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 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.
Edited by George R. R. Martin, Wild Cards is an anthology series of novels, written by a number of different authors, with over 30 volumes at this point, with contributing authors such as Roger Zelazny, Melinda Snodgrass, Lewis Shiner, Walton Simons, Chris Claremont, John J. Miller, Victor Milan, and more. With names like these attached, it seems strange to me that so few people have heard of it.
The premise is simple: In 1946, just after the close of World War II, an alien race from the planet Takis decides to test a viral weapon on the population of Earth, because humans are nearly genetically identical to them. The weapon falls into the hands of a human, who uses it to hold New York for ransom. A high-flying teenage hero of the war called Jetboy tries to foil the plot, but the virus gets released over the city. The Wild Card virus has severe effects. 90% of the people affected by it die horribly, which is known as “drawing the black queen,” 9% survive but are deformed and called Jokers, and the lucky 1% gain super powers and are known as Aces. The effects that this virus and these people have on the world is what the series is all about. The setting of the books spans decades. It begins just after World War II, and runs until present day. There are stories that take place during the Korean conflict, the McCarthy era, Viet Nam, Watergate, and pretty much every interesting time, providing a parallel history to our own. One of my favorite parts of it is that the Dodgers still play baseball in Brooklyn.
The characters in Wild Cards, even the ones with powers, shy away from the tight costumes and flashy code-names from comic books. Well, they stay away from the costumes anyway. One of my favorites is The Great and Powerful Turtle, who is a shy man with telekinetic powers who builds armored shells out of junk cars for protection. The Sleeper starts out as a poor kid in junior high who changes powers and appearances every time he goes to sleep. He soon becomes addicted to stimulants trying to forgo his transformations; some of them are not very pleasant. Captain Trips is a counter-cultured biochemist who gets his powers from various powders that he creates. His “friends,” as he calls them, are different personalities that he becomes when he takes them. They are all named and themed after 60s songs.
Senator Gregg Hartman has a persona named Puppetman who controls people after physical contact and uses these puppets for political gain. His politician’s signature handshake, is often the catalyst for his control.
Deadhead eats people’s brains and gains their memories. I actually created a villain called Abattoir back in the early 90s who gained powers by eating the hearts of his victims, much to my friends’ collective chagrin, and I fully admit that I got the idea from Deadhead.
Demise is a contract killer who survived drawing the Black Queen and shares his death psychically with others. But his real gift is his regenerative ability, but it’s portrayed a bit more realistically than Wolverine’s. Demise ran into problems a few times during the series when his bones are not set correctly and they heal in the wrong position, requiring them to be painfully re-broken.
There are any number of telepathic characters in Wild Cards, not the least of which is Dr. Tachyon, the sympathetic Takisian dedicated to helping those afflicted with the Wild Card virus. Well, he’s dedicated when he’s not drunk or deported; or both. He feels guilt over failing to persuade the American government to take the virus weapon seriously as he tried to prevent its use.
You can find an index to virtually all the Wild Cards characters at this site. There are spoilers within, so beware.
The book series has its own origin story, as the setting and some of the characters came from George R. R. Martin’s own Superworld RPG campaign, with some of the original authors as players. Most of the actual player characters did not survive intact to appear in the series, but the concepts behind many of them did. Since the series’ publication, it has been translated twice into different roleplaying games, starting with GURPS in 1989, and then Mutants & Masterminds in 2008. Coincidentally, I first heard of it in 1987 when I was running a DC Heroes campaign, and I asked the players to come up with original heroes. One of the players “created” The Great and Powerful Turtle, of whom I’d never heard. When I found out about his trick, I asked him to make another, but having been intrigued by his source, I bought and read the first two Wild Cards books. When he came back with Modular Man, a character from the second novel (which he not-so-cleverly thought I hadn’t read), I invited him to leave the group. But on the plus side, I was hooked on Wild Cards!
It’s also been a comic book published by both Marvel and Dynamite, and it’s currently back with Marvel again. I still have a page of original art from the first Marvel series.
Wild Cards, it seems, has been optioned for film or television more times than I can count. I always get my hopes up, and then nothing comes of it. One would think with that much source material to draw from and the popularity of Martin’s Game of Thrones, it would be a no-brainer for HBO. It’s currently with Peacock, as of 2021, but I’m not holding my breath.
