Ten years ago today, I took delivery of 3,000 copies of my very own comic book, Solution Squad #1. It was a labor of love. What started out as a workbook full of math problems with superhero context became a comic book story about a group of teen superheroes who powers and name were based on math concepts.
The roots of the idea date back to the very early 2000s. Superheroes adorned my classroom. Graphic novels filled my bookshelves. Bored easily with endless worksheets and activities with generic characters and names, I decided one day to spruce up my activities. I made an activity that led students to get to know their textbooks. On it, I put an image of Cyborg from the Teen Titans cartoon (popular at the time) to explain with a word balloon how students getting to know their textbook was like his getting to know his robotic body. Kids loved it. When I had to drill them on math facts (yes, we still had to do that occasionally), I used a 1982 DC Style Guide image of the Flash running across the top of the paper, calling the activities Flash Time. Because everything wasn’t searchable online yet, I stole the line art image from the DC Heroes Roleplaying Game. They loved that too. It made a generic activity more palatable! So, I started incorporating superheroes into all my activities. Instead of graphing butterflies on the coordinate plane, we graphed Superman’s pentagonal insignia while listening to recordings of his old-time radio show on my replica 1933 cathedral-style radio.
Look how bad our phone cameras were at the time!
When I had created dozens of such activities, I thought to myself it might be a pretty cool idea to make them into a book that teachers and substitutes could use. Since I never thought in a million years that DC or Marvel would let me use their characters for such a book, I decided to make my own characters. I had been making my own comic book characters for years, since I was a child. As a young adult, I had participated in superhero role-playing games, and had paid dozens of professionals to draw my RPG characters for me, establishing contacts that would become very valuable later on. I drew for myself as well, but I was never as good as I wanted to be, and I was good enough to know my own limitations. My crude drawings were good enough to get me started in making my own characters. My first was Absolutia. Absolutia can raise and lower temperature. When she raises the temperature, it serves as a model for adding positive integers. When she lowers temperature, we’re adding negative integers. The effort required to change the temperature in either direction is a great model for absolute value—hence, her code name.
Hey, we all have to start somewhere!
La Calculadora was a deliberate choice in trying to reach some of my students of Mexican ancestry. I taught in a community that has a large immigrant population, so I had learned enough rudimentary Spanish to get through some math lessons from our ESL teacher, and one of the first words I learned was la calculadora, or the calculator. I remembered The Calculator as a lame character from my childhood, but the Spanish twist on the word suggested a female character named Dora, and well, there you go. This character wouldn’t just be a weirdo in a suit. She would have a perfect memory and the ability to absorb and store knowledge at amazing rates. You see now how my brain works. From there, I replaced established DC and Marvel characters with my own.
The very earliest La Calculadora image. I hadn’t even finished designing the costumes yet.
Needing a name for my team, I found all the inspiration I needed in the pre-algebra course I was teaching.. One of the key ideas in the class was finding solutions to equations, and Solution Squad provided the appropriate comic book alliteration. I started brainstorming different characters, some of which made it to the final product, and some of which would wait until later.
One of the big ideas for which there was no comic book parallel was a set of twins code-named Abscissa and Ordinate, which are mathematical terms for the x-coordinate and y-coordinate, respectively, of an ordered pair. I knew they were going to be twins, but I hadn’t decided on ethnicity or gender yet. At this same time, my wife and I were preparing to adopt a baby girl from China. I had to prepare to be absent from school for three weeks, and as I started to put together character ideas for Solution Squad, we received our referral with the name and picture of our soon-to-be daughter. The name given to her by the orphanage was Xiao Sheng. Her name began with X! It was an omen! She would become Abscissa, and so I made up an imaginary brother for her and based their story on one I had heard during the adoption process. They would be siblings separated very young and adopted by separate American families only to be reunited later. She was born first, and he was born second. She had running speed and an independent personality, and he could fly and would always follow her lead. Together, they are The Ordered Pair!
The other characters began to fall into place, one by one. Equality is the granddaughter of an African-American civil rights pioneer. She has symmetrical features, and her names and those of her family are all palindromes. She has the ability to duplicate exactly anyone else’s ability. She is the only one of the team who actually has the build of a muscular superhero. She was a star athlete even before she got powers and she looks it. The rest of the characters have realistic body styles and differences.
