Who His Is and How He Came To Be: An Origin for the Author of This Blog

When I was a very young child in the early sixties, before I even knew how to read, I became an avid fan of the Superman television series, which my local television station reran as part of an afternoon kids show, "Dr. Max".

I can't remember seeing Superman for the first time, so I can't claim it was love at first sight, but I know the series quickly became a juvenile obsession for me, enough that I soon cajoled my mother to buy Superman family comics for me and to read them to me over and over while I looked at the pictures. I DO remember my first comic book. It was a Superboy story. I don't remember the plot, but I remember one panel -- Superboy intercepting a bolt of lightning with his chest.

After I learned to read, my parents bought me many other Superman family comic books -- Superman, Superboy, Action, Adventure (Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes), World's Finest (my only exposure to Batman), Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen. Surely there were other characters on the comic stand at the local supermarket, but I honestly can't remember seeing any other comics, except for funny animal books, and I never considered buying any of those.

The mythos of Superman -- the Fortress of Solitude, the Bottled City of Kandor, the Phantom Zone, Arco City, green Kryptonite, red Kryptonite, Gold Kryptonite, Blue Kryptonite, White Kryptonite, the magic of Mxyzptlk, the futility of trying to change the past, and the increasing cast of Super beings including animals -- they were my waking dreams, as real as the biblical characters I learned about in Sunday School.

As many stories as I read as I passed through grade school, I was never allowed to keep the comics themselves. My mother considered them clutter and encouraged me to give every last one of them to my little niece and nephews. Until junior high, when, having read in a letter column that some fans collected comics, my desire to hold on to my comics was legitimized to me as a hobby.

A veil of another sort feel from my eyes around the same time. I began to notice other super hero comics, and I began to buy them. It was the early seventies, the tail end of a very exciting time for comics. DC was madly innovating, trying to hold on to the market share they were losing to Marvel. Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams were revitalizing Batman and Green Lantern. A literary changing of the guards was in progress. Gardner Fox, John Broome, Arnold Drake, even Stan Lee were, for one reason or another, stepping aside. New voices, like O'Neil, but also Cary Bates, Steve Skeates, Steve Gerber, Steve Englehart, Mike Friedrich, Len Wein and Marv Wolfman were stepping in. War, over population, pollution, racism, sexism, drug addiction, and religion became story topics. Comics were ever so slightly coming of age at the same time that I was. I would be lying if I denied that their liberal messages had no influence on the shaping of my own political beliefs, but it is also too simplistic to say they were the only influence.

First my collecting spilled over to other DC heroes, though their comics were disappearing almost as quickly as I discovered them. Through Kirby's work in Jimmy Olsen, I discovered his Fourth World series' from their first issues. I began to buy the Batman books, the Teen Titans, Green Lantern, Flash, the Justice League, and Wonder Woman. Then I started to notice Marvel heroes on the newsstand. I had some familiarity with the characters and their story lines from the episodic sixties cartoons, which also ran on "Dr. Max". But I honestly didn't realize they were published in comics until then. I was please to discover many of the stories I had seen on the Saturday morning Fantastic Four cartoon had been based on the stories published in the comic. It made picking it up and understanding their past much easier.

At that time, most young boys stopped reading comic books by the time they reached High School, but in my sophomore year, we moved to a new town, two thousand miles from my closest friends, and maybe because of that, my involvement with my four color friends only intensified. DC was in descent -- although my loyalty to the company that published my first love never abated -- but Marvel was on a creative roll. Steve Englehart published his classic Captain America stories, and soon after wrote the Avengers/Defenders crossover, a Marvelized version of the annual Justice League/Justice Society crossovers. Steve Gerber wrote Man-thing and out of that created Howard the Duck. Doug Moench wrote War of the Worlds and P. Craig Russell magnificently illustrated it. Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan had a wonderful run on Tomb of Dracula, and Roy Thomas and John Buscema did such incredible things with Conan that even I, a die hard fan of men in tights, forgave the character for not wearing them. Truth was he was even sexier without them!

One might have thought that even a social misfit like me might have stopped buying, reading and collecting comics by college, but instead I found fannish friends by mail and through an APA (Amateur Press Alliance - it's what comic fans did before the Internet). Suddenly I was not only reading them, I was writing about them, going to conventions about them, and spending far too many hours racking up expensive long distance phone bills talking to other comics fans, even if I wasn't always talking about comics.

The late seventies was a fairly dismal time for comics fans. Most of what was published was hack work, except for a few bright spots like Englehart's Silver St. Cloud series in Detective Comics and Chris Claremont's X-Men revival. I also fondly remember Martin Pasko's run on Superman reviving the Lois Lane/Lana Lang rivalry with a touch of adult wit.

For two brief periods I did actually give up collecting comics, although I never sold or gave away the ones I already owned. Once when I graduated college and moved to San Francisco I stopped buying them for a few months, and once more a few months later when my boy friend moved in, but that second time barely counts, since he was buying them and I was still reading them. When we separated, I went cold turkey again, expecting to give them up, but soon I was back at the comic store buying as many as I had before.

The eighties were a bronze age for comic super heroes. Those of us with fond memories of super heroic action from our youths took pure joy in Wolfman and Perez's Teen Titans, the Levitz and Giffen Legion of Superheroes, and the Crisis on Infinite Earths. George Perez worked wonders on the new Wonder Woman; John Byrne gave Superman a boost, and a series of talented writers and artists made the new Flash the most consistently excellent super hero series of the next twenty years. As the eighties continued more adult fare was published like Alan Moore's Watchmen and Swamp Thing, Sandman, and the seriously warped Doom Patrol.

Although the ninties were not nearly so exemplary, by then I was no more able to give up my weekly visit to the comics store than I was able to give up my morning cup of coffee. To tell the truth, sometimes I am not even sure why I continue to buy them. Certainly there are as many disappointments each week as there are satisfying moments. I long ago gave up being concerned about having an uninterupted series of any title. I buy now mainly based on the creators, a favorite artist or writer. As much as I love many different characters I have read over the years, too often both DC and Marvel have taken the wrong tact with one of my favorites and the result is not only a waste of my money, but arguably a waste of the paper the comic was printed on. Still I almost never discard a comic I buy, and by now I must have close to twenty thousand of them -- way too many to count!

As this weekly blog continues, I hope to share my thoughts regarding my favorite characters and what I like about them. I expect I will also share my pet peeves about particular books and why I think they have fallen short of their potential.