On a funny side note, I have a signed copy of the first Wild Cards novel from George R. R. Martin himself. Back in the early days of AOL, you could just write to him, send him $20, and he’d send you a signed copy. I don’t think you can do that anymore.
I took the day off on Friday and went to the movies. This isn’t something I do often, but I was feeling really tired after teaching for eight days in a row. I mean, actually teaching, not the usual babysitting duty I perform as a retired teacher substituting. Going to the movies by myself isn’t a new activity for me. It’s something I did all through the 1990s, when I was working in Gary, Indiana. In the summer of 1996, I lived in Michigan City, Indiana. I had nothing to do in the afternoon after summer school got out, so I spent my time in the dollar movie theater. I would go to two, sometimes three movies a day until I had seen virtually every movie the theater was showing. I would buy however many tickets I needed and take advantage of their free refills on soda and popcorn and have a great old time for about 10 bucks. One of the best movies I saw that summer was That Thing You Do!, a wonderful movie directed by Tom Hanks. To this day, it remains one of my favorites.
I was much younger then, all of 31 years old. I’d hardly see anyone at the theater until late afternoon. Sometimes, I’d be sitting in the theater by myself, which I did not mind. Tom Hanks, who also played a supporting role in the movie, looked young too. That was not the case for either of us when I went to see A Man Called Otto. Who goes to the movies at 12:45 PM? Old people. You know, like me? And like Tom Hanks, who plays recent retiree Otto Anderson, a widower whose disposition is, shall we say, grumpy…also, like me. I loved the movie and its message. I walked out of the theater fully entertained and satisfied, something I haven’t been able to say very many times over the past several years of moviegoing.
Then last night, I watched A Man Called Ove on Amazon Prime. It was the film that A Man Called Otto was based on. Of course, both of those movies were based on a book by Fredrik Backman. Ove and Otto both follow the retirement of the widowered protagonist, who is embittered by the circumstances of his life. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but his becoming a curmudgeon is somewhat earned. He has had a rough time of it, especially since the passing of his wife, and that story unfolds throughout both movies. He’s reached the point where he wants to join his wife in death and contemplates suicide, but not without making almost everyone around him miserable first, and for a long time. His suicide is put off by forced interactions with his new neighbors, a young couple with two children, with whom Otto/Ove feels uncomfortable at first. Despite his interminable crankiness, he softens somewhat when he’s around them, and their mother, only to have the crusty veneer drop back down again when he returns home. Spoiler alert: Ove/Otto eventually finds new joy in life.
This movie hit me where I live. I’m not contemplating suicide, but I have been struggling to find my place in the world as a retiree, and as anyone who knows me would tell you, I am slow to change. It’s taken me some time to find out who I am, now that my identity is not 90% defined as being a teacher. Otto/Ove’s time in the cemetery, talking to his wife, also brought to mind the mortality that I’ve been thinking about lately. Death took two of my friends in late 2022, both unexpectedly, one only a year and a half older than I, the other younger than I am. It’s hard watching the people you’ve known for decades pass before you. It’s also hard watching people who’ve entertained you for decades passing before you.
For a while, there was a local radio station that I would listen to, called The Stream, when I wasn’t in the middle of a podcast, that played music from the 70s and 80s. And I would spend my short, eight-minute commute playing “Dead or Alive,” identifying the artist of each song as either dead or alive. And on some days, all three or four artists would be dead. It was shocking at times, how many of my contemporaries in that business were gone. There go George Michael, Robert Palmer, and Laura Branigan, all dead. That’s depressing. Now that station plays 80s and 90s music and has rebranded itself The Throwback. You would think it would get better, but no. Here comes The Beastie Boys, Stone Temple Pilots, and Nirvana. Well, crap. Yes, only one of the Beastie Boys is dead, but still. So, what are you to do, watching the world that you’ve known, begin to crumble and die off?