Radical is my Shaggy character, my comic relief. He is a slacker and sometimes a fool. He’s also a time traveler with the most complex powers. He can generate electromagnetic prisms with bases formed around right triangles. He can then telekinetically move things along the hypotenuse side of the prism. If he pushes his power too hard, he disappears and reappears in another time. There’s no good mathematical reason for that. I had just read The Time Traveler’s Wife, and I thought it would be cool to have a character who would have an excuse for using slang. I dislike it when modern teen comic characters talk like it’s 10 or even 15 years ago. Radical has an excuse. He may have just been to the period where it was groovy to say something rad.
Early Radical, 2007
It was hard to figure out what Solution Squad was. It started as a sourcebook of activities. Then it started expanding to include complete lesson plans. But then I picked up a copy of The Manga Guide to Calculus, and I knew exactly what it had to be. It had to be the superhero comic that I always wanted to make, but with a math lesson embedded within! For the first story, I wanted something cool and fun, not something that every math teacher already knows. So, I built a deathtrap that could be escaped only by decoding a message written with a prime number code. My high school Algebra I teacher, Charles Shimek, taught me how to construct the Sieve of Eratosthenes when I was a freshman in high school. I was actually surprised to find out that some math teachers have never heard of it. Additionally, I use prime numbers and subsequently prime factorization to reduce fractions similar to the way algebraic fractions are reduced. It reinforces old skills, introduces alternate methods, and prepares students for future skills simultaneously.
As I plotted out the story, intending to draw it myself, I designed the characters, did layouts, wrote dialogue, and then started to plant seeds within the story. They would fly in the “Coordinate Plane.”
The early Coordinate Plane, inspired by the Jonny Quest plane
As you can see, I digitally added the SS logo with has a story all its own. I wanted a symbol that tessellated, and I wanted the logo to be able to be drawn on graph paper with few fractions. This took forever.
The original logo
I refined it only once, and master letterer and designer Todd Klein himself, gave it his seal of approval.
I would give them a robotic assistant made up of billions of networked nanorobots–3.92 X 109 robots, in fact. He was a carryover from an old Champions campaign that I ran. His name was UNO (universal nanorobotic operative). I planted percent-change problems, distance-rate-time problems, Pythagorean Theorem problems, anything I could think of for which I already had activities. Any math teachers worth their salt can get math problems out of virtually anything. Solution Squad was going to be like a 24-page Easter egg hunt.
I knew my shortcomings as an artist, and even my attempts at finishing the looks of the characters was making me incredibly discouraged. But then, serendipitously, I saw some of my niece’s artwork from college appearing online. The amazing Rose McClain had a style that was suited much better than mine to representing young characters. I asked her what her plans were, and she said she wanted to get into comics. So, I hired her. For a long time, I couldn’t imagine the characters any other way than the way she drew them.
Rose’s first swing at a Solution Squad character, AbsolutiaAnother pass, with an early version of the costume. I inked this one, so don’t blame Rose.I started playing with colors. My school’s colors were blue and gold.I started adding piping in the ink stageOne of my followup attemptsFinal costume design with insignia to be added later
Then, with all of this drawing, and back and forth, Rose’s art skills exploded.
Final inked version by Rose with insignia drawn by me in Photoshop.
Final version in living color!
So, yes, all of this was preliminary work done well in advance of making the actual comic book. While this was going on, I was laying out the story.
This pretty much remained intact. Note the old Coordinate plane, though
While Rose began work on the actual pages in 2011, we attended Cherry Capital Con (as it was known then) up in Traverse City, Michigan. Using the designs Rose had done, I had the idea to get comic book artists famous for doing teenage or young characters to do character profiles for their origins section. I wanted to do an Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe/Who’s Who section of the comic. I didn’t want to spend time in the comic itself going over origin stories, so I wrote them in prose form. The first profile art we got was from Invincible artist Ryan Ottley.
Absolutia by Ryan Ottley
At the same time, Ryan’s tablemate, Jason Howard, who was doing Super Dinosaur at the time, was tasked to draw the Ordered Pair, Abscissa and Ordinate.
Abscissa and Ordinate, by Jason Howard
Next up was Radical, as I went to Wizard World Chicago that same summer. Carlo Barberi, who had drawn Gen13, was readily available, so I commissioned him! This is one of my favorite sketches of Radical.
Radical, by Carlo Barberi
We launched the comic as a web comic on February 29, 2012, and ran a Kickstarter to raise funds at the same time. Kickstarter was relatively young, then, and from the outside, it sure looked easy. It was not. My Kickstarter crashed and burned, raising only $535 in pledges out of a target of $7500. I determined to press on anyway, paying Rose and the other artists out of pocket by doing extra jobs after school.
