I've had my difficulties with the actual content of comic book letter columns in the past, but I'm not gonna lie: I love those things, and my favorite part is the clever titles. Occasionally you'll find one that doesn't really work that well -- I love the Punisher, but "Punishing Mails" is about as lazy as you can get -- but there are dozens of incredible, pun-filled letter column titles out there.

And to prove it, I've picked out twenty-five of the best.

Let's start off with Batman, because, as in all things, Batman is the best place to start. As you might expect from a title that dates back to 1940, it's had a few different titles for its letter column. For a while, it was just "Batmail," but in the mid-'60s, they got a little creative with the TV-inspired "Batman's Hot Line."

 I'm think that bat-winged T looks a little more like a whale tail than they intended. That logo lasted 'til the mid-70s, when it was replaced with this thing, which looks so much like the bootleg painting on the window of a comic book store that I had a hard time believing it was real:

 

By the '80s, though, it'd settled into the pretty familiar "Bat-Signals" title:

 

My favorite Batman-related lettercol title, though, is the pun-tastic "Detective Comments."

Brave and the Bold had a pretty bland title in "Brave & Bold Mailbag," but I'm including it here because the header includes an amazing Jim Aparo image of Batman kicking his feet up on his desk to read his mail:

The best thing about this? That desk and chair are nowhere near nice and/or bat-shaped enough to actually belong to Batman, which means he had to have straight up busted into a post office and kicked back for a few hours. Makes sense, too: Alfred can't go through all the mail.

Superman and Action Comics both shared "Metropolis Mailbag" for most of the Silver and Bronze Ages. That's not a terribly clever name, but I'm into it mostly for the header where Superman is using his X-Ray vision to read a pile of mail, but looks for all the world like he's getting ready to set it all on fire with his eyes:

 

Similarly, Superboy's fans could write into the "Smallville Mailsack", which sounds like the filthiest thing you can do to another person:

By the '70s, Action Comics had distinguished itself by changing the title to "Action Reaction," which then streamlined into one of the better puns in lettercol history:

 

 

Meanwhile, Superboy moved away from the "Smallville Mailsack" (with good reason) and into one of my all-time favorites. The '90s Superboy comic was quite possibly the most '90s comic of all time, being as it was a reboot (check) starring a clone (check) with a leather jacket (check) and a fade (check), so after a brief stint of using "Kid Stuff," they gave it the '90sest title of all time:

 

Just to round out the Superman Family, here's the one from Jimmy Olsen, featuring Jimmy sitting down to write back to you, the fans!

This might seem like just a standard title, but when you consider that it's actually a subtle play on the title Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, it's pretty rad.

And just for the sake of completeness, here's the one from DC Comics Presents, the Superman team-up book, in which the letters appear to be doing whatever letters do to make lowercase letters, if you catch my meaning:

 

 This isn't the most famous Captain America letter column title (more on that in a second), but it is pretty charming:

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The most famous Captain America letter column title -- and maybe the best thing to happen in comics, ever -- was recently brought back for Captain Marvel:

 

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Considering that it was a book about a giant red T-Rex that ended the Garden of Eden by stomping an alien supercomputer, the letter column header for Devil Dinosaur is actually pretty understated:


Much like Batman and Jimmy Olsen before him, Deadpool set out to answer his own fan mail. Unlike those two, however, he seems to be taking it pretty seriously:

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The original letter column in Doom Patrol was called "Postscripts to the Patrol" (snooze), but during Grant Morrison and Richard Case's run, it got a weirdly biblical makeover:

One of the best tricks of letter column titling involves bringing in the main character's powers. Hence, the Flash took a look at his missives in "Speed Reading":

 

Or "Recoil" from Hitman, which is a great letter column title for a book about a dude who does nothing but shoot people:

 

Or, you can go with a vaguely scatalogical pun, much like they did in Justice League International:

 

Nextwave basically had the perfect lettercol title, which makes sense since Nextwave is basically the perfect comic:

Slightly more subtle, but still pretty great, is the letter column from Secret Origins. It works on multiple levels!

The letter column for Uncanny X-Men was, as you might expect, "X-Mail." It's boring, yes, but it's also right there, and they kind of had to do it. Once the spinoffs started rolling in, however, hey got to change things up. X-Factor went with "X-Changes"....

...while the adjectiveless X-Men title went with the more esoteric "X-Pressions," so that readers could really tell them how they feel.

Finally, we come to two of my favorites. First, a book that was near and dear to my heart when I was a radical '90s teen, Gen13, with a letter column title that was as garish and obnoxious as the book itself:

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And just to prove that the art of the letter column title isn't dead, here's where readers of Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose can write in:

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It's a three-level pun, y'all. And that's real.

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