There may be OPPORTUNITY • What I Miss About Comics

I was never a fan of poetry so I can’t imagine soliciting the amateur efforts of scribes across the continental United States and Canada. Somebody at the mail drop was going to have to read these submissions whether they were typewritten or scrawled by hand in pencil, ink or crayon. This person or persons would have had to weather a stormy sea of misspellings and all sorts of grammatical tragedies all in search of a ditty. Obviously, there had to be a catch, but there has to be an easier way to make money. It sounds like a position for a masochist or a job assigned by a fairly sadistic boss. I imagine they would go through a temp agency because who would sign up for something like this?

My guess is that a large portion of the mail they received was follow ups – geniuses-in-waiting writing to confirm receipt of their epic poem. It all sounds like an open invitation to stalkers.

I scanned the above advertisement from an issue of Vampire Tales which was a black-and-white comic magazine published by Marvel Comics in 1974. My buddy Bill recently acquired this from an online seller.
Bill is misspending his adulthood chasing down trash magazines that he missed out on during his misspent youth. I must say I envy him. I really miss comics.