Rose and I attended Cherry Capital Con that year in Artist Alley, with only a few pages of the webcomic done. We were just trying to get the word out.
Jim and Rose, Cherry Capital Con 2012
I brought activity pages, pencils with the web address, and some posters I had printed up. We had a vinyl banner held up with PVC pipe that I had fashioned into a stand. Rose got three art commissions, so her show was made!
This next story is one the highlights of my comic book-making career. By chance, I befriended George Pérez on Facebook. One of the advantages of going to comic conventions since 1984 was that I knew a lot of pros, so we had many mutual friends. Just out of the blue, I sent him a friend request and he accepted! I thought, if I was going to have anyone draw the cover of my teen hero comic, it would have to be George. I sent him a message without having any high hopes, explained what I was trying to do with math and comics, and to my surprise, he responded! He said he would have been happy to do it, but he had just signed an exclusive contract with DC Comics. BUT he would he happy to draw a pin-up! I almost fainted. I gave him the specs for La Calculadora (whose real name was not coincidentally, Pérez), and he said he would deliver it at C2E2. I was ecstatic!
When I got to C2E2, I headed directly for George’s table, with Rose and six-year-old Sera in tow. We waited an hour to get up to his table, and when we finally got to talk to him–he had forgotten the drawing at home. I was like, no big deal, and he apologized profusely, and asked for my address. He said he would send it as soon as he got home and that I could send him a check when it arrived. I thanked him, got a photo with him, and took the respectable amount of cash I had saved for this to find another artist for Equality.
George and me, 2012. Again, primitive phone cameras!
I found Jamal Igle, who was also a Facebook friend, and asked him to draw Equality. Jamal had done both Supergirl and Firestorm, young characters, and I loved his art style.
Equality, by Jamal Igle at C2E2 2012
I was super happy with that sketch. I thought it captured her natural athleticism.
It wasn’t even a week after I got home that I received the La Calculadora sketch from George.
La Calculadora by George Pérez
I was, and am, over the moon for this piece. It wasn’t long after this that George’s eyesight started failing, and he wasn’t able to do his typically high-quality work. He told me that he had drawn Dora to resemble his niece, Milla, to get a true Latina look.
Milla Vela, George’s niece
With all six profile pics done, I started shopping for a cover artist. Quite by accident, I discovered Steven E. Gordon, the character designer of X-Men Evolution. I had already started to work out an elevator pitch for Solution Squad. It was, “X-Men Evolution meets Numbers.” When I approached Steve to see if he was interested in doing the cover, he immediately said yes. I gave him Rose’s character art and asked for something quite specific.
When I was a boy, I saw my first DC Comics treasury, the Batman one with the Neal Adams cover, and I begged my mother to buy it for me. She scolded me, knowing full well what would happen to it if she bought it for me. But every time we went into a store, I could see it from a mile away. That red background could pierce fog!
Limited Collector’s Edition C-25, cover by Neal Adams
And since the Squad’s colors mimicked Batman’s own, I thought it would be natural. Steve’s son Eric Gordon did the colors.
Solution Squad #1, by Steve and Eric Gordon
As you can see, I had to learn how to make a UPC symbol as well. There was no end to learning while making a comic book.
While the story of Solution Squad was 24 pages, my idea was to make a 32-page comic, so I could include the origin stories as well. And not one to pass up a gimmick, I decided to make it a flip book. One one side would be the story, and if you flipped the comic book upside down and turned it over, there would be like another comic with its own cover and all the origin stories. I wanted to draw a cover myself, so I got to it. By then, we were refining the Coordinate Plane for the comic.
Back cover, pencils by me, inks by Terry Huddleston, colors by Rose
As you can see, my artwork was improving as well, leaps and bounds beyond how I started.
By early 2013, the comic was done. I found out about a local printer, met with them, and priced my book. I had no idea how many to print, but the best price break came with offset printing at 3,000 copies. Each copy would cost 85 cents. That seemed pretty good for offset printing in full color and a cover price of $3.99.
And on April 12, they were delivered. Ever see what 3,000 comics looks like?
3,000 copies of Solution Squad #1
Thanks for going on this journey with me. It was fun putting that story together. There will be another one coming soon when Rose and I hit C2E2 for the first time as pros! Until then!