Yesterday, I found a box of my old Magic the Gathering cards in my daughter’s old room, which I’m cleaning out to make a new office. I sold off the good cards in my considerable collection years ago. This was just a box of the most common cards, land cards. Mountains, Swamps, Islands, Forests, and Plains. There were a couple of worthless generic cards in the box, too. Nothing to write home about, or so I thought. As it turns out, even the formerly worthless land cards from the first sets can be valuable. There was one particular land card that I had four of that were worth $25 each! What the heck? And the one “rare” card in the box that no one cared about 30 years ago, Nevinyrral’s Disk, from the Unlimited set, was worth $236! I traded the entire box of cards that I didn’t care about at our local game store for a video game console, and once I got the console home, much to my wife’s amusement, I spent the better part of an hour playing Gauntlet. When Gauntlet came out in 1985, I was a college student, dependent on scholarships, grants, and loans to pay for school. My parents contributed nothing to my education beyond high school. My dad even made me pay a share of the rent if I returned home in the summer. So I spent four years as a pauper and was only able to enjoy video games on rare occasions. That hour I spent playing Gauntlet yesterday was an hour spent with a smile on my face. A few weeks ago, I got a Star Wars console game, and each day I spend about a half hour playing all I want. I understand the idea of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) that goes around these days. I understand it all too well because I felt it 40 years ago. The difference is that now, I have the time and resources to do and experience the things I missed out on. I have the time to create, to write, to draw, to read, and to play.
I’m grateful to be able to write about my experiences here on the blog, and I’m going to continue sharing all the things I’ve done and haven’t had time or money to fully develop. Because now I have both, for however long I have left.
I ended my Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game campaign a few weeks ago. The main problem was that I found the Star Trek Adventures game unplayable.
Star Trek Adventures, published by Modiphius, seemed like a cool way to play a Star Trek game at first, but the more I ran it, the less it made sense. The way one completes tasks in the game requires the use of two 20-sided dice. A player adds the appropriate attribute number with their relevant skill number, plus or minus any situational modifiers, and rolls against that number. If they roll at or below that number on either of their dice, each of those rolls is considered a “success.” The gamemaster determines how many successes are required to complete the task and the players must be told that information ahead of time. There are myriad ways to add more dice, re-roll the dice, and achieve critical successes, to the point where it wouldn’t really matter if a player were asked to roll dice at all. This mechanic is good for storytelling, but it’s not great for the type of game where a chance for failure creates drama. Excess successes on the dice provide a game token called Momentum, which could add more dice in later tasks, decreasing even more any chance that the player characters would fail at anything. This begged the question on more than one occasion, “Why are we even rolling dice?”
The game wasn’t all bad. I thought that the “lifepath” method of creating one’s character was good. It reminded me of the FASA Star Trek RPG of the 80s. Having one’s character background inform the character stats adds a layer of depth to the characters that one can play. Another good idea from the game was that of having Supporting Characters for players to play when their main character wouldn’t necessarily be involved in the scenario. If you were playing a helm officer, for example, and the game was focused on the landing party going down to a planet, for example, you could jump in and play Ensign Redshirt. They wouldn’t have the in-depth background of your main character, but they could still play an important role, and maybe even sport a last name! At the very least, they could die a spectacular death, something that Main Characters weren’t supposed to do. The game rules actually mention “plot armor.”
The graphic design of the books was very attractive, but the rules themselves were badly organized. Sometimes you would be reading half a page in on something complicated, only to be interrupted by half a page of flavor text or quotes from one of the many Star Trek shows and movies. And they often weren’t even relevant to what you had been reading!
Another positive to the game was the idea that if you bought the books either directly from Modiphius or a bookseller or game store, they would send you a PDF of the book for free. And since many of the books had black pages with white letters, which is really hard on my eyes, it was a pleasant surprise to find that many of the PDFs had print-friendly versions with white backgrounds and black print. I am particularly pleased about this, because I have the PDFs from the game to use as background information, but now I am ready to sell all the books. I’ll be putting most of them up on Ebay this summer. I am going to keep the boxed starter set (to go with my FASA boxed set), the gamemaster screen, and the Tricorder set with its Original Series-themed rulebook, but the rest of it is going to go, hopefully to someone who will enjoy it more than I did.
“But wait,” you say. “Didn’t you spend a lot of money on your ship and the interiors?”
Yes, I did, but I don’t regret any of it. I will eventually get use out of them, either running an older Star Trek game like FASA, or another diceless game like I wrote about here. Or, I may just use it all to create continuing fan fiction stories and do occasional illustrations. Don’t worry, it won’t go to waste. But for now, I’m putting Star Trek Adventures away, back on the shelf.
