As the sixth grade school year drew to a close, my dad asked me if I wanted to play Little League baseball. I don’t think “excitement” is the right word to describe how I felt about that. I had always loved baseball far more than any other sport. I played it in any form at recess in every school I had ever attended. Playing “pickle,” “500,” or playing a full game, I would do it all. I had never had the opportunity to play organized baseball outside of one instance in third grade, where there wasn’t so much as a practice before we were thrown into a huge city tournament, I guess to gauge enthusiasm for that age. But now, I was going to get to play on a team, with actual uniforms, and best of all, my dad was going to be the assistant coach.
As it turned out, I was one of the stars of the team. The head coach, Sherman Holmes, put me at first base, because I was the tallest one on the team, and I could reach higher and farther than anyone else. I loved playing first base, because I got to be involved in every play where a ball was hit on the ground. My favorite player when I was younger was Bill Freehan, the catcher for the Detroit Tigers, but I had no experience as a catcher with the gear and fast pitches, so I gladly made the switch. On my team was virtually every boy from my sixth grade class. We were the only team from Tustin, and we played other teams from around the area, like Leroy and Luther, two other smaller towns that would eventually feed into the Pine River Area School District. But for now, we were just Tustin.
We won most of our games, lost a few, but I can’t describe how good it felt to finally be part of a team, and to be accepted. There was a point, one day before a game, when I was hanging out with one of my teammates, riding bikes around town, and he did something so unexpected, my jaw probably dropped; he lit up a cigarette. I still remember what he said to me: “Don’t tell your dad.” I swore secrecy, and never told a single person until now, as I write this. He offered me a cigarette, but I hated them. I hated the smell. Both my dad and his wife smoked, and both of my stepsisters smoked, and I hated that, too. This boy was up to serious mischief, too, as he also showed me that he had a whole paper sack full of snap n’ pops. By any other name, they were little wads of paper with a tiny bit of gunpowder that would make a satisfying crack sound when you threw them on the ground.
“Snap n’ Pops”
When we got to Little League practice that day, he put a whole bunch of them in the front pocket of his blue jeans. And it went probably just how you’re imagining it. As our shortstop, he mishandled a ground ball, and it hit him right in the front pocket. A really loud crack sounded from the impact, and he doubled over in pain. They had practically all exploded on impact, staining his pants dark with smoke. He wasn’t seriously hurt, but the entire team lost it right there on the field. He had bragged about his contraband, and we immediately knew what it was. That poor guy is probably still traumatized about it to this day.
Meanwhile, my run on Justice League of America continued with issue #145.
Justice League of America #145
The most memorable thing about this comic book for me was that it was the one that taught me about the impermanence of death in comic books. This Count Crystal guy successfully murdered several members of the Justice League, including Superman. I mean, literally, the narration includes the phrase, “Superman’s ghost.” And by the end of the issue, the Phantom Stranger brings them all back to life, so no harm, no foul, I guess.
But there were mixed signals with another comic that came out that month, Showcase #94.
Showcase #94
This comic book described the deaths of the original Doom Patrol. I knew who they were from various reprints, but had never read of their collective demise until now. While The Chief, Negative Man and Elasti-Girl were still dead, Robotman was resurrected to form a new Doom Patrol, which I thought was very interesting. So maybe not all comic book deaths were the same, after all?
As the school year came to a close, I said goodbye to my non-baseball-playing friends as well as Mr. Hunter, and looked forward to seeing them in junior high the next year. Unbeknownst to me, that was not to be.
When I was a freshman in college at Western Michigan University, I had a federal work-study job as part of my financial aid. That meant that I had to go to an office and choose from among a number of available jobs that would allow me to work, and hopefully do classwork at times during the job’s normal hours. I found the best job imaginable. I worked as a projectionist for the Student Entertainment Committee.
