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When I was working on FANTASTIC FOUR I would routinely receive about 500 letters a month. About half of those were actually legible -- some fans had a fascination with odd combinations of paper and ink colors, plus handwriting was abominable -- and of what remained, most were polite and civil. Those that were typed moved immediately to the top of the list of candidates for publication. SO much easier to read.*

It was around this time that the Whim of Iron issued an edict, published on the Bullpen Bulletins page, of course, ordering all of us to read ALL the letters we received. No thanks. I'm an artist. I NEED my eyes.

(Some of you may recall a brief storm in a teacup when I mentioned in an interview that the letters I'd been receiving were so poor I actually spent a few months doing fake lettercolumns, conflating the good parts from several otherwise unusable missive to create five or six that were printable. Of course, it was assumed that I was getting mostly negative mail, and refusing to publish same, but in fact the opposite was true. A writer for one fan publication had done a column on How to Get Your Letter Published at Marvel, and for the next year or so we got mountains of letters based on this model -- all vacuous praise and flattery. What Roger Stern dubbed the "Dear John, me am think you great" school of letter writing.

(So I concocted letters more like what we wanted to get -- letters that commented on the stories, the character arcs, the art, the writing, and did so in both positive and negative ways. Eventually the writers took the hint and I was receiving usable mail again.)

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* One writer/editor got in trouble for automatically building his lettercols out of typed mail -- without bothering to read the letters!!