I’ve been thinking. I know, I guess I’d better have been thinking because I sure as heck haven’t been posting anything here in a while. A few years ago, one of my friends, Scott Burnham, passed away. I met Scott when I was in college. I had just bought the DC Heroes Roleplaying Game, and we wanted to play, but had no one to run for us. We didn’t know how to run games, so we went to the college gaming group and started recruiting. Scott volunteered. Over the years, I played in a number of Scott’s games and he in mine. And when he passed away, our local comic book store purchased his original art, comics, and gaming materials in the estate sale. They told me, because there were quite a few pieces that I had done among the collection. I’m told this one was his favorite:
Psiren
Now, don’t get all judgy. Scott was a lonely guy. I know why, but that’s not my story to tell. And now that he’s gone, it doesn’t really matter. We had a couple of fallings out over the years, but I still considered him my friend. Anyway, the owner of the store didn’t want to spend the time going through the box because most of the artworks was of Scott’s own characters and the market wasn’t very good for something like that. So, I was given the opportunity to buy all of his art pieces and non-book gaming stuff, character sheets and all for $300. I didn’t really have $300 to spend at the time, but I did it anyway, with the thought that I could probably sell enough from it to at least break even on the deal. And I’d have a lot of my artwork back that I did decades ago.
As it turned out, among the pile in the box, and that’s exactly what it was–a pile in a box, I found this piece:
Dragon by Stan Sakai
I promptly sold this drawing on Ebay for $300 and the bargain was made. Anything else I got from the collection was gravy and I had all my artwork back. I spent some time going through the pile. And I found some gems, and some not-gems. One of the fun drawings I found was this one:
Psiren, by George Perez
And where did I find it? Inside a sheet protector with character sheets for Psiren! There were dozens and dozens of character sheets for Champions in the box, and as I sorted through them, I remembered encountering most of the bad guys in there, and some of the heroes, too. Then it occurred to me that with all of the myriad characters I’ve created, I don’t want them to end up in a pile in a box. So, I am creating The Masquerade Files.
Back in the early 90s, I belonged to a Champions amateur press alliance (APA) called The Clobberin’ Times, and my zine was called Of Masks and Men. So, every two months, I would put at least one character picture and their background in, Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe/Who’s Who style, and sometimes I would include a character sheet.
Abattoir. Hey, the 90s were dark!
Yes, that is indeed a dot-matrix printer page from my Tandy DMP-107, and I wrote it on a Tandy 1000 SL2! Radio Shack at its finest!
With today’s technology, I can do a little better than that!
Boy, the 90s were a dark time!
Now, Abattoir has an interesting history. I was teaching at Lew Wallace High School in Gary, and I had a Vietnamese student who did, indeed, get suspended for getting jumped because the vice principal assumed that, being Asian, he knew Kung Fu or something. I stared at him, dumbfounded. That part of the story is absolutely true. To my knowledge, he was not recruited by an evil corporation and was not experimented on. But then again, it’s been a long time.
Abattoir was the main villain in a Clobberin’ Times gathering at Chicago Comicon one year. A whole bunch of us midwesterners played our main characters in one big game. As was our habit at the time, there was a vote at the end of the game for who played their character best, and that person won the original art, which is seen in the profile box. . Moving forward I will be taking good, long looks at some (or all, if I live long enough) of the characters I’ve created for gaming, comics, and just fun, and I’ll be assembling them all into one big file. I’ve had to go back and relearn InDesign all over again to make the template, but I think I have a handle on it now.
When I was in fourth grade in the fall of 1974, we lived just outside of Hastings, Michigan. It was the longest stretch of attending a single elementary school that I ever had. I had started second grade at Northeastern Elementary, and did all of third grade there, and had just started fourth grade in the same place, despite moving out of town, which would have placed me in a different school. This required me to do an unusual transfer of buses, but my mom wanted me to have that stability.
