A story I’ve never written about before. It was the fall of 1982. I’d just had my senior pictures taken, we were in the middle of football season, and my circumstances were a bit unusual, to say the least.
Earlier in the summer, my father had left his fourth wife while I was vacationing for my annual two weeks of visitation at my mother’s house in the upper peninsula of Michigan. He’d had me pack all my things, not that there was a lot to pack, and leave them in places where he could find them easily. When I came back, he had moved to a one-bedroom apartment in Cadillac, away from Mesick, where I had lived ever since seventh grade. The apartment was in the adjacent building to the one where my grandma lived, just down Pearl Street, at the end of which was the ubiquitous Big Boy restaurant that had been such a large part of my childhood. I slept on a futon in the living room, while my dad had the bedroom. I didn’t have a problem with that. I was glad to be away from Number Four.
The problem with living in Cadillac was that I would have to switch schools for my senior year, which my father promised I would never have to do. The solution was unique. my friend, Ken LaFountain, lived in a farmhouse with his mother in nearby Copemish, with his mother, Joyce, who was a foster parent. We negotiated a $40 per week payment for me to stay there with them for the year. My dad was gainfully employed at the time (for a change) but I wanted to support myself, so in the winter, I got a job at Crystal Mountain Ski Resort, where Ken worked. I worked Saturdays in the cafe, and Sundays in the buffet room. Because I had taken all of my academic classes except for two, math analysis/pre-calculus and civics, I enrolled at the Wexford-Missaukee Area Vocational Center. I took electronics, in hopes of becoming a computer systems engineer. This becomes important a little bit later. The vocational school was located in Cadillac, just down the hill from my dad’s apartment. So, I got dropped off at the vocational school on Monday morning, stayed the week with the LaFountains, and my dad picked me up after the Friday night football game to take me back to Cadillac from wherever we were playing. It was really a pretty elegant solution.
So, one Saturday, I had to drive to Traverse City to take the ACT. We didn’t have the money for me to take the SAT, and none of the colleges I was going to apply to needed it, so the ACT was it for me. I drove all the way to Traverse City from Cadillac, my longest solo drive ever, in my dad’s beaten up 1974 Chevy Nova. I got to the college campus where the test was being given, and it was a gorgeous sunny day. I left my jacket in the trunk with my duffel bag, locked the car, and went in. The ACT was given in four parts, and math was first. I didn’t care for math, but it went okay, I thought. I knocked out social studies and English. Those were my best subjects. And then came science. I froze. There was so much on this test that I simply hadn’t learned. I was terrified. What was I going to do? I muddled through the test as best I could, and looked up at the clock to see that there were only ten minutes remaining and I still had about 15 questions to answer. I started to panic until I saw what the next section was: Ohm’s Law. As fate would have it, we had just gotten done with Ohm’s Law in my electronics class at the vocational school and I absolutely crushed the last 15 questions with time to spare. Flushed with victory, but feeling like someone had sucked all my brains out with a vacuum cleaner, I walked outside in the fresh, crisp fall air to my locked car.
And I did not have the keys in my pocket.
I panicked. Where were the keys? Then I realized exactly where they were. They were in my jackeg pocket. I had locked them in the trunk! Now, these were the days before cell phones. I used a quarter and a dime to call the police to come help me unlock my dad’s car. I waited about an hour until they showed up. They popped the door lock for me, and I knew well enough how to get into a trunk by taking down the back of the back seat. I retrieved my jacket and my keys, and they asked me to unlock the car door to prove it was my car. The key didn’t work. I thought, oh no, they’re going to think the car is stolen. I went back to the trunk and the round GM key opened it right up, but the rectangular key didn’t open the door. I was puzzled. I was able to start the car, though, so the police were satisfied that I hadn’t stolen the car. But I was sure confused why the key wouldn’t open the door. That was a mystery for another time. I thanked the officers and commenced with my post-test celebration.
My dad had given me $10, and I wasn’t going to bring change home. I drove just down Garfield Street to Bonanza. Back in those days, Bonanza was where you could buy a steak and baked potato, and then eat off the food bar until you couldn’t move for about five bucks. And in those glorious days, I was burning about 4,500 calories a day so I could pack it away. I was 6’4″ and 210 pounds and pack it away I did.
When I got home, My dad grabbed my grandma and took us both down to the Big Boy. I told them both of the great adventure I’d had and my brush with the law. My dad said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Those are replacement doors. Don’t lock them.”
My back may argue against me, but my brain doesn’t. Although I retired over six years ago, I really wasn’t ready to. I may never be. I settled into a boring daily routine of substitute teaching and doing puzzles to keep my brain sharp. I worked on my supposed reitrement hobby, buying, repairing, and selling old Mego action figures, and tried to keep my brain engaged with the world.
It didn’t work.
