Every few years, events in my life come to a head and a paradigm shift occurs. I take a step away from social media, gather my thoughts, and take a new start at life. Today, it happens again.
I’m going back to teaching full-time. I interviewed for an open math position yesterday, and it’s mine. Most likely, I’ll start next week.
The author, doing what he does best
No, Hell hasn’t frozen over, but this is something I need to do for my family. My wife wants to retire so she can start collecting the pension she’s been owed for the past two years. She’s not done teaching either, and will try to get her job back after being separated from the school corporation for 30 days. It’s not well known that in Indiana, due to the teacher shortage, you can teach full-time while still collecting your pension. But there’s no guarantee that she’d get her old job back, and someone in our family needs to carry health insurance for us in case that doesn’t work out. And that’s me.
I’ve enjoyed my retirement time, goofing off every day while making far more than I’m worth as a substitute teacher. But last fall when I got COVID, I lost $1400 in salary by missing only four days of work. It occurred to us, what if I’m hospitalized? What if I get really sick? Then my non-pension income just vanishes. Magi is eligible for early Social Security, so in the same circumstance, she could have two incomes. But mine would be limited to my pension, which doesn’t cover the bills. If I teach four more years, while Sera is in school, I’ll be 63 and therefore eligible for early Social Security as well.
But the truth is, I’m also a bit bored. I banged out a 60,000-word novel in November during NaNoWriMo. My writing partner and I have spent two months editing it and rewriting parts, and the parts that need the least editing and rewriting are the parts where the male lead teaches. “Write what you know,” they always say. I know how to teach. It’s what I spent 31 years doing in the classroom, and I truthfully miss it. I’ve been tutoring online right along, and the kids I’ve substituted for have come to me for math help frequently. The other day I subbed for a math teacher, and the kids were solving linear equations by substitution. Despite the teacher leaving a video of instruction on how to do it, I explained it better in person and helped a great many of them with the assignment. It’s a wonderful feeling; one of the best.
This change in perspective is also fueled by the idea that I’m only 59. Normal retirement age (for full Social Security) is 67. Early retirement has made me feel older than I actually am. This may be my childhood trauma talking, but I don’t feel like I deserve to be retired yet.
With our daughter headed to Purdue in the fall and her nightly absence due to the advent of Robotics competition season, the reality of empty nest syndrome hit us like the proverbial ton of bricks. What are we going to do? Where are we going to live? Do we need a two-story, four-bedroom house for two old people? So, we’re making plans to pile up as much money as we can while renovating our 24-year-old house so we can head south for the winter, so to speak. And looking around the house at the sheer amount of stuff that doesn’t need to travel with us is daunting.
And after dabbling in running roleplaying games and restoring old Mego action figures, I finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and I want to be a writer. I’m a natural storyteller (as anyone who knows me will tell you) and I’d like to spend my golden years doing that. So, my goals for the next four years are set. I’ll take stock then and figure out what comes after.
I set up at my buddies’ local toy and comics show yesterday. It was the first time I brought any Megos out for sale, to go with the Hallmark ornaments I’ve been selling for a friend.
Sales were light as the traffic was pretty limited due to the inclement weather. But I think this model might be workable. I had a couple of people stop by the table, and instantly smiled and fell into reminiscence about their Mego figures. One even told me that he had a few that were broken. I told them I could fix them and we exchanged numbers. Another dealer asked me, after he saw what I had out, if old, broken Megos had any value. I said, “They do to me.” He even had them with him but not on display. He got them out and we worked out a deal.
Now, this might look like a pile of junk to most people, but to me, it’s a gold mine. I mean, yes, some of it is junk. But the Captain America, Aquaman, and Conan were decent, despite Conan missing part of his leg. And let me tell you, whoever owned these toys as a kid must have been as mean as Sid Harris in Toy Story, because they weren’t broken at the knee joints like most Megos break, but they were broken below the knees, where it’s nothing but solid plastic. That takes some serious torque. But after a bit, I was able to harvest fresh vintage knee pins from each one. So, another great reason to do little shows in the area!
Another dealer was working on his own collection and had his Dukes of Hazzard Megos with him. They were in need of repair and I told him I could help him out. I said that next time, I would just bring my spares and tool boxes with me and repair stuff right at the show! I think that would be cool to do. If it becomes known that I do on-the-spot repairs at shows, people will bring business to me!
But the best bit of the day came when my good friend Bruce Nelson just suddenly appeared in front of me. Bruce is a special kind of friend. He drove all the way from Indianapolis just to see me at the show!
I met Bruce at the first C2E2 convention I did with Solution Squad, and he encouraged me to apply for the Lilly Endowment Teacher Creativity Fellowship, which I did, and received! We’ve been friends ever since.
You know, sometimes when I write about the past, people tell me that I make it sound like they are there. I take that as about the highest compliment a writer can be paid. But to me, there’s more to it than that. When I write about the past, it’s sometimes like I want to be there.
I have a vivid memory. It’s colorful. It’s full of sights and sounds and smells. And more recently, I have discovered the tactile sense of memory to be important as well. Working with and on the action figures of my youth has brought about a whole new perspective about my reminiscences. For example, when replacing a boot on a Mego Superman figure, I remember that sometimes it’s easier to get the boot completely back on the figure’s foot than others. You have to extend the foot by bending the ankle to point the toes to insert the foot. Then when the toes reach the sole of the boot, ideally, the foot bends back to flat again, the heel slides in, and the rest of the boot slides on easily over the calf. But sometimes it’s difficult. Sometimes the toes of the figure want to dig straight in the sole of the boot at a right angle and they don’t want to make that final slide. I have spent half an hour trying to get a boot on a Mego toy before, working the insertion at different angles, trying to get it to slide in just right. There’s a satisfying give when it finally happens that’s almost like flipping a switch in my brain that releases endorphins.