Hot on the heels of the great treasury-size All-New Collector’s Edition #C-55 featuring the double covered Legion of Super-Heroes came what very well may be my favorite comic book of all time: All-New Collector’s Edition #C-56, Superman vs Muhammad Ali!
All-New Collector’s Edition C-56, Superman vs. Muhammad Ali
With another fantastic wraparound cover, this time by Neal Adams, Superman vs. Muhammad Ali sounded initially like a dumb idea. Of course Superman could easily beat Muhammad Ali in a fight–any fight. I had watched Muhammad Ali fight all through the 70s. I had seen virtually all of his title defenses and losses, including his loss to Leon Spinks on February 15 that year. So, by the time Superman vs. Muhammad Ali came out, Ali was no longer the champ. That diminished the power of the comic book not at all.
Now, Neal Adams was primarily known as a Batman artist. He had done lots and lots of Batman stories. But his Superman covers were just beyond compare. As much as I love Curt Swan’s artwork, when you bait-and-switch a Curt Swan story with a Neal Adams cover, that’s a pretty big shock.
Superman #233, art by Neal AdamsSuperman #317, art by Neal Adams
As soon as I opened the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali comic, it was different than any other Superman comic I had ever read. The opening double-page splash was just Clark Kent, Lois Land, and Jimmy Olsen walking down the street, yet it invited me to stare at it for several minutes. I’d never seen a street in a big city before, but it was easy to imagine that this is what one might look like. I almost felt worldly just taking all the details in.
Superman vs. Muhammad Ali pages 2-3. Art by Neal Adams
It doesn’t take long to get into the action, as the trio find Muhammad Ali shooting hoops with some local kids and naturally, an alien lands to challenge Ali to a fight against his champion. Because in the 1970s, this was not out of the ordinary at all. I loved comics then! When Ali refuses, the alien threatens Earth with destruction by firing two missiles at the planet. While Kent sneaks off to change to Superman, he rushes to the missiles, but finding that they are made of plasma and he passes right through them. By flying in circles at superspeed, Superman creates a wind tunnel powerful enough to affect the mass of the missiles, which then detonate in the ocean. The don’t detonate harmlessly, however, as a tidal wave is set into motion. Superman stops that by slamming his fists together to make a shockwave. At the same time, the aliens, called the Scrubb (unfortunately) have launched two more missiles, that Superman is just a fraction too slow to intercept.
The Scrubb missiles explode. Original coloring.
Now, all of this occurs in just the first dozen or so pages of a 72-page story! It was not a reprint. It was not a collection. This was something special. In effect, Superman challenges Ali for the right to fight against the Scrubb champion. But of course, things being equal, Superman would easily win. But it’s revealed that the Scrubb homeworld orbits a red sun, so Superman wouldn’t have any powers there anyway. Ali agrees to train Superman but they are given only a short time to manage this before they fight each other for the right to go up against Hun’Ya, the Scrubb fighter.
I’m not going to spoil the rest of the story because it really is a lot of fun. There are twists and turns and a pretty big surprise that fooled me as a 13-year old, and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. Trust me, you need to read this comic book. I promise you, it all makes sense in the end.
I studied every page of this comic book for the next year, and that’s not an exaggeration. By the time the next summer rolled around, I had my brother and sister record an audio version of it with me, using the tape recorder I had received for Christmas. You could tell that DC was gearing up toward the big event, and I started buying more Superman comics. Gary Grossman’s book, Superman: Serial to Cereal got a new printing, which I also bought. This was the first time I learned of the Fleischer Superman cartoons of the early 1940s. I had known about the radio show, but had no idea that there were Superman cartoons before 1966. I had also never seen a single episode of Adventures of Superman, the long-running TV show of my dad’s youth. The book explained that Superman had his own movie serials too!
I was born into Batmania, but clearly there had been more to Superman than had met my eye! It was at this point, even before Superman the Movie would be released in December, that my favorite fictional character was shifting from Batman to Superman.
Returning home to my dad’s house on the Night Bus was a transition. I felt like a different boy. And to be certain, I was. I went from being a timid kid who thought he was lazy, worthless, and stupid, to a kid who was coming out of his shell, beginning to gain confidence in who he was and his place in junior high and the greater world. I was able to dress and wear my hair like the other kids in my class for the first time in my life, and I no longer feared getting beaten every day.