Every Friday and Saturday night, the SEC showed second-run movies in Sangren Hall, in two lecture rooms that each had projection booths. My job was to haul four 16mm Bell & Howell projectors from the SEC office about 200 yards away, as well as the film, which was in three (or more) canisters. I would set up the projectors and run the films. Each reel would last about 35-40 minutes, and then I would have to manually transition from one projector to the other, flipping the A/V switch at roughly the same time to transfer the sound from one projector to the other. Then I would rewind the reel, take it to the other classroom, and prepare to start that same reel over again for the second showing. That provided me with roughly 25-30 minutes of free time before I had to go back to the first room for another reel change. During that time, I hung out with the Student Entertainment Committee.
As you might imagine, these guys (and it was indeed made up of all guys) were nerds. They loved film, and surprisingly to me, comic books. I hadn’t read a comic book in four years at that point, having put away “childish things” in order to make myself more attractive to girls my age. But here at school, away from the small town I grew up in for the first time, I found peers who still liked comics. They were talking excitedly one night about the newest Thor comic book, #337, that featured a new writer/artist named Walt Simonson. I was vaguely familiar with Thor from the 1966 cartoons, as well as the Marvel Christmas comics I had. It looked really good to me, too.
Thor #337, art by Walt Simonson
Then they were talking about Wolverine’s wedding in the newest issue of X-Men. I had barely heard of Wolverine. He was a guest star along with the other new X-Men on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. My only exposure to him portrayed him with an Australian accent, sticking his claw through an arrangement on a table and saying to Firestar, “‘Ey, babe, wanna piece of fruit?” These were not the X-Men I knew, and that was not the Wolverine I saw on TV. I thought, wow, I have a lot of catching up to do.
As time went on, I found out that comics weren’t the only nerdy things they were into. They also played a game called Champions. I had no idea what that was, but it sounded interesting. They said it was like D&D but with superheroes. I had never played Dungeons & Dragons, but I knew what it was. My junior high math teacher, Mr. Neahr, tried to recruit me to play when I was in 7th grade. But back then, I was really focused on trying to get along in a new school, and the kids who played in his group were social outcasts. I politely declined, and played sports instead. But now that I was away from my small hometown, I was a little bit more daring, and asked if I could try this Champions game. They had me make up my own superhero and they wrote the character up for me, using their only copy of the rules. I made a character called Darklord, who could manipulate darkness, even using it to make a coherent blast attack. He moved through darkness by teleporting.
Darklord, pencils and colors by me, inks by Barry Winston
One Sunday, we went to one of the guys’ house in Paw Paw, and played. I enjoyed the game at first, trying to see things through the eyes of my character and acting as he would. I understood the basics of rolling dice to simulate success and failure, but their incessant bickering turned me off from playing with them again. I still hung out with them and read their comics while I was working, but I never played Champions with them again.
I would, however, let my imagination wander during classes sometimes, picturing Darklord in action. I would even sketch in my notebook in the margins. I still felt awkward about the nerdiness of comic books and games, but one day, my mind got changed forever. In my honors English class, Writing and Science, a very attractive girl wearing a dance leotard and a long skirt saw me drawing in the margins of my notebook and commented about the art. I was mortified. But she said she actually liked comic books. I could not quite believe my ears. I had seen her around because we lived in the same dorm, but there had been no sign that she was a comic book nerd. I don’t know what that sign would have looked like, but she didn’t wear one. And from that point on, I was never afraid to let my nerd flag fly. She told me about a comic book store on the other side of town, close to where her parents lived, and suggested that I go there. I asked the most obvious question: What’s a comic book store? She laughed and described it, and I probably looked at her like her head was on backward. Whoever heard of such a thing? But I got the address from the Yellow Pages, and on my 19th birthday, I took two city busses, transferring downtown, and took the $10 my mom had sent me for my birthday, and went to the comic book store.
