One of my favorite things about spring and summer was going to the Copemish Flea Market with my Grandma McClain. Held every Saturday, my grandma would always prefer to get fresh fruits and vegetables there from a farm stand, rather than the limited selection available at the local grocery store. They would hold us over until her massive garden started yielding carrots, peas, tomatoes, corn, rhubarb, and blackberries. I only remember growing potatoes once, because they were so inexpensive at the flea market.
I, on the other hand, would be on the hunt for more unusual fare. There was the comic book dealer, who not only sold older comics cheap, but would also trade two for one. But there would also be other stuff, like frog spears, rubber band guns, and other hand-carved toys. I mostly stuck to comic books, always in search of something I missed at the grocery store that served as my only other source. He also had paperback books, something that my grandfather enjoyed immensely.
My Grandpa McClain had his daily routine as a retired ornamental iron worker. He’d get up at 4 AM, make coffee, and then go out to the garage to putter. When my grandma got up at seven, he’d come back to the house for breakfast, and then putter around until lunch at noon. After lunch, he’d lie on the couch, reading a Zane Grey western until he fell asleep in the sunlight, which streamed through the window. He’d still have his cheaters (glasses) on, and his mouth would be wide open. I always thought, wow, that’s the life. He’d go back out to the garage until dinner, then watch the news and whatever show Grandma wanted to watch until bedtime at 11. If baseball was on, everyone was happy, and in the springtime, baseball was on just about every night.
We had a cabinet full of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour westerns. I was free to read whatever I wanted from the cabinet, but I found the westerns to be pretty repetitive. Grandma and Grandpa also had a subscription to Reader’s Digest, which I looked forward to, and their Condensed Books anthologies, which had abridged versions of popular novels of the time. When I found Peter Benchley’s Jaws on the shelf in Volume 98, I knew I had to read it. Just a couple of years before, when I was still living with my mother, we had gone to the drive-in theater, where they played a kids’ movie first, and then a popular movie more geared for adults second in a double feature. The expectation is that the kids would go to sleep for the second feature.
We had a station wagon at the time, and we kids were supposed to lie down and go to sleep in the back. When we went to the show and Jaws was playing, though, I could not go to sleep. That John Williams music was so suspenseful, and the sounds I heard played like the most exciting radio show I’d ever heard. So, I kep sneaking peeks over the back seat. I gave myself away during the scene when Hooper was diving on Ben Gardner’s boat and the fisherman’s severed head floats out through a hole in the boat. I let out an audible gasp and I was busted. My mom figured the damage was done at that point, and let me climb over the back seat to watch the rest of the movie. I was 10 years old, and the memories of feeling like a grown up would stay with me for a long time.
My mom had the original novel, but I wasn’t allowed to read it. I argued that it wasn’t fair because I’d already seen the movie, but it was useless. She wouldn’t let me. So, when the opportunity came up to read the Condensed Book version in my grandparents’ cabinet, I didn’t ask. I had been given carte blanche, remember. I was stunned. Hooper and Brody’s wife? Organized crime? Where was all this in the movie? And the ending was, shall we say, radically different from the movie. I have to tell you that this was a whole lot different than the Hardy Boys books I had read just a few years before. It was closer in tone to the Cyborg novels upon which The Six Million Dollar Man was based. I was starting to get the impression that novel reading was a whole lot more exciting than most people made it out to be and they definitely weren’t all for kids.
I still enjoyed my funny books, but the world was suddenly a much larger place, thanks to Reader’s Digest.
It is the summer of ’85, I’m 20 years old, and I’m driving home from my bagger job at Meijer on Westnedge Avenue in Kalamazoo. I’m cruising north on US 131 in my ’78 Buick LeSabre, windows down, the radio on loud. Voices Carry by ‘Til Tuesday comes on over the speakers. I like this tune, and I’m singing along to it:
“Hush, hush, Keep it down now, Voices carry.”
When the music fades, there’s a short pause, and then the song mysteriously plays again. That’s strange, I think, and I listen to it again. As I said, I like it. Then it plays again. And again. And again. I arrive home after the 20-minute drive, and I run upstairs to the attic room that I rent from my grandmother. I turn on my JC Penney stereo that my mom had found for me at a garage sale, and it’s still playing.
