It’s been almost two years now since I began doing a series of writings on here about the times I sent letters to comics and they were printed. I posted one and then never posted about another.

There are reasons for that. There’s one I want to save for later in the series, and the one I specifically wanted to do next is in a comic I no longer own and can not find a scan of. So I was thinking “what other comics did I have letters in?” and the answer was “didn’t I get one into Walking Dead?”

Spoilers: the answer is I don’t think I did get one into the Walking Dead comic. I did WRITE a letter to Walking Dead, and I guess at some point my memory decided it had been printed, but having spent some time last year checking, I don’t think it ever actually was. But hey, I can still talk about it.

Zombies movies were one of my favourite kinds of horror movies as a kid. I enjoyed the Romero movies maybe while I was younger than I should have, and Return of the Living Dead was a truly formative experience for little PDR. By the late ’90s I felt that zombies were losing ground in the public consciousness, so when they made a huge return in the early 2000s I was elated. Things like 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead pleased PDR greatly. The Walking Dead comic was part of that resurgence of zombie media and, though I didn’t learn about it right away, when a friend told me of its existence a year or so in, I went back and became a loyal reader. On one occasion, I also wrote a letter (presumably be email at this point).

I must have been around 24 when this occurred. I don’t remember exactly what issue I was responding to, but I know it was the one that ended with two young girls being decapitated. The cast was trying to make a home in a prison and the two of them had gone off on their own to give each other haircuts, only to be found at the end of the issue dead. It was supposed to be a shock that they weren’t killed by zombies, but by a person who was probably still among the survivors! Uh oh!

The reason I remember that is that in my letter I made a joke about how they had messed up giving each other haircuts and decapitated each other by accident. Mildly amusing at best, but also the only thing I remember about the letter. I presume it was full of compliments. I doubt I had any questions. Asking questions would have felt like hassling them and I wouldn’t have wanted to hassle them.

Anyway, I continued reading Walking Dead for years after that, but never wrote again. Maybe I never wrote again because my first letter hadn’t been printed, but at some point I got it into my head that it HAD been printed, so it doesn’t seem likely that I actively avoided it for that reason. I think I just didn’t write again because it does feel like a hassle. It’s stupid, given that the letters pages are there for a reason, but it does take a surge of mental effort on my part to get over the idea that the creatives would rather not hear from me. It’s so much easier to just not try to connect, even if sometimes its a shame we don’t.

I still like zombies well enough, though they don’t light a fire in me the way they did when I was younger. I didn’t follow the Walking Dead television show for much beyond the first season, and I understand there are now a couple spinoffs which I’ve not seen at all. There are sequels to 28 Days Later and roughly a million zombie video games. Whatever fear I had that the genre was disappearing in the ’90s was simply incorrect. It’s here to stay. It’s here when I need it, which is only occasionally, but I’m still glad it’s there.

That guy over there is Solok. We all know Solok, right? He was a Starfleet Captain during the Dominion War, and he captained a ship made up of a predominantly Vulcan crew. That’s good stuff. Mean ol’ PDR is always going on about how humanity is over-represented in Starfleet and how we need to see more aliens, so PDR must love Solok, right?

I do not. Solok is a jerk.

Solok is a Vulcan-supremacist, who loves picking on humans (especially Ben Sisko) and “proving” how much he, as a Vulcan, is their better. Not just humans, either! When he winds up making an all-Vulcan baseball team to mock Sisko, Solok makes it clear he also thinks it is stupid for Bajorans or Ferengi or Trill or Klingons to deny Vulcan superiority. Solok thinks that he’s Logic’s gift to the universe and loves to tell you about it.

And what really shows what a prick Solok is can only be the design of his team’s uniforms. He decided to decorate them with the Vulcan symbol of the IDIC, an icon used to acknowledge the uncountable ways the universe can present itself, and to appreciate the beauty that results from that. The thing is basically the Vulcan way of saying equality is good, and here we have Solok wearing it while he tries to prove that Vulcans are better than everyone else. It ain’t right.

I fully acknowledge that the humans in Starfleet can be annoying, and I’ve absolutely seen them mock Vulcans in ways that I consider racist. But that doesn’t mean Solok needs to also be a racist.

Superman meets another fancy sci-fi concept.

We get a standard opening and then we’re into it. A scientist is using his magic observatory to pluck comets from the sky and pull them closer to Earth for study (it is, of course, ridiculous that the Magnetic Telescope would be able to pull comets from so far away to Earth in a matter of seconds, but what’re ya gonna do?). It goes wrong and the first comet crashes into the city, so the scientist is told to knock it off. Knock it off, he does not. To this scientist, the benefits of his experiments are more important than any potential risks, including any human lives lost. He’s a rogue scientist with a comet addiction and they can’t stop him. In fact, the cops don’t much help the situation, smashing up the machinery so the scientist loses control and now the comet is heading straight for the city.

Lois calls in the story and Clark goes to help (taking the opportunity to change in a cab this time) and before we know it, Superman is trying to bash that comet away. But Superman fails. Twice. A lot of destructing rains down on Metropolis in this one and if we pretend they were going for any kind of realism, people would have died here. It’s only when Clark gives up on the brute force that he wins, by getting the Magnetic Telescope working again that he and Lois are able to send that hunk of evil outer space back where it belongs. Lois accidentally kisses Clark, thinking he’s Superman and we’re out.

Lasers, robots, T-Rexes, and fancy cars, and now this magnetic telescope. The threats Superman face in these cartoons are right on the cutting edge of sci-fi technologies. A common complaint I’ve seen about Golden Age Superman comics is that they focus too much on gangsters and not enough on more fantastical stuff. Well these shorts have been consistently science fiction and I like it. We have some exceptions I recall coming up, but at this point the groundwork is laid that Superman is a sci-fi guy.

The image of Superman flying up into the sky to stop a threat coming down and failing is one that will recur throughout time. Most notably in Panic In The Sky, an episode of the 50s show that has been essentially remade multiple times in later shows and which, PDR thinks, deserves a Wikipedia page of its own instead of just a redirect to the list of episodes of Adventures of Superman. But whatever. We’re just lucky that Superman here was able to get back up and deal with the comet instead of getting amnesia or anything.

A bald scientist who thinks he knows better than the authorities and will put the world at risk to get his own way is also a thing that would recur in Superman, but this unnamed guy is a professor and Lex would never bother with that.