Fanfare Comics and Cards shared part of a two-story home with a country-western radio station on Westnedge Avenue. It was a hole-in-the-wall kind of place, but it might as well have been Disneyland to me. I had always bought my comic books either at the grocery store, the book store in Cadillac, or at the flea market in Copemish. But here was every current comic book on the market on shelves against one wall, while on the other side of the room were tables of boxes of old comic books, protected by some kind of plastic bags. Thousands of comic books! I went through the old boxes, picking up one of my very favorite old ones, Batman #203, which was 50 cents. I found some other old Batman comics that I recognized from my childhood too, and just started a pile. I picked up some new comics, including the latest issue of Thor. They didn’t have the issue that everyone had talked about, #337. That one had been sold out for a while now. But I got the third and fourth issues in the storyline for myself. I bought the new issue of X-Men, and I also found The New Teen Titans #39, which showed Robin and Kid Flash quitting on the cover. I had loved the Teen Titans when I was younger, all the way back to the Filmation cartoons in 1967, so I had to know what that was all about. In other words, I was hooked.
New Teen Titans #39, art by George Pérez
When I went home for Christmas break just a few weeks later, I happened to find a boxed set of Champions at my beloved book store in Cadillac. I didn’t even flinch at the $12 price. I grabbed it.
Champions boxed set
I also found the second part of the Walt Simonson Thor story, #338, in the bookstore window. And then I looked up. There, attached on a vertical plastic strip, were 10 copies of Thor #337, at cover price, 60 cents. I only had enough money for one because I was trying to budget my money for the whole month of vacation, and I bought it. I was satisfied with my purchases, and I went home to read.
Inspired by the comic book store in Kalamazoo, I checked the Yellow Pages from Traverse City to see if there was a comic book store there. And sure enough, one had just opened. It was called the Comics Cave, and it was a lower level store along Front Street. Somehow, I persuaded my grandma to take me up to Traverse City so I could check it out. When we had lived in Mesick, Traverse City and Cadillac were roughly equivalent trips, but now that she lived in Cadillac, it was quite a hike. But she indulged me, and we made the hour long drive. I couldn’t get over the fact that there was something like this so close to where I had lived. I had felt forced to give up my nerdy interests because of peer pressure, but if someone was able to keep a store open dedicated to comics, then I might not have been alone after all. On the wall of the Comics Cave was something I had to have, even if it meant spending my last dollar. It was a New Teen Titans poster with art by George Pérez. I bought it with my last five dollars and stashed it away to put up in my dorm room when I returned. I still have that exact poster today.
New Teen Titans, art by George Pérez
When I got back to school in January and told the guys from the SEC about my Thor purchase, they yelled at me, asking how I could leave all those copies of Thor #337 behind. I didn’t understand why, but they explained that that one comic book was selling for $5.00 now. I didn’t believe that. Who in the world would buy a four-month old comic book for $5.00? They said, “WE ALL WOULD.” So, the next day, I called my dad and asked him to go to the book store and buy them all. When he called back, he said they were marked down to 35 cents apiece. The next time I saw him, I gave him his three dollars and change, and for the rest of that spring, if I needed spending money, I sold off one of the extra copies I had. I got a $45 return on a three dollar purchase!
As fate would have it, the girl from my English class who lived in my dorm and I had the same calculus class up on main campus on Tuesday and Thursday nights. She was a tiny young woman, 5′ 2″. She asked me to walk her back from class in the evenings because it was dark by the time class was over, and there were some poorly lit stretches between Rood Hall and Goldsworth Valley III, where we lived. I agreed. And before you know it, we were dating. I was literally the last of my suitemates in the dorm to get a girlfriend, but with my nerdity on full display, I felt like I had been luckier than they were. Less than a year out of high school, where I couldn’t keep a girlfriend despite giving up comics, I had a girlfriend who also liked comics. We made weekly bus trips to the comic book store and read them and talked about them all the way back. Go figure. I was now a nerd for life.
I didn’t see Star Wars the month it opened. I didn’t see it until later that summer. But the funny thing is that I read the book first. I was a voracious reader, and not just of comic books. I read anything I could get my hands on that sounded cool. And when I saw a novel called Star Wars, I picked it up.
Whew! $1.95!Not quite what ended up happening, but that’s not uncommon in Star Wars stories.