The song played 22 consecutive times that night before the station played a commercial. I felt like I had to see the mystery through to the end, but I never found out why. No explanation was ever given, no mention of it ever made again.
It’s easy to get jaded by adolescent behavior when the kids are growing up substantially differently than you did. “These kids spend all their time on their phones!” “They never go anywhere! They don’t even want to learn to drive!” I hear it all the time. But as I was scrolling through TikTok one night before I went to sleep, as I often do, I kept encountering a band called Burn the Jukebox. They were doing a cover of a Foo Fighters song. I thought, you know, they’re not bad. And I watched a couple more of their videos, and I have to tell you that I was impressed by their range. They covered bands like No Doubt, Alice in Chains, Rage Against the Machine, and even A-Ha and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Then I got hit with a brick. They’re 15 and 16 years old.
Luke, Virgina, Ethan, and Carter, of Burn the Jukebox
Once you reach a certain age, it’s honestly difficult to tell how old kids are, even if you’re a teacher. Some 16-year-olds look like they’re 22. Some look like they’re 12. So, when I saw one video celebrating Virginia’s sweet 16, I was taken aback. These kids have been playing together for three years! They post something new just about every day, and their skills are already impressive. They’ve done tours already, too.
The Internet, being what it is, provides the expected negative commentary: “They reek of privilege!” “That guitarist has a million dollars worth of pedals.” They answer with maturity and unexpected candor. Their parents were musicians, too, and are very supportive. And they’ve bought their equipment with gig money, you know, just like a “real” band would. And believe me, they are a real band. It’s great to hear them honoring the past with the songs they perform. But they also answer their critics who say they should make their own songs. They DO. They have their own original songs that they perform and release. It’s just that the cover songs they produce draw views to their various channels. It’s a successful tactic; it’s what got my attention.
This is the kind of story that makes me happy. It’s kids being kids, following their dreams, not allowing negative people to tear them down, and proving naysayers wrong. Good on these kids!
After high school graduation, I went to work in the same factory where my dad worked: Four Winns Boats. I started at $4.25 per hour, which was significantly better than the minimum wage at the time, $3.35. I was a vinyl puller, also known as an upholsterer. I was one of the people who took the wooden frames that made boat seats, stapled foam on the boards, and stretched the sewn vinyl seat covers over the frames, stapling them down with an air-powered staple gun. It was repetitive work, as there were only two kinds of seat frames I was responsible for, the ones that formed loungers. There was a seat and a back. Each set was two seats and two backs. Someone down the line would assemble them together so that the back-to-back boat seats would expand out so that you could lie down on them. In very short order, I was the fastest puller they had. It was virtually mindless work, and I enjoyed it after four years of high school.
The only problem with the job is that it came with a price. I had to quit my high school baseball team, while we were still playing in the state tournaments. My dad had arranged this job, and if I continued on in the tournament for two more weeks, the job wouldn’t be there anymore. Regrettably, I folded up my uniform and turned it in. I felt like I was letting my friends, teammates, and coach down, but on the other hand, I felt like it was time to grow up. I would need this money for college, especially because my dad lived by the philosophy that since I was 18, I had to pay my share of the rent, even though I didn’t even have my own room in his one-bedroom apartment. I slept on a futon in the living room. I also needed to buy a car, and soon.
Ironically, my high school graduation gift from my parents was a car, a 1974 Chevy Nova that my dad had bought for himself. He got my mother to donate $350, half its perceived value of $700, and he gave me the car; allegedly. My mother was furious. Basically, she paid him $350 for his car and he “gave” it to me. Until he didn’t. Right about that time, my aunt and uncle’s car broke down completely and they needed a replacement immediately. My dad gave them my car. How he gave them MY car, I’ll never know, but like Vin Diesel says in those stupid Fast & Furious movies, it’s about family. I guess. So, there I was, without the car that had been given to me as a gift. It took a few weeks, but along with the graduation gift money I had received from some of my more scrupulous relatives, I scraped up enough to buy myself another car, this time a 1974 Ford Pinto station wagon. Since I paid cash for it, this one had a title in my name and no one was giving it to anyone! I loved that car. It was orange and had mag wheels for some reason. I removed the AM radio it came with and installed an AM/FM/cassette boat stereo and speakers from Four Winns in it with my own hands. Electronics class at the Wexford-Missaukee Area Vocational School really paid off! I even bypassed the normal fuse box so that the stereo could play without the key in the ignition. Now I had freedom that no one would ever take away from me. Because my dad worked second shift and was a supervisor, I was not allowed to work on the same shift, so I worked days. That and having a car freed up my evenings to do whatever I wanted.