“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty, ‘Hi-Yo Silver!’ The Lone Ranger!”
Bam! Bam! Bam! Gunshots ring out.
“With his faithful Indian companion Tonto, the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early Western United States. Nowhere in the pages of history can one find a greater champion of justice. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!”
Now, imagine you’re a child in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. There’s no such thing as television, your family can’t afford to go to the movies, and your only source of information is the cathedral-style radio that takes a place of honor in your living room. The words written above activated the imagination of boys and girls all over the country, as they preceded each episode of the Lone Ranger, starting on station WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan.
I first heard those words when I was around nine years old in 1974, at my Uncle Mike’s house, listening to the very first episode of The Lone Ranger on his reel-to-reel tape machine. I had watched The Lone Ranger TV show with my dad when I was younger, but I’d never heard of a radio drama before. I listened intently, enthralled with the voices and sound effects, and I could almost see the drama unfold in my mind.
When the Lone Ranger was over, he played “The War of the Worlds,” the famous radio broadcast produced by Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on the Air. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds played out like it was an actual alien invasion being reported on the radio. And that was all it took. I was hooked for life. I hoped that someday I could get ahold of recordings like that for myself.
Though we didn’t have the Internet back then, I kept my eye out for any reference to radio shows. And sure enough, on the back of of box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, I saw it.
Superman Radio Show ad from Kellogg’s Corn Flakes
There was a SUPERMAN radio show?? I could hardly believe my eyes. How had I not known of this? Looking back, of course, it’s easy to know why. We didn’t have the Internet, and how else would the topic even come up? Not in conversation around my house, that’s for sure. But I wanted to know what the Superman radio show was like. There was no way I was ever going to get any of the records. $1.50 might as well have been a million dollars to me back then, and I knew my stepfather wouldn’t allow it anyway.
As I got older, I found out more about Old-Time Radio, or OTR. There were dozens of shows, thousands and thousands of episodes of radio drama, comedy, news, and more. Occasionally, I would run across a tape of them and I would buy them whenever I saw them. The Shadow was one of the more common and easily obtained shows. I was familiar with The Shadow because he had teamed up with Batman once in the comics, but the Shadow of OTR was an entirely different character.
Batman #259, guest-starring The Shadow
The Shadow of OTR was dressed normally, one would presume, as he went about town as Lamont Cranston, turning invisible when he became The Shadow. He didn’t carry a gun normally, although there were times when he would resort to using a pistol. He certainly never ran around with a pair of .45 automatics. But getting past all that, The Shadow on radio was simply a treat. The whole idea of a character who turns invisible is pretty easy to convey when you can’t see the hero at all!
Then there were those great Power Records, which combined a large format comic book with an audio drama. Remember those? Featured here is a Star Trek book and record set that I used to have with cover art by Neal Adams. I used to get these whenever I could, especially when they came out with one for the Six Million Dollar Man. There’s a guy who has a whole blog about just these items!
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I really got a healthy dose of radio drama. That was when our local NPR station started broadcasting the Star Wars radio show. What’s that? You didn’t know there was such a thing? Oh, yes. I hurried home each night to listen to it on radio in 1981. It took the Star Wars story and expanded it, filling in gaps where the movie had been edited. There was the usual clumsy expository dialogue that radio has to use to paint the images in your mind, but it used the original sound effects and some actors from the movie, including Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels. The actors who replaced the originals were no slouches, either. Brock Peters took the place of James Earl Jones, for example. You’d be surprised how good it really was, especially since they used John Williams’s Oscar-winning score.
My interest in old-time radio and radio dramas waned in my college years. There just wasn’t anything going on in my world. But when the Batman craze of 1989 came along, a couple of different items came to my attention and sparked my imagination. First, there were some cassette tapes adapting comic book stories that came out. The associated comic books came with them, and the tapes served to add an audio soundtrack. The first one I bought was an adaptation of the Untold Legends of the Batman. It was like the old Power Records, but there was no album cover.