My dad being out of work meant that he was home a lot, when he wasn’t out plowing driveways or doing the odd construction job. My aunt Nancy, his younger sister, had moved in with us, which helped with expenses. We only had a two-bedroom trailer, but we converted the dining room next to the kitchen to a small bedroom for her by putting a curtain across the full width of the trailer. Nancy was closer to my age than my dad’s age. When I was 13, she was 22. My dad was 34. She worked in Traverse City, a half-hour drive away, at Grand Traverse Auto. She was a secretary, and she would come home, telling us stories about working in “the city,” And to us, Traverse City was just that. Mesick had a stable population of 376, according to the 1970 census. Traverse City had over 18 THOUSAND people living there!
We travelled to Traverse City fairly often, especially when it was time to do laundry. My grandma had a small washing machine, but no dryer, and in the summer, she would do the wash and hang it all on a line outside. It came back in smelling like fresh Michigan air. But in the winter, we would make weekly trips to the corner laundromat at the end of 16 Road to use the coin operated machines. But about once a month, we would go to Traverse City to do laundry at one of the big laundromats. There was one on the south side of town, right next to a 7-11. While the loads of wash were running, I became introduced to the Big Gulp. I would have an occasional can of Coke at home, or Mountain Dew if I was working for the Amidons. Otherwise, I was allowed two 12-oz. cans of Meijer-brand soda per day. But on laundry day, I got to drink 32 ounces of whatever I wanted! I was high-energy by the time the wash was ready for the dryers.
These trips were also fun, because they would include lunch at a restaurant. My grandma, my aunt, and I would settle in at Chicken Coop quite often, which was just down Hammond Road. We could eat our whole lunch while the wash was in the dryer. But it was a special occasion when we ate Chinese food.
What you have to understand about the 1970s is that Chinese food in America was less Chinese than it even is now. La Choy was a brand that you would find in stores, and my mother had been a fan of La Choy Chicken Chop Suey. There were even painful commercials that sang, “La Choy makes Chinese food swing American!” But there was a Chinese restaurant in Traverse City that served food closer to what we have now in American Chinese restaurants and my grandma loved it. Born in 1914, my grandma had dropped out of school after 10th grade to help support her family. She worked in a Chinese-owned restaurant in Battle Creek in 1930, which of course was during the Great Depression. She had a special affinity for the culture and the food, but she had never made any in my presence because my grandpa and dad, I’m sorry to say, called it “Chink food,” They were pretty free with their racism against the Chinese, and every other non-white race, for that matter. My dad claimed that he had tried Chinese food but it “tore him up” and would insist on a cheeseburger. So, when it was my grandma, my aunt, and me, we were free to get what we wanted. That patriarchy thing ran strong.
My first love was egg rolls. Mind you, I hated cooked cabbage. HATED it. Whenever my mom made it, it stunk up the whole kitchen. But in an egg roll, I found it delightful. And when I discovered hot mustard, I was done. I could live on egg rolls for the rest of my life. I tried everything they put in front of me, but I always ordered egg rolls. This tradition helped me bond with my grandmother even more, if that was possible. It was legitimizing something she loved that the other males in the family made no secret of despising.
Coincidentally, a comic book that had been released at about the same time as my return from my mother’s house put quite a different spin on race. All-New Collector’s Edition C-55 came out in January, and it quickly became one of my favorite comic books ever. Once again, it was one of these great treasury-sized comics, and the cover, to this day, is still my favorite of all time.
All-New Collector’s Edition C-55
This cover, by artist Mike Grell, was something I studied for hours. As you can see, it’s a double cover, illustrating on both front and back, and on the front cover, you see Superboy in the sweet spot, as he should be, as the titular character. But the composition also puts Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy, who I knew were the three founding members of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Oh, sure, Karate Kid is in the background there, too, but I assumed that was because he was popular enough to merit his own short-lived title back in those days. Now, the problem is, all those yellow guys they’re fighting? They’re Lunarites, and this is going to get a bit ugly.
Yikes.
In this comic, the future has been altered so that the United Nations disbanded in 1978, and various nations went to war. The “Chinese Empire” left for the moon and over the next thousand years, became the Lunarites. The writers of the Legion books had long had a whitewashing problem, as just a few years before this, they explained that all the Black people in the future had gone to an otherdimensional island called Marzal that was only sometimes on Earth, off the coast of Africa. DC Comics was going a long way to explain why there weren’t any people of other races depicted in the 30th century setting of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and they did it poorly. I’m hoping that this coloring was supposed to be understood as some kind of evolutionary change, but it’s possible that it was just laziness.
Regardless of the racial undertones, the cover of this book was a textbook in anatomy, perspective, and inking, especially feathering and hatching. I learned a lot while studying it.