One of the first things I did was go to a movie by myself. Yes, I could have gotten a date, but this was special. Return of the Jedi was out in theaters, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by taking a girl to see it. I had already suffered enough jibes from my former classmates for liking this genre. It wasn’t like it is now. So, one evening, I plopped down in a seat by myself in the Cadillac theater with a big bucket of popcorn and a Coke, and settled in. Toward the end of the movie, an unfamilar emotion washed over me. You see, Star Wars had come out when I was 12 years old, the summer before I started junior high. Luke Skywalker was a simple farmboy. When its first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back was released, three years later, I was a high school sophomore. I literally drove my family to see the movie with my learner’s permit in hand. Luke was in his adolescence very much the same as I was at the time. And now, at the end, Luke’s hero’s journey came to fruition, as he proclaimed himself an adult. “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” I didn’t need to be beaten over the head to recognize the parallels. I had come of age. Young, yes, but I was paying my own way. I had a job and a car that I had bought with my own money, and would soon be on my way to college and the rest of my life. The possibilities were endless.
June was filled with graduation parties, so there was always somewhere to go in the evenings. I loved grad parties. All the turkey, ham, and roast beef you could eat, always on the same rolls. I think everyone used the same service to get their food. There was almost invariably a keg, too, but I wanted nothing to do with beer. Pop was my drink of choice, and Mountain Dew was my favorite. Coke would do as well, though. Since I was now paying for my own food, I appreciated free dinners almost every night! Quite often, when I stayed until the end of a party, I would do my good deed and help clean up, and parents would often beg me to take home leftovers. I would, and those became my lunches at work, wrapped up and packed in my Igloo cooler that I had bought the previous summer for the Christmas tree trimming patch. I took that cooler everywhere, even to the drive-in for movies.
When my brother Jeff, who was 12 at the time, came for visitation that summer, I took him to the drive-in so that we could see some cinematic masterpiece like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. We made a bag full of popcorn using the air popper my dad and I had gotten when I was in eighth grade, and put a six-pack of pop in the cooler with ice. I had a dub of Michael Jackson’s Thriller on cassette, and my brother thought it was the greatest album ever made. We played it again and again. It felt good to be a big brother, because I knew what he was going through at my mom’s house.
I took girls to the Cadillac drive-in, too. You might as well just queue up Bob Seger’s Night Moves, so I don’t have to go into detail. I know I remember going to see Flashdance at the theater with one of my high school crushes, but I didn’t see much of the movie.
Later on in June, I traveled down to Kalamazoo for Western Michigan University’s orientation. I had to take a couple of days off work to do it, and I didn’t appreciate losing the money, but it was highly recommended for incoming freshmen. I had never driven a long-distance trip like that before, so it was exciting. What was not exciting was driving the Pinto, which didn’t have air conditioning. When I got there, I saw parents dropping off their kids everywhere, and I was just all by myself. It felt strange but exhiliarating at the same time. We got marched all over campus, touring the facilities, taking placement tests, even applying for work-study for fall. We were also introduced to some of the slightly off-campus offerings, like Bilbo’s Pizza. Named, of course, for the main character in The Hobbit (which I had never heard of), it was a Middle-Earth-themed pizza place, complete with round oaken tables and dark lighting. The only pizza restaurants I had ever sat down in were Pizza Hut and Little Ceasar’s, which yes, had sit-down locations back then.
This was well before Hot ‘n Ready, and even before Pizza! Pizza! was a thing. It was still a cheap-looking place, nothing at all like Bilbo’s. So my small-town self was impressed by the ambience that a real pizza place provided. And the pan-style pizza was pretty good, too!
