Undercover Spy Writer in the MMMS

In rereading mid-sixties Marvels, occasionally you might look over the list of Merry Marvel Marching Society members in each issue to see if there are any names you recognize with hindsight. For instance, I see Will Meugniot in Strange Tales 143. And then I see a professional writer listed in Strange Tales 148—under his fandom pseudonym (he used his real name on his books).

Ted Johnstone, at the top of the rightmost column, is actually Man from U.N.C.L.E. tie-in writer David McDaniel. So it's appropriate that his listing appears in the book featuring Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. When ST 148 (Sept/66) went to press McDaniel's first novel, The Dagger Affair, had been on the stands for about half a year and his second, The Vampire Affair, was just coming out from Ace Books.  It was in his novels, not on the TV show, that the secret history of THRUSH was revealed and in fact its full name: the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity.

(I didn't have to look that up any more than I would the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, The Higher United Nations Defense Enforcement Reserves, or Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage Law-Enforcement Division, but I can't get any further on SHIELD's gritty, with-it, "up-to-date" new name [twenty years now?] than Strategic Homeland blah blah blah blah.)

In the U.N.C.L.E. novel that McDaniel wrote to end the series but that Ace declined to publish in 1971, The Final Affair, one character, a motorcycle gang member, is nicknamed The Thing and shouts "It's clobberin' time!" And at one point Mr. Waverly refers to THRUSH as "that Hydra-headed bird."