I had spent 11 solid months living with my dad, and at last, as of December 5, I was officially a teenager! This was the first birthday I’d spent with my dad and Grandma and Grandpa McClain since I turned six. My grandma made a cake, of course, and on Monday night, we had dinner, followed by cake and ice cream. My dad had unfortunately lost his job at Suburban Furniture earlier in the fall, and had started a new job selling Case tractors at a dealership, and by winter, that job had evaporated as well. He was now doing odd construction jobs for our neighbor and landlord, Dick Amidon, and was helping my grandpa plow driveways.
My grandpa had a 1966 Ford Bronco with a big yellow plow on the front, and spent his retirement winters plowing driveways for people. In northern Michigan, snow fell much heavier than it usually did in other places, and there was always work to do. He’d get up at 4:30 in the morning and plow until seven or so, and then he’d go down to the restaurant for his usual coffee and roll. While my aunt Nancy lived in an apartment in Traverse City, her malamute/samoyed mix named Nikki stayed with my grandparents. Grandpa would take Nikki plowing with him. She loved riding alongside him in the Bronco and kept him company. I remember my grandpa teaching me to plow. It was a blast. First of all, the Bronco was a stick shift like our van, so there was a lot to do besides put the Bronco in gear and move forward. It was clutch, shift, gas, brake, clutch, reverse, clutch, gas, brake, clutch. It was not a boring activity!
After my birthday dinner, my dad had a special surprise for me. He and Grandpa and Grandma gave me a snowmobile! My dad and Grandpa had bought a used Arctic Cat Panther that had been in disrepair due to an engine fire. Together, they got it running enough for me to use. They repainted the engine cowl purple and presented it to me. I was near tears. I had wanted a snowmobile for my whole life. For those readers who don’t know, snowmobiling is a way of life in Northern Michigan. I had been riding snowmobiles with my family since I could sit on one. Usually I rode with my grandma because she wouldn’t go too fast and scare me. Don’t laugh. Snowmobiles can really fly, some easily doing over 100 miles per hour. My Panther topped out at about 50, which was good enough for me. I couldn’t wait to take it out for a long ride, but with basketball practice and games, that would have to wait for the weekend.
A lot of my friends were in band, and though I loved music, I had never been allowed to join band. Try not to be too surprised. My dad, of course, encouraged me to join band. The band teacher, Mrs. Carnahan, said that I had the lips of a tuba player, and started me out in a near-soundproof practice room, learning to play baritone. She explained that baritone music also played using bass clef, and so reading the music would be good training for tuba. It was also a lot easier to carry home for the half-mile walk to the trailer.
A rare photo of me in 7th grade! Ladybug is assisting in baritone practice.
I practiced for about a month, and then started on the tuba, and was able to join the rest of the junior high band soon after. I loved playing in band. The whole idea of listening to what others were doing and then contributing your part in concert, if you will, made me feel a lot less alone and odd. And when I started playing tuba, I could hear my horn filling the room with rich sound. I was the only tuba player, so I often carried the bass line by myself. There was nowhere to hide if I made a mistake. I sat in the back row with Margaret Saxton and Angie Alberts, who played baritone saxophone. And Margaret didn’t punch me anymore, so band was a win-win all around. The band was doing a fundraiser that winter, selling World’s Finest chocolate bars. I was given a case of them to take home and try to sell for a dollar each. And I knew just how I was going to get out of my own neighborhood where Kellie Amidon, who played trombone, would have a stranglehold on the market.
On Saturday, I dragged my snowmobile out of the garage, primed it, pulled the cord, fired the engine up, and off I went. Zoom! I drove the snowmobile across the back field and into the woods where we had been snowmobiling since I was six. I took it across a scary ridge and down into the Glengarry area out in the rural area that no one would ever attempt to cover on foot, where no one else had even tried to sell candy. I sold the entire box in one afternoon! I broke down the empty carton, stored it under my seat, and drove my snowmobile into town. You could do that with snow-covered roads. My mom had sent me a check for my birthday, and earlier in the week we had opened my first bank account. I had deposited five dollars of it in the bank and kept the other five dollars to spend. I went to Jack’s market and bought Firestorm #1. I couldn’t believe it. A new #1 issue of a hero I’d never heard of! I had just missed the beginning of Black Lightning earlier in the summer, and I was not about to let this one slip past me!
