Flo Steinberg came to the notice of comic book fandom during the early 1960s, during the initial flowering of what became the Marvel Age of Comics. As Marvel’s corresponding secretary, she was, among other things, charged with answering the volumes of fan mail that came in for editor Stan Lee, and so the various active fans of the era came to know of Flo. Stan himself treated her as a character as he’d produce his letters pages and Bullpen Bulletins reports, and he also featured her prominently on the Voices of Marvel record that he made as a promotional item for the M.M.M.S. fan club.
Flo’s employment at Marvel came to an end in 1968 after publisher Martin Goodman refused to approve a $5.00 a week raise for her. Flo hadn’t been a comic book person per se when she joined the firm, but through the friends and associates she made during that time, she connected with the field and the industry. Moving out west, she spent a few years in San Francisco just as the underground comic movement was reaching its peak and entered the orbit of a number of its practitioners. A few years later, Flo returned to New York and found employment with Jim Warren running the fulfillment of his Captain Company merchandise operation.
At a certain point in 1975, Flo was compelled to try her own hand at publishing an underground comic of her own. This was BIG APPLE COMIX #1, and its contents were centered around the Manhattan living experience at the time. Flo prevailed upon her friends in the industry to contribute to this new venture for rock-bottom rates. She was beloved enough by this time that a veritable who’s who of the industry came out to contribute to her publication.
Flo printed 20,000 copies of BIG APPLE COMIX #1, and she sold enough of them over the years to break even and even make a small profit. But she continued to have copies all the way up to her final days, and she gifted me copies on at least two separate occasions.
We’ll take a further look at the contents of BIG APPLE COMIX #1 in the weeks to come.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
An extra $5 an hour might have been aiming a bit high in 1968, even in NYC.
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From an Alter Ego. Vol. 3, no. 70. July 2007.
Minimum wage in NYC was $1.60 per hour in 1968 and secretary’s made on average $400 a month, and she worked in the low paying comics industry. Maybe she was taking home $100 a week in 1968 or less, so it’s highly unlikely that she asked Goodman for a $200 a week raise. She more likely asked for an extra $5 a week and not $5 per hour as reported here.
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This makes sense. Also it should have occurred to me that most office staff is paid by the week, not the hour. But as I spent the last 30 years of my working career in retail, hopefully I can be forgiven.
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No worries. The article has been corrected… pretty sure it originally said $5 per hour.
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Are you sure she asked for a $5 per hour raise, and not $5 per week? She likely wasn’t taking home much more that $100 per week in ’68 making $5 a week a 5% raise.
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Brad Bickford looks like Roy Thomas.
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Cool comix! Really like the story and the art. Shame she didn’t do better financially but isn’t that the true way of the Silver Age?
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Frank Brunner wrote and drew a riposte to Linda Fite’s one-pager. It appeared in Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach #5.
And is it me, or is the protagonist of Al Williamson’s strip modelled on a certain rascally Editor Emeritus?
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There is a strong resemblance!
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Denny’s intro notwithstanding, most of the THIN MAN movies aren’t set in New York, and the Charles family doesn’t live there.
I first saw BIG APPLE COMIX when it was fairly new — it was one of the undergrounds Scott McCloud’s neighbor Chris Bing had, so I read it before I went to college in 1978.
It may have been the first time I ever saw Archie Goodwin’s self-caricature, which gave a different texture to all those Epic comics introductory pages…
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That Wally Wood story deserves to be better known.
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