There are certain questions I receive over and over even after I've written about them on this blog.  Here's one from Robert Rowe…

I saw your name mentioned as having been featured as a character in a story in The Flash #195 from 1970.

What are your recollections of the event? Was it only editor Julie Schwartz having some fun with the fans of the time? Were you notified that you would appear or were you surprised to see yourself in an issue of The Flash? Maybe most importantly, did it change your opinion of the book?

I wrote about this but it was some time ago some of this is me quoting myself. We used to buy our comic books at newsstands or at racks in mini-markets or drugstores. They came out Tuesday and Thursday in most areas and if you were a devout fan (as was I), you hurried to the vendor each of those days to grab up the new releases. On January 20, 1970, I did just that and among my purchases of that day was the new issue of The Flash, #195.

I was at the time working on the fringes of the comic book business. And suddenly, I bought that issue of The Flash, opened it and discovered I was a character in it.

There was a scene of The Flash doing a whirlwind autograph signing at the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon and he was calling out the names of the folks who were receiving these autographs. The comic's editor, Julius Schwartz, had inserted the names of three folks who were frequent contributors to his letter columns: Me, Irene Vartanoff and Peter Sanderson. (All three of us, by the way, wound up working in comics.)

I think "weird" would describe how I felt. I just stopped and stared at it and told myself I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. And I remember looking around at the people passing me and realizing how little this would matter to any of them. But it meant a lot to me just as having letters of mine printed in comic books meant a lot to me. It didn't particularly change my opinion of that comic or any comic. It just broke down (a bit) the barrier I felt between being a reader of comic books and being part of the world that made them.

And then about two weeks later, Jack Kirby asked me to become his assistant and I really felt like I'd crossed over.