I have told the tale to my students many times of the time I was hit by a school bus. They often wonder at the hyperbole of it. It certainly sounds more devastating than it was. When I got off the school bus one rainy afternoon, I noticed that my boots (galoshes, really) were unbuckled, and if my stepfather saw them like that, I would get “the stick.” So, I bent over to buckle them up as the bus rounded the corner to make a left turn, the back end swung around and hit me squarely in the rear end, knocking me to ground, carrying on its merry way. I lay there for a minute, splayed flat on the ground, unhurt, and after a moment I realized what a tale I now had to tell. I’d been hit by a bus! I started laughing maniacally.
I started with a funny story to soften this one. It was around this same time that my brother accidentally shut my finger in the car door. Now, you have to realize that at this time, most American-made car doors weighed about the same as an entire compact car does now. When you closed those doors, they made a satisfying “clunk” sound. That sound was drowned out by my yelling when my brother, who was only four years old, caught my pinky finger in the door. We got it back open quickly, but my little finger was a mess. There was a big old blood blister under the nail, and it throbbed.
Over time, my fingernail got infected. My finger was swollen and discolored. By the next weekend, it was looking very ugly, and the nail had started to come away from the skin. My stepfather decided he knew what to do about it. So, on a Sunday evening, he took me over to the sink, held my hand under cold running water, and pulled my fingernail off with a pair of pliers. I probably don’t have to describe the incredible pain I suffered, but it wasn’t enough to make me pass out. I’ve never passed out from pain. I’ve come close once or twice, but I’ve never passed out. I did scream, though. I never screamed as loudly as I did that day in my life. It was the most painful thing I’d ever experienced to that point. As I held paper towels over my finger to staunch the bleeding, I noticed that the quicker picker-upper was filling with blood. Like a lot of blood. We were applying direct pressure like all the first aid directions told us to, but it wasn’t stopping. It was finally decided that Steve would take me to the emergency room before I passed out from blood loss; or worse. He was mad at me because he was trying to avoid taking me to the doctor in the first place and now he was going to have to pay for an emergency room visit. At least he had his priorities straight.
Sitting in the emergency room, I was fascinated to see that they had a color television set up so that people could be occupied while they waited. The television show, Apple’s Way was on. I liked that show, but hardly had a chance to watch it because Steve didn’t like it. It was by the creator of The Waltons, another show he didn’t like. When we were finally called back, the doctor was able to stop the bleeding, and chastised Steve for waiting so long to bring me in. At this time, he and my mother were not married, and he was not my legal guardian, at all. The doctor said that the infection was pretty bad, and that some drastic measures would have to be taken to get it all out. Twice a day, I had to soak my finger in hot water with Epsom salts and then cover the spot where the nail had been with a raw potato for an hour to draw out the pus. This had to be done for a week. As you might imagine, this hurt quite a bit, but by this time, I was no stranger to pain. I did this every morning before school, and when I came home in the afternoon.
The upside of this event was the science experiment that my friends and I got to participate in, as every day we got to watch the progress of my fingernail growing back. When I came to school each morning, I would peel back the bandaid and we’d all check to see how it was going. It took about four months for the whole thing to grow back. All I cared about is that it would be back in time for baseball season, because my left hand was my glove hand. Fortunately, it worked. It stung a little, but baseball took a lot of my pain away back then. It still does.
This machine, The Great Hot Air Popper, is one of the finest ever devised by humankind. Note, I write is, not was. How do I make such a claim? Because even though I got it in 1978, it still works!
When my dad bought this KMart blue light special, it was an outrageous $9.99. Little did we know, however, that it would see me through decades. My dad was out of work for about six months in the winter of 1978-79, and we didn’t have a lot of extra money. So, in the evenings, we ate popcorn. Lots and lots of popcorn. Even then, half a cup of popping corn cost practically nothing, and all you had to do was melt a little butter in the butter tray, add some salt, and you had a reasonably healthy snack for literally pennies. Now, in those days, I liked to experiment and think outside the box with my food. So, when my dad had me put Lawry’s seasoned salt on my popcorn, I thought, why not? It is simply the best, takes less salt to make big flavor, and it’s still my preferred way to eat it.
