The Slipper Sox Contest

©Marvel/Disney

A fabulous Rick Parker page! I was lucky to have such a talented fellow so close to hand. Hey, Rick-o, can you finish, ink and letter a page? Yup

I recently wrote about all the Assistant Editors Month pages I did—being in the thick of various really tough plots and licensed characters, I didn’t feel like I should put myself in the comics. Which was what most of the other Assistants were supposed to do.

I had forgotten all about this page. Which appeared in New Mutants #31.

The page explains the whole situation. Now who thought this up? It was either fellow Assistant Editor Mike Carlin—with both of us working like mad dogs alongside Marvel Universe Editor Mark Gruenwald. Or my own extraordinarily clever and inventive boss, Editrixe Above All, Louise Jones.

The slipper sox themselves, innocents indeed, were a device of desperation. As comfy as any shoes may be, I dislike wearing them after, oh, 10 hours. I needed something better, softer and warmer. I would often be working alone till 2 or 3 AM and it got mighty cold in that old stone building! I didn’t know I wanted such things until I was in some kind of imported junk store on Third Ave and there they were.

They were made of sturdy acrylic—plastic! Just what my shivering flesh needed to stay warm.

I also wore a set of comically large Army Cargo Pants. I would wear them over my regular pants—I tell ya’ it got really cold in that building (they shut off the heat at around 7:30… )!

All well and good, I can hear you saying, but what happened to the slipper socks? The winner must have them framed and mounted on a wall somewhere, right!?

Here’s what happened.

In one of those cosmic coincidences, the book went out late in the week. I believe it really went out Thursday. The first contest entry showed up Monday morning. I couldn’t believe it. Considering there was a weekend involved, the entrant must’ve sent it out Saturday… how could that be?

I put that question to Milt “Miracle Worker” Schiffman – that intermediate between us and the printing presses. He informed me that occasionally such a perfect bit of supply line worked. Almost like magic.

And it was a good entry. A very good one. Save for one detail—I had asked for post cards. This was a neatly typed letter.

Total entrants: 46. Some extraordinary efforts. Some clearly young and some obvious budding writers. In fact, #1 was a published science fiction author whom I had heard of! One kid wrote a beautiful little post card but forgot to put her return address on! I mean, that’s just sweet, right?

So sweet were many of these I allowed myself to be caught up in my own office situation—I was escorted down the hall from Louise’s calm sanctum to Tom DeFalco’s Madhouse and the Marvel Universe treadmill picked up speed.

Thus everything got stuffed in an envelope and stored safely away for…

37 years.

I got myself a wifey, we moved upstate, the comic industry went into upheaval with Marvel going bankrupt, we had a kid and I was prattling on about something on FaceBook when, Ms Ellen Fleischer spoke up: Hey, whatever happened to the slipper socks?

I do believe that only one other person ever asked about them. I was still on staff at the time, so that was long ago. Ms F. was the only person to bring them up in all this time.

So she gets them.

They’ve been carefully stored away through several moves and various acts of cleaning. Well, the cleaning part is not necessarily actually cleaning anything off of the socks…

How am I going to recognize all the wonderful and imaginative people who did enter? I am going to celebrate each and every one of you in the very next blog entry. Any one who finds this and contacts me will get a custom print of some of my work sent to them. Your address will not appear so that is one way to identify yourself. I guarantee sooner than another 37 years.

You all have my heartfelt apology for being so self-involved and neglectful. It was certainly not my intention. Ms. Fleischer, I regret not being able to send you a can of Lysol. Times have changed…