When you read the Star Wars novelization now, you wonder what “George Lucas” really knew about his own movie before he made it. But, as is laid out here with more detail than I would ever include, Lucas didn’t actually write the novelization. A prolific author named Alan Dean Foster did.
The first thing that struck me when reading was that the droids’ names were spelled phonetically. There was no C-3PO or R2-D2. They were See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo, respectively. It was as if each one had a first name and a last name instead of alphanumeric designations. They were called Threepio and Artoo throughout. I remember passages that described Luke getting knocked over in the cantina into some foul-smelling liquid. But the thing I remember most is the phrase, “Servomotors whined in protest,” which occurs no fewer than three times in the book.
I knew it would take some time before I saw the movie, but my imagination had already begun to run wild with the new science fiction hero. After all, the subtitle was “From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker.”
I was in my dad’s apartment in Cadillac, Michigan, on a wintry night home from college for the break. Stevie Nicks’ The Wild Heart played on his little boom box on cassette.
After LPs and 8-tracks, we had cassette tapes!
It was a Christmas present from my aunt, who knew that Stevie Nicks was my favorite member of my favorite band, Fleetwood Mac. I must have spent a thousand hours listening to Rumours on headphones while I read comics at my grandma and grandpa’s house. But now I was a newly minted 19-year-old and I was waiting for Ron Radaweic to come and pick me up so we could go to the bar. We could do that back in those days in Michigan. You just had to be 18 and if you knew the right people, you could drink. Not legally, of course, but Northern Michigan was never really known for its stringent law enforcement. I was not a drinker, either. But the bar was where I would find other people my age. So, there I stood, in the dark, wearing my Western Michigan University hoodie and Levi’s 501 jeans with the button fly, ready to mingle and serve as wingman for Ron. We had worked together the previous summer at 4Winns Boats, doing boat upholstery, and he was one of the first friends I had made post-high school. His parents owned the very first video rental store in Northern Michigan, and we had spent many an evening picking out films that neither of us had seen in the theater. He was back from Michigan Tech, way up in the U.P. in Houghton, and we were going to live it up for a night back.
My dad was out for the night, gone off to wherever ancient 40-year-olds go, and If Anyone Falls came on. I was just thinking about Stevie’s first solo album, Bella Donna, which came out in 1981 when I was back in high school, and we listened to that a thousand times on bus rides to and from games, as well as in the locker room…on eight-track. Yeah, that’s right. Eight-track. I had bought a portable eight-track player for a dollar at a garage sale that supposedly didn’t work. I cleaned off the battery of corrosion with Coke, and put fresh batteries in it, and voila! We had music with us on the road. But high school days were now seemingly long behind, and I was a college man. So much of my identity in high school had been wrapped up in the orange and black school colors and the Bulldog mascot and the town, Mesick. I could walk anywhere in two counties and be recognized by name by the time I was a senior. My grandma would always look at me in amazement and ask how they knew me. High school sports were big in Northern Michigan, and I had played every one that I could: Football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring. I was good enough to get my picture in the papers and cover my varsity letter with medals, but not good enough to get a college scholarship for it. But that was okay, because I had just enough brain to take care of that; or so I thought. While I had finished as class salutatorian in high school, I had just gotten my ass handed to me in my first semester of college. I thought about that as Gate and Garden began.
When I got to college in August, I discovered that my dorm, Eldridge Hall, in Goldsworth Valley III, had more people living in it than lived in my entire hometown. It was culture shock, to be sure, but not as much perhaps as the fact that I was still recognized by the guys on the floor of my dorm. Just down the hall from me was the cousin of the baseball player whose line drive I had caught to save the Class D state championship game in 1982. “Circus Catch,” they called me. The only thing I wanted to do when I went away to college was to forget all about high school, and yet there I was, infamous for it. I tried to focus on my studies, but I’ll be honest, some of my high school classes had not prepared me well. Chemistry was killing me, even though I’d gotten an A in it in high school. The professor was literally a rocket scientist. He had worked for NASA and he wanted you to know it. I struggled with it, but my roommate and suitemates sat in the back didn’t. They used their brand-new TI-55 calculators to share answers. With three 8-digit memories, they encoded the answers to the first 24 of 25 questions on the test. 1 was A, 2 for B, 3 for C, 4 for D, and 5 for “none of these.” I refused to participate in their academic dishonesty, and I paid the price for it. By the end of the semester, I was in desperate trouble. I needed a B on the final just to pull out a C in the class. I studied 14 straight hours for the final, trying to figure out what I’d been missing, and pulled a BA on the final, to get a CB in the class. Enchanted played next.