That Christmas, we had a small tree, and no decorations to put on it. We had a needle, thread, and popcorn, though. We strung popcorn on that tiny tree, and I fed my dog Ladybug about 100 pieces of popcorn as well.
When I went away to college, the Great Hot Air Popper came with me. My dorm room was a popular place in the evening, because cooking appliances were not allowed in the dorm, yet somehow, my roommate knew how to block smells from leaving the doorway, and popcorn was to be enjoyed by many a poor college student who only had to bring an empty bowl.
Nothing is too mundane for me to write about in this blog. And today, I’d like to write about ketchup. Now, you might think that it’s a topic that is relatively meaningless in the world, and you might be right. But in my long and storied life, even ketchup has played its part in the drama.
When my mom was young, she was not what anyone would consider a great cook, by any stretch of the imagination. That’s not to say that it was always the case. Over the seven years she was married to my dad, my Grandma McClain took her under her wing and brought her right along, and Grandma McClain was a farmhouse cook. She could put on a spread. But in the early days of my life, my mom didn’t cook a whole lot. What she could cook, though, was fried potatoes. She would get them sliced really thin, and fry them in a pan with butter and onions, and it was just about one of my favorite things to eat as a kid…with ketchup, of course, as she taught me. Naturally, I ate ketchup on other things, like hot dogs and hamburgers and such, but my primary use of the condiment was on Mom’s fried potatoes. There just wasn’t much better than that.
If we fast-forward a couple of years, though, it gets ugly. Everything does. By then, Mom was with Steve, the father of her newest child, and my dad was in the rear-view mirror, married to Steve’s ex-wife. One of the things Mom did best to make me happy was to make her fried potatoes. We had a pattern in our meals during those years. On Saturday, Mom made pancakes on the electric griddle, and on Sunday before church, she made eggs and fried potatoes. And the very first time Mom made the fried potatoes, I was so excited that I just reached for the bottle of ketchup that was already on the table. I never saw the backhand coming that caught me under the eye. I should have sensed it, but I was temporarily distracted by the prospect of fried potatoes. When my vision cleared, I tearfully asked what I had done wrong. “You didn’t even try the food your mother worked so hard to prepare before you were going to smother it in ketchup,” he nearly hissed. I looked desperately at my mother, whose potatoes were already covered, and she gave me a look that said, just take it. He had taken everything else away from me, and he took that too.
A few years later, Steve took a job in another county, staying with my Grandma B in her spare attic room, while we stayed in Hastings, left to our own devices, and I have to say that it was one of the happier times of my life with him. Mom let us watch TV while we ate, which was unheard of when Steve was around, and more nights than not, she made us fried potatoes for dinner, and I was allowed to put as much ketchup on them as I wanted. As I have said before, my mom did her best to keep us from being completely destroyed at Steve’s hands, and that memory remains strong in my mind as an example of that.
Years again later, when I went to live with my dad, the chains were definitely off. I was often left to myself for most of the day and many nights, and I was expected to feed myself. It was at that point that ketchup became its own food group in my diet. My diet consisted of TV dinners (yay, Salisbury Steak!), pot pies, and hot dogs or macaroni and cheese. Side dishes often included corn chips and cottage cheese. Everything was easy for me to prepare, but the lack of variety produced a need to experiment. It was at this time that I started putting ketchup on macaroni and cheese. As I have writtenbefore, we didn’t get the good Kraft dinners; we bought the cheaper store brand. It needed something. And what do you know, it wasn’t bad! Then I remembered hearing that Richard Nixon liked to put ketchup on cottage cheese, so I tried that. It was great! I couldn’t really stand cottage cheese otherwise, so I started eating it that way all the time.
We just had macaroni and cheese for dinner, and even though it was the fancy Kraft dinner kind, I still had to put ketchup on mine, for old time’s sake. Think I might fry up some potatoes tomorrow!
When seventh grade was finally over and summer vacation began, I couldn’t wait to play baseball. The year before, I had played Little League in Tustin with my dad as an assistant coach, and there was no question that I was one of the stars on the team. But in Mesick, that pecking order had already been established, and I was more like in interloper coming in to disrupt things. Still, I had made friends over the course of the year thanks to my size and being recruited to play basketball, and I was one of the guys now. So, naturally, I wanted to play baseball, which was a sport I was actually good at and had experience playing.
