Unhappily for me, I don’t know Denny O’Neil, editor and writer of many of my favorite Marvel and DC comics characters, including Spider-Man and Batman. Many people, however, think we must be buddies because we’ve worked on the same projects, know many of the same people, and love and write about some very outre things.
But we’ve never worked on those projects, hung with those people, or loved and written about those outre things together. I did once get a letter from Denny, back when he was an Editor of The Amazing Spider-Man. It was a personal reply to a letter I’d sent to Marvel praising a particular ish (as Stan Lee had trained us fanboys to call them), and Denny’s response was astonishingly honest: He disagreed with me. Said he hadn’t liked the story at all. (And I think he may even have written it.)
So I, of course, have loved the guy from afar ever since.