BID #1 – BECAUSE HUE DEMANDED IT

July 27, 1990

The first query came from Bob Greenberger during the course of my daily crabbing-about-certain-licensors phone call. Bob, my editor on Trek, said, “So — you gonna do the column?”

What column?

“The column for CBG,” he prompted.

Seems somebody had suggested to Don and Maggie Thompson that I write a column. Suggested it in print. And they said it sounded good to them and tossed the ball over to me.

I didn’t want the ball, so I tossed it back.

But it kept being thrown at me. People asked me at Marvel. People came up to me at the Heroes convention in North Carolina and asked me. I couldn’t believe it. This was a three-line squib in the back pages. Does everyone read every line of the paper?

Guess so.

“Write a ‘How-To-Write’ column,” Don and Maggie suggested.

No way. Writing a how-to-write column, to me, implies that you’ve reached a pinnacle and are now ready to dispense wisdom from on high. Let’s face it. What such a column really means is, “I will teach you how to write like I do.” Believe me, you don’t want to write like I do because then you’d have to think like I do. That’s too hideous a fate. The only person who’s figured out how I think is my wife, Myra. And she won’t tell me.

To think like I do means that you could be watching Showtime one evening and see the words “This program is close-captioned for the hearing impaired” appear on the screen. And then a voice solemnly intones, “This program is close-captioned for the hearing impaired.” And you suddenly wonder, “Wait a minute. Who are they saying it for? What is the purpose of saying ‘This program is close-captioned for the hearing impaired’? Because if you are deaf you won’t know they said it, and if you aren’t deaf you won’t care.

But I digress…

“Talk about how to break into Marvel,” Don and Maggie suggested.

I don’t know. Lock picks, I suppose. If that means how to get started in comics, you can’t use me as an example. I wasn’t trying to break in as a writer. Instead, I was cheerfully toiling away as direct sales manager at Marvel when “it” happened.

No reader understands, or cares about, what a sales manager does. This puts them on par with most editors.

Once I was at a convention sales repping Marvel comics, and a fan came up to me and said, “What do you do at Marvel Comics?” And I said, “I’m the sales manager.” And he thought it over for a moment, then shrugged, and said, “Oh– well– I guess I’ll get your autograph anyway.” He felt he’d do me a favor.

Certainly, I’d made a vague attempt or two at selling a story along the way. I had not been awesomely successful. I tried submitting a couple of Moon Knight plots to Denny O’Neil. I still haven’t heard back from Denny on them and, frankly, I’m starting to think I never will.

Then Jim Owsley became the editor of the Spider-Man comics and he was more than happy to make time for me when I kind of drifted by and said, “I’ve got an idea for a Spider-Man comic.” And that story became Spec Spidey #103, which, if you hunt around, you can probably find in a three-for-a-dollar box somewhere.

Besides, when people ask, “How did you get into comics?” they don’t really want to know, anyway. They want to think there’s some secret word that professionals know, and all you have to do is whisper the word and you’re in. They don’t want to hear about 95 percent luck. Can’t blame them. When I was on the other side of the autograph table, I sure didn’t want to hear that, either.

So a “how-to” column was out.

I knew I didn’t want to write a gossipy “Behind-the-Scenes” type column, because I’d lose every friend I have in comics. No one would ever talk to me about anything, because they’d be wondering whether they were providing grist for a column or not. So that didn’t sound like fun.

People kept asking, and here I had no idea why I should, because I had no idea what I would write about.

What finally made me decide to write this column was my appearance at the aforementioned Heroes convention (a fun series of conventions run by Shelton “Well Hush My Puppies” Drumm, proprietor of “Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find,” a nice guy and new husband of Cynthia Drumm. They got married at the most recent con. The guy’ll do anything to boost attendance. But I digress).

I was scheduled to speak at noon on Sunday. Then I noticed that nothing was scheduled after me until 2:30. And I said, “No way am I going to stand there and fill two-and-a-half hours. I’ll talk and field questions until I run out of things to say and/or the audience gets bored with me and leaves,” which was fine with Shelton. No one really expected me to fill that huge a block of time.

I never ran out of things to say. They dragged me offstage at 1:45, and the room was still full. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves — either that or, being southern, they were just too polite to leave.

The thing is, my talking style is much like my writing style. When someone asks a question, I will talk and, as things occur to me, I’ll go off on a tangent and just keep going and then vaguely come to a stop and say, “Did I answer your question somewhere in there?” This rambling style of mine is currently accepted as my rather offbeat style. When I’m old, it will be cited as evidence of senility and be more than enough reason for my children to have me put in a home.

The point of all this is that, if I can fill up time at conventions with such ease, then I can probably fill up a column.

And if I find the fan who got me into this, I’ll throttle him.

(Peter David writes Hulk, Dreadstar, Star Trek, Atlantis Chronicles, and other projects he’ll shamelessly plug. And when he writes short bios about himself at the ends of articles, he uses “he” to make it sound as if some-one else wrote them. If you have questions or issues you’d like him to address, send them to him c/o CBG, and maybe they’ll be addressed there. Or maybe not.)