Why was I even waiting for a ride? Because I had sold my car midway through the first semester. I was very popular with my roommate and suitemates because I was the only one of us four who had a car. Most freshmen couldn’t have one, but I got permission. The 1974 Ford Pinto station wagon ferried those boys back and forth whenever they could persuade me. But one night, as we were piling into the car, I noticed that the “Bulldog Country” bumper sticker on the rear bumper of my car had been torn off. I didn’t like that, but it was no big deal. It was only a bumper sticker, and I was trying to separate myself from my hometown anyway, right? Well, we got about five blocks down the road, and there was a bad vibration, and it got worse. I pulled over and found that all the lug nuts were loose on the driver’s side front wheel. I jacked the car up and tightened them. What a weird coincidence. Then a horrible thought crossed my mind, and I checked the rest of the wheels. All the lug nuts had been loosened on every wheel! I was shaking. Naturally, I thought that the athletic rivals who called me “Circus Catch” had done it, but I had no proof. I drove the guys to their destination and went back to the dorm. I parked the car and never drove it again. I called my dad and told him to come and get it and to sell it for me. Whoever had done it knew it was my car, and I’d never feel safe in it again. Nightbird ended just as the snow started getting heavy.
I popped the tape and flipped it over to play the title song, The Wild Heart, and reflected that the first semester hadn’t all gone badly. I had rediscovered my love of comic books. I had given them all up when I was a freshman in high school because the only place to buy them in my little hometown was a local grocery store, where the girl that I liked, a junior, was a cashier. For me to buy them, I’d have to pay her the money and endure the judgment. It was easier to give them up. But at Western Michigan, I was shocked to discover that there were girls who liked comics too. One of them was in the first class I took, Honors English 105, Writing and Science. She lived in my dorm on the 6th floor (I was on the 5th) and she told me that there was a comic book store in town. I laughed. “What do you mean, a comic book store?” She told me that there was a store that sold nothing but comic books. I couldn’t believe it. What a wild fantasy world! But on my 19th birthday, I visited it for the first time. I was writing a paper for the English class and I interviewed the owners. They had new comics as well as old back issues. My mother had sent me $10 for my birthday, and I spent it all that day. I bought old issues of Batman from the 1960s for a quarter each, as well as the Limited Collector’s Edition featuring the Superman-Flash races, which I had never seen before. I wrote a paper like I had never written before, so excited was I by the discovery and got the highest grade in the class. I vowed to make a trip to that store regularly from that point on. And I took more of an interest in the young lady who had told me about it.
As I Will Run to You, Stevie’s duet with Tom Petty began, I took a good look around the apartment. There was not a hint of my existence except for my cheap plastic suitcase (black with red piping like the Batmobile) on the floor over by the futon I was sleeping on in the living room. I thought back to just a few weeks previous, on that same 19th birthday, when my dad had failed to call me. I was crushed that night, but the more I looked around, the more I thought to myself that it was no coincidence. Out of sight, out of mind. My dad felt that his obligations to me were over once I had graduated from high school. The only thing he missed about me being around the one-bedroom apartment was half the rent and utilities he made me pay to stay there in June, July, and part of August. I didn’t leave so much as a coffee cup in the kitchen when I left. He had me take everything with me. That’s when it finally hit me. I truly was an adult, standing on my own two feet.