I got so bored that, three years ago now, I wrote a novel. You’ve heard of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? It takes place in November every year. I didn’t join the website or the official group or anything like that. I just read the guidelines, which suggested writing a 50,000 word draft during the month of November and off I went. I wrote 60,000 words in 26 days. Done. Are you ever going to read that novel? No. It was a romance novel set in 1998 and the main characters are two middle school teachers who work in a school very similar to one that shall remain nameless, where very early in my career, many shenanigans were going on. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” was a complete lie. I just wanted to see if I could do it.
When I gave up, bored, and went back to the classroom full-time, I was not in the best mindset. I started off teaching freshmen, who were feral wolves during COVID and didn’t know how to behave at all. And then I had to transfer to the city’s grade 10-12 building because I was the only one certified to teach most high school classes. That turned out to be even worse. I was saddled with teaching students Algebra I. These were students who had failed Algebra I in eighth grade, and ninth grade, and were now on their third try. With the academic challenges came behavior challenges and by the end of that year, I was ready to walk away again and go mine coal or something.
But this past year, an opening at my old middle school came up, and I found myself not just teaching in a school where I had worked for 18 and a half years previously, but in a classroom I had taught in previously. I was home. And with that change came the return of my best and favorite creation, Solution Squad. Here I was, teaching seventh grade math again, and one of the first standards we were expected to teach was writing the prime factorization of a number using exponents. What else would I use? I had created an entire graphic novel based around prime numbers, prime factorization, simplying fractions, and solving proportions with them. And the target audience was here, right in front of me.
Earlier in the summer, I had used ChatGPT and became familiar with it and Canva as well, and suddenly I was able to make my characters appear in presentations without drawing new images, as described here. And when school let out for the year, I sat down in earnest to see if I could make my kids come to life.
3 x 5 Banner for my classroom next year
One of the first things I did was to create animation-style turnarounds of each of the characters. And no, this wasn’t a case of simply prompting with words. I have had to refine my prompts at least 100 times to get the results I want. And even then I have to go into Photoshop and adjust the boots of the costumes and make sure the colors were consistent. Generative AI is known to have its own ideas and is not intended to follow specific guidelines. That tool may be coming down the road and when it does, I’ll be all over it. But for now, I’ll work with what I have available.
Now, I’m not taking any work out of the hands of actual artists. I haven’t paid anyone to draw in years, except for the occasional blog banner or profile picture. I’m not going back into the comic book publishing game ever again. I’m doing this for my classroom. Once I got my turnarounds done, I dug through my old Solution Squad papers and found the first page of a comic book story I never finished. It was pencils only, no backgrounds. Here’s what I got back:
All I need to do now is drop these elements onto Canva slides and add letters and balloons. I don’t need to be fancy and use Illustrator. Again, not looking to publish. These 72 dpi images are good enough for Canvas. My digital comics are back in the game!
As opposed to my short period of retirement, where I thought I had to adjust to doing nothing, I have a million things I want to do. I want more comic stories for my kids. I want to try animation. I want to put music to the stories. I want to learn again, and it’s been a while since that’s been true. So, do I feel 90 anymore? Heck no.
My daughter Sera came home for a visit this week. Yes, it was a visit. She’s 20 now, and lives in Indianapolis while she goes to Purdue, majoring in mechanical engineering. She stayed in Indianapolis this summer, subletting from an intermational student while she does an internship at Glassboard. She had this week off, and is flying to California to spend a weekend there with friends.
It’s hard.
It’s hard to be a parent who did their job well. She’s independent, confident, competent, and brilliant. She loves us, but she doesn’t need us; not really. Yes, we pay for school, but that was always the plan. She pays for a lot of her living expenses, and her travel. This is her second trip to California this year. She never asks for anything.
It’s hard.
The energy in our house changes completely when she’s home. Her things are on the bathroom counter, a reminder that our family is complete under the same roof once more.
When she said goodbye a few minutes ago after packing up her car, I sat on the edge of my bed, holding back tears. It was the same way when we dropped her off at school two years ago in August. I don’t think it’s ever going to get easier. My wife and I rely on the saying, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Be happy it happened.” Every single day, we tell stories to each other about raising Sera. We send each other Facebook memories. Occasionally we peek in her bedroom.
It’s hard.
Her life is an absolute joy to witness, and thank goodness for instananeous communication. I love seeing projects she works on (the ones not covered by NDA, of course), and photos of the places she goes, and I just think to myself, this is how we raised her. We gave her the skills to live this life. We can’t be sad that she’s doing it right.
It’s hard.
It’s a few hours later now, and I just checked her progress on Life360. She’s almost back at her apartment. I don’t stalk her during normal life, but I watch her when she travels. I want to know that she arrives safely. In a few days, life will return to our new empty-nest normal, and we’ll start looking forward to seeing her just before school starts again. But for now…
When I started working on lessons for the 7th grade math classes last year, I inadvertently resurrected the Solution Squad. It wasn’t my initial intention. I just wanted to make a school for super-powered teens. The Mutants & Masterminds roleplaying game had a fictional school called The Claremont Academy, named after X-Men writer Chris Claremont. I thought, well, my favorite teen hero artist was George Pérez, so I’d name mine after him. And once I thought about how they would get around, I thought, why waste a perfectly good design? I have the Coordinate Plane.
