DC’s soon-to-arrive letters pages are a welcome addition to my comics reading experience. They were a standard feature of comics in my youth, and DC’s resurrection of them makes me feel — rightly or wrongly — that this is a sure sign that the people currently in charge of the company recognize that the audience is invested in these books. Maybe we’re more invested than some of the creators. Many of them work on a title for one or two six-month hitches and then vanish, while we stay with the book for years. Putting some of our names in the books legitimizes our involvement — or at least acknowledges that we’re part of the experience.

So, while DC is prepping their books for our missives, I hope they consider bringing back something else from our shared past: the editorial asterisk.

[I’M REFERRING TO THE ONE ON THE LEFT]

This little guy ==> * disappeared some time ago, and I miss him. Editor’s would insert one wherever a reference was made to something that happened in a character’s past, with a little note at the bottom of the panel referring readers to the specific issue in question. For most books, this meant the previous issue; in the case of any book written by Roy Thomas or Chris Claremont, the asterisk could throw you back in the storyline a decade or more, or even to another title’s history. Obviously, most monthly books now come with a “Our Story Thus Far” box on the first page, eliminating the need for the most common asterisk. But the other asterisk, the one that referred to the distant past of a character, that was a little candied treat for the long-time reader of a book. When you hit one of those, and your brain dredged up the instance being annotated before your eyes even flickered down to the bottom of the panel, well, that was a peculiar validation of your fandom. “Yes!,” you’d think. “That was that issue of X-Men when we discover Misty Knight is Jean Grey’s roommate. I knew that.”

[THINK OF IT AS A GOLD STAR FOR CONTINUITY HOUNDS]

I suspect the asterisk became extinct when creative teams and editors began cycling on and off titles so rapidly that determining what was canon and what wasn’t made documenting these moments a logistical nightmare for even the most devoted editor, but I don’t doubt that the internet and Wikipedia played a part in their demise. Knowing that fans could create, maintain and access a shared database of character history must have made the asterisk seem like a slow and old-fashioned reference method — and it allowed fans to figure out much more quickly when an editor’s asterisked note was incorrect. (Indeed, Marvel has recently started inserting hyperlinks in their digital comics where there once would have been an asterisk. But digital comics are an abomination, so who cares what happens in them?)

Still, seeing those little stars on the pages again would be another sign from the people in charge that they care that we care. It’s nice for one’s affections to be rewarded, even with something as meaningless as an asterisk or two.**

-Paul

*I’m not really lost.

**Asterisks are not really meaningless. They’re one of my favorite typographical marks.

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