Firestorm #1
I bought the comic book, a Marathon bar, and a pack of Star Wars trading cards, total cost 75 cents plus tax. I didn’t want to spend all my money at once! I raced back home, put my snowmobile away, and went inside Grandma and Grandpa’s house to enjoy my finds. This was the quintessential experience I think of fondly whenever I remember this part of my life. I sat in my grandma’s recliner with headphones on, listening to music, while reading and eating a candy bar.
My wife Magi and I have been watching Bosch together recently, and I’ve been thinking about the trend toward 10-episode seasons for TV shows on streaming services. Game of Thrones used that format (more or less), as did Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which I really enjoyed. I kind of like the idea for tabletop gaming purposes. I ran a weekly Champions game for almost a year before I needed a break, but it was too much for me to handle the pressure of preparation, even with a lot of free time to come up with interesting villains, maps, and virtual tabletop tokens..
Grinding in a 162-game baseball season is one thing, but when you’re doing something creative, it isn’t necessarily the best practice. I was thinking toward the end of that experience about the Aaron Sorkin-driven Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, with its never-ending clock that counted down until the next airtime of their fictional TV show. Even when the power went out, the digital clock just kept ticking by some almost metaphorical means. That’s what running an ongoing weekly game felt like.
I think that taking the time to put together 10 games with a fairly tight plot that includes a resolution in the end, that also plants seeds for future events, sounds really nice. And with my recent Star Trek Adventures campaign as an example, you can figure out if it’s just not working and you’re not locked into it for the long term if it isn’t.
I spent a big part of the pandemic collecting superhero role playing games and supplements, but I also picked up Star Trek games, Star Wars games, and a few others. I had a lot of fun with that, because I would buy them in big lots to get the unit price down on the ones I needed for my collection, and then I’d sell off the duplicates in smaller batches, getting the unit price up to a level where I was nearly breaking even. I was collecting for hardly any cost except for my time. And since I enjoyed what I was doing, that was no cost at all.
One of my favorite games to pick up was Mutants & Masterminds. I played in a short campaign back in 2009, but that was another edition of the game. I didn’t know the rules and just kind of went along with whatever the gamemaster said I could or could not do. I never got a real feel for the rules. The most recent edition, the third edition, has the advantage of having four sourcebooks featuring DC Comics characters that I am familiar with. I could kind of get a better handle on the game that way. But the best resource for learning about it was the actual play podcast, Masks and Mayhem. Listening to four people kind of struggle their way through learning the game while playing at the same time was a lot of fun. Mutants & Masterminds is more of a narrative game than Champions, and I’m not sure how that would go with the current group I play with. But that’s where the 10-game campaign would probably work best. Just the other day, I found myself pulling out game tokens for future use from an M&M supplement. If I take my time and put together a decent 10-game run at a leisurely pace, I think it would be a lot more fun for everyone.
Running games is one of my favorite things to do. It’s a lot like writing comics, except you get immediate feedback on your story, whether the intended audience enjoys it or not. The surprises that come with cooperative storytelling are an added bonus. Oftimes, a player’s speculation on what they think is happening is better than what the gamemaster had in mind in the first place, and a good GM will make a minor adjustment to make that speculation the truth. A great gamemaster can sell the players on the idea that it’s what they had in mind the whole time. Unfortunately, I’m not a great gamemaster. I am, however, a good one, and I’m not too proud to switch gears when someone has a better idea than mine, as long as it’s entertaining for everyone. After all, that’s the purpose of the game in the first place.
I think that running a 10-run campaign would be beneficial in other ways. I would have time to write out campaign summaries in some detail. It’s something I used to do back in the 90s when I ran a bi-weekly game. I lived in Michigan City, Indiana, and all my players lived in west Michigan, so I had a 65-minute commute each way to a friend’s house in Paw Paw, where we played. I didn’t mind this commute. I do some of my best thinking when I’m driving on the highway. I’d have time to visualize the game on my way there, and on the way back, I used my Sony microcassette recorder to dictate the game summary while it was still fresh in my mind. The next morning, I would transcribe the summary on my keyboard and distribute it to the players electronically, using our BBS. Yes, those were the days! Now I could just use WordPress, or Discord if I wanted immediate feedback. When I was running a weekly campaign for the long haul, I just couldn’t find the time.
