my part. Certainly the fact they were apparently produced by the Nova Scotia Department of Health and Fitness suggests a more limited reach than a product that was probably sold across the country and maybe beyond.

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.