As the next decade progressed, DC, Marvel, and even Disney kept putting out audio dramas. Stories like “Superman Lives!” as well as the “Complete Knightfall Saga,” along with the Rocketeer were all adapted to audio dramas. Later on, we would even see one for “Kingdom Come.” But the real fun came in 1994, when the theatrical version of “The Shadow” was released.
When the Alec Baldwin movie came out, the radio shows made a huge comeback. A company called Radio Spirits started releasing audio cassettes and CDs of the old radio shows and I bought several sets of them. Then with the advent of the mp3 file format and the Internet, old-time radio was everywhere. Streaming sites popped up, and suddenly the world of old-time radio was no longer restricted to small gatherings with tape exchanges. Suddenly you could buy hundreds of episodes of long-forgotten shows on CD for pennies and listen to them on a computer.
I finally got to hear Superman on radio, and I was not disappointed. It quickly became my favorite radio show. The episodes were short, but in its heyday, it was on five days a week! I can only imagine what it would have been like to run home after school to catch the latest episode. Superman didn’t go up against the menagerie of villains from his comic book, but often the bad guys were gangsters, racketeers, and kidnappers. My favorite episodes, though, were the ones where he went up against racists and fascists, like the Knights of the White Carnation or the Clan of the Fiery Cross. It was quite progressive, especially for the 1940s. The only drawback to listening to old Superman shows is my inability to try Kellogg’s PEP cereal. “P-E-P! The sunshine cereal!” I wonder what it tasted like.
When the deluge of OTR programs began, I started doing research on this. My limited exposure to War of the Worlds, the Lone Ranger, the Shadow, and Superman, suddenly expanded. I started listening to Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, The Saint, The Whistler, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar, Dragnet, Gunsmoke, The Green Hornet, and more. I found books on the subject, and read the history. The more I learned, the more I loved it. I started making connections
One of Jack Benny’s supporting cast was lecherous bandleader Phil Harris, a bawdy southerner who constantly kept Benny, whom he called “Jackson,” on his toes. The first time I heard the voice, I just about jumped out of my chair. It was Baloo the Bear from Disney’s “The Jungle Book!” Not only was the voice the same, but the character was very much the same, a jazzy, hedonistic fun-loving guy who could sing scat. Amazing! Then, when listening to another episode, the unmistakable tones of Mel Blanc appeared in a voice similar to Speedy Gonzales. Then it hit me. The mice in “The Mouse that Jack Built,” a 1959 Warner Brothers cartoon, were the characters from this same Jack Benny radio program! When I saw the cartoon as a kid, I had no idea that Jack Benny was a radio star!
On the Fred Allen show, I caught Foghorn Leghorn in the form of Senator Claghorn. Then the floodgates came open. Many cartoons, whether on television or feature films, featured radio performers of old, many doing the same characters or voices that they were famous for decades before. Even “The New Adventures of Superman,” the 1966 Filmation cartoon, starred Clayton “Bud” Collyer as Superman, with Joan Alexander as Lois Lane. Narrator Jackson Beck, whose voice I know you would recognize, since he was active in voice acting for an incredible 73 years, was brought back to narrate Superman.
It wasn’t only voices and characters that were brought back for cartoons. When Mr. Whoopee’s closet would open on Tennessee Tuxedo and everything would fall out, I thought it was hilarious. Imagine my surprise when I was listening to Fibber McGee and Molly from decades before and heard the same thing happen!
Just a few years ago, I was rummaging through stuff in my basement and found cassette recordings of a role-playing game session from 1988. As I thought more about it, I realized just what we were doing. The gamemaster describes the action and plays the part of the characters not portrayed by the players. The players describe their action verbally and act out their characters’ roles, often using voices not their own. We’re not dressing up and acting things out (like LARPers do), but we are doing radio drama. There are a few static images and figures on a map to keep track of where everyone is, but otherwise everything is done by voice and description. They called radio “The Theater of the Mind.” I think it’s still alive and well. It’s just taken a new form.
But if you’re just interested in pure radio, it’s more popular now than it has been since the Golden Age of Radio. With the popularity of podcasts (radio, if you think about it), there are some that talk exclusively about OTR. It’s on Spotify; it’s even on YouTube. Old-Time Radio is everywhere!
Update, 1/25/2023:
I grabbed all four of the Superman radio records on Ebay for $21!
