(AfroGamers.com) The spinner rack by the register had a squeak to it, and that squeak is what my memory reaches for first. Newsprint gone soft, a little sour at the edges. Ink that smeared gray on your thumb if you gripped it wrong. I’d slide a quarter across the counter at the corner store while my grandmother stood behind me, keys already in hand, done with the whole errand. What I carried home wasn’t just a story about a man in tights. I bought a seat at somebody’s table.
That table belonged to Stan Lee.
Here’s what folks forget. Back then the books held a conversation, not a lecture. Somebody in there was reaching across to the reader, never talking down from up high. He ran these little columns across Marvel’s books, Stan’s Soapbox, and he used the space to say whatever sat on his mind. Racism came up plenty. So did the small ugly hangups folks drag around with them. He’d tell you flat out that hate was a coward’s move and practically dared you to disagree. A kid in the seventies reading that felt seen. He often signed off with “Excelsior” like a preacher blessing the pews, and somehow it landed. You believed the fella on the other side of that page cared whether you showed up next month.
The Bullpen. Whew. They sold you on the idea that behind every book sat a crew of artists and writers cracking jokes, arguing, spilling coffee, all of them pulling for you. The Bullpen Bulletins made the operation human. Jack Kirby had a nickname. Steve Ditko had one too. Everybody in that room felt like your slightly older cousin who knew about the cool stuff before you did.
Then came the letters. When they printed yours, your actual name and city sitting there in ink, that was a moment. My boy down the street saw his run printed once and walked around like he signed a record deal. Readers argued continuity, caught mistakes, praised a splash page. The company fired back with jokes and handed out a No-Prize to whoever spotted a goof. A No-Prize was literally nothing. An empty envelope. And we lost our minds trying to earn one.
That was the beauty of it. None of it was fake. You counted, and both sides knew it. The relationship ran two ways.
And it went further than warm fuzzy stuff. Readers actually shaped the books. Fan mail could influence what editors emphasized, which characters got another look, and sometimes whether an idea had more life in it than anybody expected. You wrote in, and the universe flexed a little to answer you. Try that today. Send your notes into the void of some mega franchise and watch a focus group and a marketing deck decide the plot three phases down the line, long before you ever cracked a spine.
Then the money showed up.
I love the films. Let me say that clean so nobody comes for me sideways. Wakanda up on the big screen got me in a way I wasn’t ready for. Chadwick stood there in the suit and my throat just closed. My daughter kept tugging my sleeve, wanting to know who he was, and I could barely get the words out. Damn near cried in a matinee. That counted too, in its own way.
But the machine underneath changed shape. What used to read like a cookout with your people now reads like a shareholders meeting with better lighting. Sometimes it feels as if characters and stories are being positioned around a corporate calendar mapped out years ahead. The soul of the thing got handed to a spreadsheet.
There is no Stan’s Soapbox anymore, no companywide voice on the back page making the whole operation feel like somebody was talking directly to you. Letter pages survive here and there, but that old conversation is no longer the center of Marvel’s identity. Instead you get a mid-credits scene teasing a product you’ll pay for later. The conversation became a broadcast. You aren’t at the table now. You’re in the audience, and the audience is a line on a revenue projection.
Look, I’m a Black man who grew up starving for heroes who looked like me. So when that door finally cracked open, part of me wanted to just be grateful and hush. Storm meant the world to little me. Luke Cage in that hoodie hit a nerve I didn’t know I had. Watching Miles swing through Brooklyn put a lump in my throat my own son will never understand, because to him it’s just Tuesday. I don’t take a drop of that lightly.
Gratitude and honesty can sit side by side, though.
The difference is intimacy. The man, for all his flaws, and he carried a wagonload, made you a fellow conspirator. He hyped you up. He handed the entire readership a name, True Believers, like we belonged to a congregation with membership cards. You weren’t a consumer. You were people.
Set that beside now. A quarterly earnings call. Analysts fretting about franchise fatigue. Suits describing content pipelines like they’re running an oil rig. That word, content, tells you everything. It’s filler, whatever goes in the box. Nobody in the whole history of the world ever loved content. We loved stories, and the canyon between those two is wide as Texas.
I won’t paint the old days gold and call them holy either. That man benefited from a public story that too often minimized how much Kirby and Ditko brought to the table, and those wounds over credit never fully closed. His so called family had its ugly fights over money and glory, same as any household come Thanksgiving. So this isn’t nostalgia begging you to ignore the receipts.
What I’m mourning is a feeling. The sense that somebody on the other side gave a real damn about you specifically. That the whole thing was a handshake, not a transaction. My uncle used to say you can tell when a place stops being a home and turns into a business by how they greet you at the door. Homes ask about your mama. A business just wants your card.
The House of Ideas used to ask about your mama.
And now?
I cracked open a recent issue not long ago, hoping to catch that old spark. Slick art. Competent writing. A QR code in the back pointing me toward an app. The creators’ names are still there, but the company itself no longer feels like somebody you know. Nothing here tells me a room full of folks built this thing with their hands and wanted to hear back from me.
Just a product. Well made. Cold.
When the old man passed in 2018 I sat with it longer than I planned to. Those movie cameos earned their laughs, sure. But something honest went in the ground with him. Not because he still ran the place. He hadn’t in years. What died was the last thread tying this giant back to the corner store, to that quarter, to the boy with ink on his thumbs who believed a stranger three states away was rooting for him.
The suits will keep the logo polished. They’ll stack the release calendar years ahead. And those films will keep making my chest do that thing when a hero I never had as a boy walks into frame.
I’ll show up. Still a True Believer, or whatever’s left of one.
But a piece of me will always miss the table. The noise and the mess of it. That envelope with nothing inside that somehow meant the entire world. A voice on the back page telling a scared kid down South that he mattered, that hate was for cowards, and that next month another story would be sitting there waiting just for him.
Excelsior, old friend. We knew it. Even now.
Staff Writer; Carl Davis
This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.
Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.