To say that we were dominant as a baseball team would be an understatement. We crushed everyone in our path. These guys had been playing together practically since birth, and their roles were were established. Everyone knew who the pitchers were, who the catcher was, and who played each position. I, who had been used to playing first base, was cast aside in favor of two left-handed players. I was relegated instead to right field. Not because I had a good arm for that long throw to third, but because fewer balls were hit there than the other two fields. I had fielded fly balls for years on the playground, but playing organized outfield was different. I did have a good arm, far better than average, and I loved to unload from the outfield. I was pretty accurate, too. I was happy as long as I was playing.
Can you picture the movie, The Sandlot? Just kids playing in blue jeans and t-shirts? That’s who we were. Kastl Well Drilling was our sponsor, and it was written in black on the front of our orange t-shirts with our numbers on the backs. The head coach our team was Jerry McNitt, the local gas man who also had a trout farm. His son, Eric, was our best pitcher and one of the lefty first basemen I mentioned. Floyd Carpenter was his assistant. Floyd was married to Vonceille, who was the lady in town who cut everyone’s hair. No, I mean it. She was the only stylist in town as far as we boys went. Unless you wanted to drive 20-25 miles to Cadillac or Traverse City, Vonceille was the only game in town. She was also Monty Geiger’s mom, and he was one of my classmates and teammates. They lived right across from the ballfield, so it was convenient!
As the summer went on, I looked forward to Little League every day. There was nothing I loved more than playing baseball, even from a young age. It was one of the few things that I did that my abusive stepfather actually approved of. I still remember the thrill of getting my first baseball glove (from a garage sale) and playing catch with myself by bouncing a hard rubber ball off of the propane tank in our back yard. The cylindrical nature of the tank provided for fly balls, ground balls, and line drives, depending on the angle at which the ball hit the tank. Eventually, I received one of the best gifts ever, a Pitch-Back.
With the Pitch-Back, I could use an actual baseball, another wonderful Christmas gift. I was always amused that my Christmas gifts were usually things that I couldn’t use for months while we waited for good weather, but my dreams were filled with visions of using them, and that sure beat nightmares any time.
One thing I had never dealt with before in baseball but encountered for the first time in Mesick, was a curveball. For those of you who don’t deal in sports very much, a curveball is thrown with an angled spin that makes the ball change course in the air. It is NOT an optical illusion. The raised seams of the baseball provide resistance against the air in the direction of the spin, while the spin accelerates on the downward side. Bernoulli’s principle is at work here. For a right-handed pitcher throwing to a right-handed batter, you literally aim the ball at their lead shoulder, and the ideal pitch will break down and to the left, across the plate for a strike. That means to the batter, for a split-second, the ball looks like it is going to hit you. You have about half a second to determine if it’s a curveball or not, and whether to swing. You determine that by picking up the spin out of the pitcher’s hand as soon as possible. As a kid who had been hit a lot, I was not one to stay still in the box and find out. I flinched almost every single time. Throwing a curve ball puts a lot of tension on the elbow, so it’s generally not something you see until 12 or 13 years old. That added a whole new element to baseball for which I was unprepared.
Still, our team dominated every area team, going undefeated for the entire summer. We beat one team in Grawn 38-0. By the end, we were all batting opposite handed so as not to run up the score even more. When victorious, our coaches would take us to the Dari-Pit for ice cream.
The Dari-Pit, a few years before I was in Little League, but it looked pretty much just like this
This, of course, was the same place my grandma used to take my brother Jeff and me for ice cream, and I knew I loved those banana boats. When it was my turn to order, I ordered the banana boat. The other players jumped on me immediately. Banana splits were for players who hit a home run. Everyone else just got a vanilla or chocolate cone. I was devastated to have committed such a faux pas with my new team. I overreacted and refused any ice cream at all, because I had been conditioned to prepare for punishment for making such a mistake. The coaches wouldn’t hear of it, though, and were great. They just told me gently to check with them next time. This, like so many other instances growing up in Mesick, was a kindness that I would never forget. It was the polar opposite of what I was used to, and how I was used to being treated. Teachers and now coaches were proving to be positive models for adult behavior which I would emuate in my own adult years.
