Someone who signs himself "Gary from Buffalo" and who might even be named Gary and hail from Buffalo writes…
I'm back with another super-trivial question about Superman comics during the silver age, when I was a devoted reader.
Every month, each comic's letter page invariably contained letters pointing out mistakes (or boo-boo's) in previous issues. (The only submission of mine that ever made it to print was such a letter.) Later on, when these stories with errors were reprinted in the 80-Page Giants, I'd notice the mistakes had been corrected. If you knew where to look, these tacked-on corrections were usually very obvious.
My question is, how did DC keep track of the story corrections to be made? Was someone in charge of physically writing the correction into an issue? Or did they put the 1960's equivalent of a post-it note onto each page? And were the issues with corrections then kept in a separate file? They must have had a system, because I doubt anyone would be able to commit all the corrections to memory. After 60 years of wondering, I'd love to know the answer!
I don't know of any organized error-tracking procedures in the DC offices but I did know a man named Nelson Bridwell who was an assistant editor — and sometimes an editor — there during this period. Nelson was in charge of most of those 80-page reprint issues and he was also a highly-sophisticated and obsessive proofreading machine.
He assembled and wrote the replies for most of the letter pages for the Superman comics and later when those stories were reprinted, he was in charge. It would not be surprising that when he selected a story for reuse, he then checked the letter pages of subsequent issues for things that needed fixing. It would also not be surprising if he just plain remembered 'em because Nelson had one of "those" memories.
And it's interesting that you could always spot the corrections. Every comic book company has someone around to fix spelling errors and art mistakes, DC had their Production Department, which was headed up by a gent named Sol Harrison who routinely bragged that his crew was the absolute best-ever at that kind of thing. I kept it to myself when I was around him but I thought the opposite.
I thought they were pretty bad at it. Even as a kid, I could spot all kinds of clumsy lettering fixes and often there'd be some drawing on a page — usually a body part — that you could see wasn't drawn by the credited artist…or even by a very good artist at all.
In the forties, all the way up to 1967 or so, they had a letterer named Ira Schnapp who was to lettering what someone like Joe Kubert or Nick Cardy was to everything else on the page. Schnapp designed most of the title logos and lettering on the covers and most of the house ads and such. When he made a fix, it was seamless and unspottable. When anyone else did, it stood out like a rhinoceros in a box of See's Candy — to coin a phrase.
This is the first time I (or I think anyone) has ever said that the DC Production Department before around 1980 was not only not the best anywhere, it was simply not very good, at least when it came to corrections. If I had said this at the time, I would not only have been banned from the company for life, I would have been somehow forbidden from buying their comics ever again. I had to wait forty years to feel safe in speaking my mind on this topic and it feels good to finally do so.