Nothing Ever Changes echoed around the empty apartment, as Ron pulled up in his Honda. The evening was uneventful, for me at least, as we tried to talk to people in the bar. It was packed, of course, with all the college kids back for break, and after about an hour, we got ourselves invited to a party at someone’s house. Again, not my scene. I always felt uncomfortable in crowds of people I didn’t know, and that remains true to this day. I patiently waited for Ron to finish his rounds and asked if he could drop me back at the apartment. He agreed, but then went back out into the night to seek his fortune elsewhere, leaving me alone with my thoughts again. My dad called a little after midnight, and told me about possibly getting back together with his third wife, Peggy. Wonderful, I thought. At least he’ll be happy without her kids around. When I lived in her house, I was the youngest of the five step siblings, and if I was gone, they all would be too. Sable on Blond? Gross. I couldn’t wait to go back to school so I could miss that reunion.
The next morning, I went to breakfast with my grandma at the Big Boy down at the corner of Pearl and Mitchell Street. Grandma McClain lived in another one-bedroom apartment in an adjacent building to my dad’s. He still wasn’t home yet from his excursion, so I entertained her instead. I had my usual Mexican Fiesta omelet, and she had scrambled eggs and hashbrowns. My grandma and I had always had a special connection from the time I was born. I was the only grandchild for the first six years of my life, so naturally, she spoiled me a bit. She was only around my brother for about a year of his life before my parents split. I was just about to start seventh grade when my dad and I moved to Mesick to a mobile home across a field from hers and Grandpa McClain’s house. And it was she who had provided the positive influence and unconditional love that had helped to heal the deep traumatic scars that had been inflicted on me in the five years under my stepfather’s roofs. She was focused now on her newest grandson, my aunt’s son Jeremy, who had just been born the year before. I listened to her tell all the stories about him, and I was happy that she had somewhere to focus her energies now that I wasn’t around. I didn’t feel replaced, per se, but I did feel relief that she wouldn’t feel alone with my dad off chasing after another potential wife. After breakfast, we went down to the bookstore that I had been frequenting since childhood and had found so many of my precious treasures that I still value to this day. On this visit, I found a copy of the boxed set of Champions, a superhero roleplaying game that I had had an opportunity to play that fall, that opened my eyes to a whole new world. I also found a copy of Thor #337, by Walt Simonson, that many of my new comic-loving friends had raved about. With the recent trip to the comic book store in Kalamazoo and the idea that I didn’t have to be bound to the restrictions I had placed on myself in high school for the sake of impressing girls, I returned in January to a whole new life, and a whole new me. I hung up my Mesick Bulldogs varsity jacket for the last time and started wearing my late grandpa’s parka, which I had inherited for the really cold days.
The lyrics from Beauty and the Beast rang true in my mind. I had changed.
We often visited my grandparents on Sundays, which was great for me because in the evening after I got bored listening to the adults talk about their adult things, I was left alone to watch The Six Million Dollar Man battling the Venus Probe–in color! As I’ve said before, we only had a black and white television, so even as I watched Star Trek after school every day, it was not quite the same, in is monochromatic monotony. But Grandma and Grandpa McClain had a 25″ color TV, the very height of living room luxury!
The Six Million Dollar Man was my childhood idol. When my stepfather took away all of my comic books and burned them in front of me (“They’ll give you bad dreams.”) I needed a hero. Steve Austin was that hero. If my stepfather had read the source material, as I did, he may have had a different view.
You see, the Six Million Dollar Man from the TV show was an astronaut who was severely maimed from the crash of an experimental spacecraft. The Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) replaced both legs, his right arm and his left eye with bionic (cybernetic) parts. Steve Austin then had tremendous strength, could run at 60+ miles per hour tirelessly, and could see great distances and in the dark. In short, he became a secret agent with super powers.
The television show was clearly made for kids. Steve became the last man to walk on the moon, a famous astronaut. He refused to kill people, and usually only hit people with an open hand. The physics of the show were often questionable. There was no explanation given how when his non-bionic hand was handcuffed to his bionic one, he could simply pull his arms apart and the handcuffs would snap.
