Mindy Newell: The Letter

Mindy Newell

These days Mindy Newell knows that if she could do it all over again she’d have gone to college for screenwriting and film editing. Instead she became a nurse to please her parents and pleasing your parents was what it was all about for nice Jewish girls who graduated from high school in 1971. But the creative larva was in her soul, and when the cocoon broke and the butterfly emerged, it flew to DC’s New Talent Showcase program. Under the auspices of legendary editors Karen Berger, Len Wein, Julius Schwartz, Paul Levitz, and ComicMix’s own Robert Greenberger, Mindy learned the craft and art of writing comics, including Tales Of The Legion, V, Legionnaires 3, Amethyst, Lois Lane: When It Rains God Is Crying, and numerous other comics, including a Superman story based on a dream Mindy had as a child. She also worked on Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! and other independent comics. All this time Mindy continued to work as a nurse while being a single mom to her daughter Alixandra, until the late and dear Mark Gruenwald hired her as an assistant editor at Marvel, while writing stories of the Black Widow and Daredevil. She edited NFL Pro Action, a licensed kid’s magazine about football with the NFL until Marvel imploded in 1996. Returning to full-time nursing, she she also co-wrote a story for 2000 A.D. with her then-husband, British artist John Higgins. A few years ago Mike Gold called and asked her to join the team of columnists here at ComicMix, where her topics freely range from comics to pop culture to politics; she even wrote a piece about the great American thoroughbred Secretariat, which caused editor Mike to tell her that she had won the prize for the most off-topic column ever written ComicMix.

You may also like...

3 Responses

  1. George Haberberger says:

    Wow Mindy, that is really horrible. It seems obvious that someone was threatened by your talent and that was the only way he could deal with it. I guess from your column that he still has a career which is troubling. I wonder if this is similar to the Weinstein scandal in that there may be others who were similarly harassed but said nothing. After all, you said it was “years and years later” before you even told your parents about the guy on Wall Street.

    • Mindy Newell says:

      George, it was the Weinstein scandal as well as Martha’s column about it that made me decide to tell the story of that pice of shit…and I’m referring to “The Letter” as well as the editor who wrote it.

      As far as telling my parents “years and years” later, it was because we (my parents and I) had (finally) reached that point in our relationship where were could talk to each other as friends and as adults, not just as parents to a daughter.

  1. January 6, 2018

    […] activities of men in the public eye, some obnoxiously obscene, and with my own experiences with The Letter, I do find myself wondering […]