Learning to read in the 1960s with Batman comics and the Batman TV show, it’s small wonder that I identified with Robin, the Boy Wonder. Always at Batman’s side, Robin gave kids, boys especially, someone to project themselves onto. Wouldn’t it be cool to be Batman’s sidekick? To ride along in the Batmobile? Robin was portrayed as about 16 on the Batman TV show, but in the comics by 1969, he was going off to college, so mark him down as 18 years old. He got aged up just a bit so that Batman would have darker solo adventures. He was still around 18-19 years old in comics in 1980, when the New Teen Titans got started. Time passed oddly in the DC universe. Yet, still, he led a whole superhero team at a pretty young age and had a lot more responisbility than most kids his age. When Marv Wolfman and George Pérez matured him for their book, it was time for a new Robin to be at Batman’s side. Dick Grayson abandoned his Robin identity in New Teen Titans #39, which I bought on my very first visit to a comic book store, mentioned here.
This was an exciting time to be reading The New Teen Titans. Longtime readers had been introduced to their newest member, Terra, and many fans thought she was just great. But when it was revealed that she was actually a spy working for Deathstroke, the Terminator, well, the wheels were about to come off the wagon. Suddenly, Dick Grayson discovered that his entire team had been ambused and were missing, and he was fresh out of yellow capes. By summer, the conclusion of “The Judas Contract” storyline was about to conclude, and Dick Grayson needed a new costumed identity.
So, after 44 years of being Robin, Dick Grayson became Nightwing. Now, before we get too far, here, I just want to point out that many barbs have been thrown toward this costume as somehow being inspired by disco because it has a raised collar. Uh, no, you mooks out there. It was inspired by the circus. You know, like Deadman? The other superhero in a circus costume?
Dick Grayson, having been a circus performer, obviously went back to his history to pull out that costume design. It was 1984, for crying out loud. Disco was gone.
Anyway, the comic where this transformation took place, Tales of the Teen Titans #44, was published in July 1984. I had just finished my freshman year of college, the second semester of which being much more successful and enjoyable for me. I had a steady girlfriend whom I had started dating in February, and I was down in Kalamazoo visiting her, when this comic book came out. But I also had a rare opportunity. My brother and sister were also in southwestern Michigan, with my mother and stepfather. They were staying couple of towns over at my stepfather’s parents’ house. I volunteered to come over and get them, and take them to the movies. My mother agreed. So, my girlfriend and I drove over to pick them up. Let’s see, I was 19 at the time (the same age as Nightwing), so my brother would have been 13 and my sister, 12. I took them to see what every kid that age should have seen that weekend: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Despite the more, uh, terrifying aspects of the Raiders prequel, they had fun and I had the unique feeling of being a true older brother, taking my younger siblings to the movies in the summertime, something I hadn’t really gotten to do, living apart from them as I did.
I enjoyed the Nightwing character, especially the part where Grayson was honoring Superman’s Kryptonian heritage as well. For many, many years of World’s Finest, the Batman-Superman teamup comic, Robin worked closely with both men, and I thought it was a nice touch to make a callback to that time. Nightwing was originally a costumed identity that Superman took on in the bottled city of Kandor, naming himself after a Kryptonian bird. Jimmy Olsen, of course, was his Robin, taking on the name Flamebird.
From Superman #158
Unbelievably, Dick Grayson has been Nightwing now for 39 years, almost as long as he was Robin. There have been some, let’s say, unfortunate choices along the way. The mullet, the ponytail, both a few years after they had been in style, for example. Having him be shot in the head and becoming an amnesiac, leaving a scar that looks like his symbol? That was rough. But more recently, the character has been given a new life, using his inhertiance to make life in his city better than perhaps Batman ever could. It’s good stuff.
