In a world packed with so much violence and anger, it probably should not surprise us to know that comic creators receive death threats over their work (especially thinking about how…shall we say, dedicated, certain fans are). Here are four examples of how the act of writing comics nearly turned into something a little more serious.
1 Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. When Captain America Comics #1’s iconic cover (featuring Cap punching out Adolf Hitler) was released, it was a year before the United States was drawn into the war. As crazy as it might sound now, there was still a faction of Americans in the United States who were vocal in their support of the Nazis—and these two young Jewish guys having their character punch Hitler out on the front cover? It caused quite a sensation. Things got so bad that New York City police officers were assigned to guard their offices. They even received a phone call from Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York, who told Joe Simon, “You boys over there are doing a good job. The City of New York will see that no harm will come to you.” Can’t beat an endorsement like that, huh?
2 Marv Wolfman and George Perez. Wolfman and Perez were the creative team behind New Teen Titans, a popular 1980s series from DC Comics (for the first few years of the 1980s, it was even outselling X-Men). One of their most famous plots was the “Judas Contract,” where the Titans learn that their teammate Terra is a mole sent to infiltrate the group by their old enemy Deathstroke the Terminator. Terminator captures the team and after their plan is thwarted at the end of the story, Terra dies as a result of her own powers. Despite the fact that the reveal that Terra was working with Deathstroke had occurred nearly a year earlier, fan outrage was palpable, including, yes, a death threat.
3 Ron Marz. In 1994, Ron Marz was brought on as the new writer of Green Lantern to do one thing—have Hal Jordan, the longtime star of the book, go insane and become a villain, and then introduce a new Green Lantern. That was solely the plotline that Marz was hired to write—it wasn’t even his idea. That said, he still received a tremendous amount of negative fan feedback, with some fans going as far as to threaten Marz’s life.
4 Ed Brubaker. In a 2010 issue of Captain America, there was a political rally in the comic that was basically modeled after Tea Party protests, but wasn’t intended to be any specific political group. The letterer of the issue, who was in charge of adding the words to the signs in the background, used Google Images for research and ended up unknowingly modeling the signs after trademark Tea Party slogans. Once that was discovered, attention was called to the dialogue of the superhero Falcon in the issue, who remarks that he does not feel comfortable at an antitax rally—an ironic coincidence that took Tea Partiers over the edge. Writer Ed Brubaker began to receive death threats over the comic book, receiving so many negative and threatening emails that he had to close his account. All because a letterer picked the wrong two signs from Google Images to add to the background. Yikes.