That visit made me excited. I could hardly wait to start a new life on campus. I had kind of walked away from several of my high school friends at the time. When my two best friends (I thought) planned their graduation parties together and left me out, I got the message that I was not wanted. So, I started making new friends. One of my newer friends was Brian Goodenow, a Pine River student I knew from my class at the Wexford-Missaukee Area Vocational Center. We had been in the same electronics class. Brian was a DJ at WATT, AM 1240, which was only a short drive from my apartment. I spent a lot of time hanging out with him while he was on the air. And I made another new friend at work, Ron Radawiec, who had also gone to Pine River. Ron’s dad had just opened up the very first video rental store in Northern Michigan, so Ron and I would often rent movies to watch at his house when we had nothing else to do. I found the video cassette recorder to be a magical tool, and I envied theirs. Of course, you couldn’t afford to own movies. No, the average cost of a VHS movie was $80-90 back then. That’s why you rented them! Three-dollar rentals were expensive, but nowhere near the cost of a newly released movie. And because of my Pine River connections (it was the high school where all of my Tustin Elementary friends went), I even got a visit one night from Janet Johnson and Robin Byers, my sixth grade crushes, with whom I had also reconnected at the vocational school. They were there for nursing. It seemed like my world was getting bigger than the isolated Mesick High School experience.
Moreover, it felt like my life had come full circle, going back to when I first went to live with my dad. Like Luke Skywalker, I had completed the first leg of my hero’s journey.
The first comic book convention I attended was the Return of King Kon back in 1984. It was held on the campus of Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. My roommate, my girlfriend, and I drove to the show, where we spent the day looking at comic books, and meeting the people who made them. That’s where I first saw a copy of Fleischer Studio’s Superman cartoons, which I had read about when I was a kid. I entered a trivia contest and won second place. As an entry gift, I received a copy of Badger #9, and liked it enough that I added it to my monthly list of comics and sought out the previous issues.
I was hooked.
I didn’t have the financial stability to attend conventions regularly until around 1990, after I had graduated from college and was working full-time as a teacher. I taught summer school just to have enough money to do what my friends were doing, which was getting professional artists to draw my Champions characters. Some of my friends had some pretty impressive sketches already. My friend Scott Burnham had taken one of my drawings to a convention in 1988 and had Mike Gustovich ink over my pencils, which was kind of a thrill. I was terrible at inking, and he made my drawing look a hundred times better.
Quantum, pencils by me and inks by Mike Gustovich
Another friend took Scott’s idea and ran with it, getting Neil Vokes to ink my drawing of his character, Firefrost, in 1989:
Firefrost, pencils by me, inks by Neil Vokes
When I attended Chicago Comicon in the summer of 1990, I sought out artists to draw my newest character, Domino. Domino started out as a detective character who wore ordinary street clothes. He was very much inspired by The Question and The Spirit. But he also carried guns, not to kill people, but to defend himself against the higher-powered characters in the word he lived in. I immediate got Bill Reinhold, the artist from The Badger, to ink one of my drawings.
I was also lucky enough to find Steve Mitchell, who was inking a Batman title at the time, but more importantly, had once inked over Frank Miller in 1980!
Domino, pencils by me, inks by Steve Mitchell
I was really starting to see the difference in how an inker can affect the overall quality of the image. But that was really driven home by being inked by Denys Cowan.
Domino, pencils by me, inks by Denys Cowan
I honestly never cared for this piece after that. My pencils were of uniform quality, but the inking was hit or miss, it seemed. I loved Denys’s work on The Question, but this, to me, was not much more than scribble.
But the find of the show had to have been Brian Stelfreeze. Brian was drawing Cycops, a black and white indy book from Comics Interview, and I loved how different his style was compared to most artists. I caught him early in the show, but his dance card filled quickly. He stayed even after the show ended to finish this one up. He turned the paper upside down, and said, “I’m gonna have fun with this.” And he drew it just how you see it here:
Domino, by Brian Stelfreeze
This remains one of my all-time favorite pieces, and it was drawn upside-down! I paid 30 whole dollars for this one. Over the years, I attended this convention and Motor City Comic Con in Detroit several times, and loved the fan experience. I never thought I would qualify to be on the other side of the table. But a boy can dream…