Some of the campaigns I might like to run:
Wild Cards: Flashback–Set in 1986 after the Astronomer’s defeat and during the WHO tour that takes most of the well-known aces abroad, a mysterious drug called Flashback appears on the streets of Jokertown. One dose sends the user on a 12-hour hallucination of the way things used to be, allowing jokers to forget their deformities, at least temporarily. Highly addictive, each successive dose lasts roughly half the time of the previous one. Can a small group of aces and jokers uncover the truth behind the drug epidemic? Mutants & Masterminds 3rd Edition.
M&M Wild Cards
Star Trek: Chimera–While the captain of the starship Challenger (and most of the main characters) is on a landing party, the ship is taken over by once-human Augments who have melded their DNA with other humanoid races from the Alpha Quadrant. Can the landing party hope to sneak aboard and re-take Challenger? FASA’s Star Trek The Roleplaying Game 2nd Edition.
Challenger in orbit
Champions 1989: Escape from Stronghold–With the Champions gone missing, can the player characters prevent a mass escape of the “classic enemies” from the superprison, Stonghold? Champions 4th Edition.
Although my dad and I were living in our own trailer now, my grandma’s house was a short run across a field. I had gone back and forth so often that there was a path between our houses. When we moved out of their house, my aunt Nancy moved back in. My aunt was closer to my age than my dad’s. He was 12 when she was born. She was only nine when I was born. So, when I was much younger, I was like an annoying baby brother who was always hanging around her. I used to watch Dark Shadows with her after she got out of school sometimes when I was four, until I would get too scared. Boy, would she get mad.
Nancy had married young, at only 18, to an older “friend of the family,” that she had grown up having a crush on. He turned out to be abusive, so she left him and came back home. Now that she was turning 22 and I was a less annoying 12, She introduced me to one of my most powerful artistic influences, Fleetwood Mac. She had an external cassette player, which she usually hooked up to her stereo system in the basement that my dad and I had just vacated, but for me she brought it up to the living room of my grandma and grandpa’s house. I listened to the cassette of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on her over-ear headphones. She had a big case full of cassette tapes. She listened to them in her Ford Pinto station wagon as well, so she’d let me borrow one or two for a week, while she had the rest for her drive to and from Traverse City, where she worked as a secretary for Grand Traverse Auto. If you’re going to discover music as an important thing in your life, you really can’t go wrong with Fleetwood Mac.
I wore Rumours out, but I also discovered Seals & Croft, England Dan and John Ford Coley, The Doobie Brothers, Captain and Tennille, and more. I found myself watching less TV and listening to more music. There were some really happy days for me, sitting in my grandma’s recliner with headphones on, reading comic books and magazines, and eating a candy bar. Marathon was my favorite. For the money, you couldn’t go wrong. The hard caramel forced you to eat it slowly. Sometimes I picked up Bottle Caps or Spree, because I could portion those out. I was only treated once a week on Fridays, so I wanted to make my treats last.
Marathon Bar
My reading was now expanding beyond comic books and movie adaptations. Every magazine in existence had Star Wars on the cover. It was a phenomenon. Science Fantasy Film Classics launched with Star Wars on the cover, and it ran for years.
Science Fantasy Film Classics Vol. 1, Issue 1
When I had read the feature article on Star Wars about a thousand times, I read about the other movies that were in the magazine as well. I had never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey nor Forbidden Planet. When I asked my dad about the latter 1956 film, he raved about seeing it in the theater when he was my age, 12 years old. I really wanted to see it then, but there was no way to do so back then. We didn’t have streaming services, or even cable TV. There were no home video stores yet. Either you would catch it in reruns somewhere or it was lost to time.
My favorite magazine back then was Starlog. My first issue was #11. I’d seen it in the bookstore in Cadillac several times, but the cost was the same as several comic books.
Starlog #11
I wanted to read about the makeup men in the cover blurb. I wanted to learn how these movies were made. And what’s that? There was a Superman movie coming! We knew this from DC Comics at the time, because they were running a contest to see if YOU could be in the Superman movie!
I think my grandma and my dad indulged me in these purchases because I wasn’t just reading comic books anymore. On the other hand, I wasn’t reading them any less. Although the Star Wars comic series finished off the events in the movie with #6, the comics continued. MORE Star Wars!
Star Wars #7
These Star Wars comics were crazy. Han Solo and Chewbacca were off on their own with more adventures and misdeeds. But, it was all approved by Lucasfilm, so it counted as far as I was concerned.
Superheroes were starting to fall by the wayside in my view. I wasn’t even paying attention to the Marvel Memory Album Calendar anymore, especially with Tomb of Dracula (what else?) representing the month.