But where would they get a Coordinate Plane? Why, from La Calculadora, of course. She designed and built it for her team. And that’s when it hit me. Her last name was also Pérez (not a coincidence). The school could be named after her! But she was an eternal 16-year-old. She couldn’t run a school. And so she and the rest of the squad got aged up to adulthood, 21-22 years old, and the story took place five years after the graphic novel. When I tried to design La Calculadora in ChatGPT, it could not, would not, get the uniform right. I spent no less than eight hours trying to force the image generator to get the suit right. It just couldn’t do it. It also gave me some frighteningly real-looking images in its attempts.
Now, I have a secret. I have always thought that most live-action superheroes look like Adam West playing Batman. People in superhero costumes look ridiculous to me. They have ever since I became an adult. I don’t judge people who choose to do it. It’s just not for me. For me, superheroes belong in comics and cartoons. After all, they were intended for kids. So, when I chose to create La Calculadora for everyday classroom use, I went with an American animation style with cel shading.
But still, every single time, it failed to get the boots right, and it failed to do the rib panels on the costume right. Eventually, I just settled for saying the Squad’s costumes had evolved over time.
And that’s the way it went for the whole school year. Every time I brought a member of the Squad in, I modified their costume to match this set.
But then this morning, I found, quite by accident, a picture of La Calculadora’s inspiration, George Perez’s niece, Milla. And I went back to ChatGPT and asked it to model the character closer to her. And what do you suppose it did? It got the costume 95% right on the first try! Suddenly, there’s 16-year-old La Calculadora, staring me right in the face! I did five minutes worth of Photoshop work on it to get it just right. A year later, ChatGPT has figured out how to do what it absolutely couldn’t do before.
This was, without a doubt, the closest image to how my mind’s eye saw the character. And just as suddenly, the floodgates opened. There’s nothing stopping me from making new Solution Squad material, just as they were in the graphic novel that came out nine years ago!
I worked on a turnaround sheet for the character and now it can be drawn on-model again and again. Now, I know all the arguments against AI are going to come up again. I have recently been attacked online by one of my former Solution Squad artists. But perhaps, not coincidentally, said artist still owes me artwork that I paid $400 in advance for, eight years ago. My time for spending money on artwork that I wait years for (or that I never receive at all) has come to an end. I’m also not rejoining the comic book world. I did my time out there, never to be repeated. This time, I am going to stay in my own little corner of the universe, doing what I’m best at: creating materials used to teach kids math!
One of the favorite characters I played in Champions was Silverwing. When I first joined the Aegis campaign right out of college, with Scott Burnham running, I initially played a speedster, which Scott wrote up for me. Scott and I had been friends while I was in college but I didn’t have the time to devote to gaming that he did. I had my studies to concentrate on. Scott ran DC Heroes for us when our little gaming group could get together, and he often playtested his scenarios on our little group before he ran them against his group down in South Bend. Once I graduated in June 1987, I got to sit in on an Aegis game, but there was no room for me as a player. As fate would have it, however, Scott was in a major car accident that summer and was in traction for a month, having broken his hip. He also had permanent nerve damage in his ankle and couldn’t move his foot up and down on the accelerator of a car. When he was well enough to travel, he asked me to drive him to South Bend every Sunday, and they made the concession to let me play since I was useful to the person running their games.
I didn’t really know much about Champions at the time, having only played once before, early on in college. But after two lackluster performances, I knew I didn’t like my speedster and wanted to try something else. At the time I was living in my grandmother’s spare upstairs room and substitute teaching for a teacher on maternity leave in Allegan. My evenings were pretty free. So, I dug into the Champions books to learn what I could about what I was doing wrong. I knew I wanted to play someone fast, someone with martial arts skill and a shield, Captain America being one of my favorite Marvel characters; and Alpha Flight was a popular book at the time, so the flying battlesuit sounded like a fun idea, too. And so I wrapped my patriotic character up in Honolulu blue and silver like my Detroit Lions and off we went.
I really got into playing Champions. I mean really got into it. I bought a game bag in my character’s colors, with matching 12-sided dice. I customized a metal miniature of Vortex, the flying character from The Elementals, and glued a triangular shield on his arm that I cut away from a D&D miniature, and painted it.
By the time January 1988 rolled around, I started tracking my experience points on a piece of graph paper. I also made notes of what or who we faced that week in the game, which later came in handy when I wrote adventure recaps. Just today, I found those experience point trackers in my character folder. I played Silverwing until June 1990.
This progression of character sheets shows not only the changes in the character over time, but also the changes in art styles and even game systems, as the final character sheet is in 4th Edition Champions with the hero creation software.