Eventually the TV show would spin off The Bionic Woman, featuring Steve’s girlfriend Jamie Sommers, a tennis pro who just coincidentally fell victim to nearly the same kind of injuries while skydiving. She got a bionic ear instead of an eye. There was also a Seven Million Dollar Man, who went bad, a Bionic Boy, with leg implants that compensated for his paralysis, and of course who could forget Max, the Bionic Dog?
When I received the Six Million Dollar Man action figure from my Grandma B for my 11th birthday in 1975, I was the first one in my fifth grade class to have one. I was the envy of all. You could look through his “bionic eye” through a viewfinder in the back of his head. He could lift the included engine block when you pressed a button in his back. Oh yes, my stepfather let me have it over having another doll, but by that time, I was learning to ignore him.
Six Million Dollar Man action figure, image taken from Ebay
During the summer when I was 11 years old, my grandmother took my brother and me to a bookstore in Traverse City, Michigan. Horizon Books was just a hole in the wall on the south side of Front Street then. When we asked if they had any Six Million Dollar Man books, the clerk showed us the original novel upon which the Six Million Dollar Man was based: Cyborg, by Martin Caidin. My grandmother asked if it was appropriate for my age and the clerk replied that it was. I was so excited to see this book that I couldn’t even wait to get back to her house to start reading it.
Cyborg, by Martin Caidin
To my dismay, I found a mistake. The book claimed that Steve Austin had lost his left arm, not his right! I immediately took a pen to the book, crossing out “left” and writing “right” in the margin above the line. And Steve didn’t work for the OSI, he worked for the OSO (Office of Special Operations). What was this?? My grandmother calmly explained that when books were made into movies or television shows, details could be changed like that. Satisfied with (and more than a little surprised by) that knowledge, I went back to reading.
The Steve Austin of the novel was a whole different character from the one in the TV show. This Steve Austin could not see out of his bionic eye, but it did hold a camera that could take up to 20 frames of film. The camera was activated by a button just under the “plastiskin” at Austin’s temple. His arm could not lift great weights because it was still attached to muscles and ligaments in his shoulder. He used it primarily as a bludgeon. But one huge difference in the arm was the CO2 airgun in his finger that shot cyanide-tipped darts. They definitely never had that little contraption in the television show! He also had a supply of flares that he kept in his hollow wrist joint. There was a plug he could pull out to gain access to them. Austin’s legs were also far different. He couldn’t run 60 miles per hour, but he could run without tiring, since his respiratory and circulatory systems were only working to supply oxygen and blood to one limb. His feet had swim fins that could deploy from the underside, just behind his toes.
Austin was much more ruthless in the novel to say the least. He undertook two missions, one to steal a Soviet MiG and one to infiltrate a Central American military complex. He was basically James Bond with built-in gadgets. The novel also dealt with other, more adult concepts, like impotence. Steve Austin’s doctors had specifically chosen an attractive nurse to try to persuade him that he wasn’t a monster. The novel also dealt with suicide, the first time I had ever been exposed to that word. Austin tried to kill himself, after requesting steak and orange juice to eat. It was a ruse to get a glass so that he could break it and free himself from the restraints that kept him in his hospital bed. That’s some pretty serious stuff.
After finishing this book, the TV show never quite had the same lustre again. When Austin battled the Soviet Venus Probe in January, it looked pretty ridiculous, to be honest, even as I enjoyed both parts at my grandparents’ house. Earlier in the fourth season, Bigfoot had returned, as well. And now, armed with a little more maturity provided by literature, I was a little disappointed. Even the comic books were a bit muted now. Fortunately, there was also a Six Million Dollar Man black and white comic magazine that had more adult stories in them. In fact, in the fourth issue, one of the stories was practically taken verbatim from the first novel.
So, at the same time my interest in children’s comic books was being rekindled, I was taking a more mature look at fictional characters through novels and magazines. This would become a common theme throughout my adolescence, and in fact, even into adulthood. I still enjoy childish things as well as more adult entertainment. It’s very possible to hold two thoughts at once.