I think that’s a part of toy collecting that is overlooked by the people who don’t understand the hobby. When I watched the joyous faces of very serious 40-year-olds as they transformed their Optimus Primes from robot to truck and back again out of sheer rote and physical memory, that’s when I understood it. It isn’t just photos, videos, foods, and songs that take us back. It’s touch as well, and it isn’t just old people. It’s holding something in our hands that we held when we were the happiest in our lives; before we had responsibilities and our imaginations were curtailed by rules, discipline, and structure. And in my case, abuse. If you have read any of this blog at all, you know that I focus on those scant weeks of happiness in the midst of years of horror. It’s almost like there was no way I got enough of that joy during those five years of abuse, and I’m going back to get more, no matter what anyone thinks.
It’s more than that. Not only am I surrounding myself with many of the toys I never had (and was not allowed to play with even if I did have them), but I’m fixing broken toys so that more people can experience the same joy I do. It’s a similar feeling to when I was teaching. I tried, successfully at times, to be the teacher I needed when I was that age. Now that I don’t have that, I’m finding it another way.
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.
Action Comics #484, art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Dick Giordano
There’s a certain bait-and-switch that happens with comic books. Quite often, the cover doesn’t match the contents of the interior. This one was no exception, although the marriage of Superman and Lois Lane does take place within. It’s just that it was the Superman and Lois Lane of Earth-2, the world of the golden age of comics instead of the continuity of the Superman of 1978. And while the outstanding image drawn by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez sold this comic, the interiors were drawn by Curt Swan, the stalwart Superman artist whose work spanned decades. There is nothing wrong with Curt Swan’s artwork. It’s like comfort food to me. But the dynamism of Garcia-Lopez and just the pure joy expressed on his subjects’ faces always sold me on a comic book. I hoped that one day he would succeed Curt Swan as the regular Superman artist. And then, the very next week, I practically got my wish.
DC Comics Presents #1, art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Dan Adkins
On the stands was a new title, DC Comics Presents, sort of a companion title to Brave and the Bold, which had been a Batman team-up book for several years at that point. I loved these sorts of team-ups. If I didn’t know anything about The Unknown Soldier, for example, I could learn about him when he teamed up with Batman in B&B. Outside of actual story, it was a way for DC to maintain their trademarks on dormant characters. DC Comics Presents was Superman’s own team-up book. I’m sure they were gearing up for the upcoming Superman movie that people were talking about. There had already been casting rumors flying about in trade magazines, with names like Robert Redford and Sylvester Stallone in the running. But Starlog Magazine #11, earlier in the year, had a photograph of the new Superman, Christopher Reeve!
Unlike the previous week’s Action Comics #484, DC Comics presents had Jose Luiz Garcia-Lopez art throughout the entire book. And it was gorgeous. It was kind of a silly story written by Martin Pasko, featuring a race across time between Superman and The Flash, who had been drawn into a civil war between aliens, but I loved it anyway. As it turned out, years later, I found out from Marty himself that it was not his favorite story. He and I became Facebook friends and had many interactions. My favorite came on his birthday one year:
“Okay, Marty. I’m going to tell you the same thing I told Elliot S Maggin when I met him a few years ago. And it’s the same thing I told Dennis O’Neil when I met him a few years before that:
“I grew up being beaten every day from age seven until age 12, when my mother allowed me to go live with my father, for fear that her new husband was going to beat me to death. The worst thing he did to me was not the beatings, but burning my comic books in front of me, simply as an act of cruelty. My father was not an abuser, but he was also not a very good example to follow. It was his cheating that led to their divorce and my subsequent abuse. But at least he let me (and encouraged me) to read comics. I didn’t have adult male role models in my life. At least not any in the real world. The men who provided that example for me were Batman and Superman. And those heroes were written by real human beings whose names I knew, and you were most certainly one of them. From various issues of Action, up to and including #500 (one of my personal favorites), to DC Comics Presents #1 to various issues of JLA and World’s Finest, you did your fair share of shaping my life going into manhood. I still believe in the values those characters once embodied to this day.
“I’m 53 now, a middle school teacher for the past 31 years. I help shape the lives of young people. I also create comics, and not in the modern sense that we see Batman and Superman now, written for adults. My comics are written for me at age 12 and 13. They’re written for kids who need them, like I needed you guys.
“My 12-year-old daughter reads comics now too, and she also knows your work from Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. At the risk of turning you into the monster you fear, I wanted you to know just how much your comics meant to me as a child, an adult, a teacher, and a father. I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to meet you face-to-face one day, but I wanted you to know all of this before you got another year older.
“Thank you and happy birthday.”
To which he replied, “I’m literally speechless (yes, that’s a joke from Mr. Motormouth, moi). But, honestly and sincerely, Jim McClain: Your deeply moving and beautifully articulated comment is the greatest compliment I’ve ever been paid.”
Marty died not long after that exchange, and I am so very grateful that I had the chance to tell him what his writing meant to me. They say, never meet your heroes, but I think in this case it was one of the highlights of my life.
I also happen to be Facebook friends with Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez. But him, I’ve met in person. I was so looking forward to reading more of the DC Comics Presents series just to see his Superman in every issue, but again, the distribution in my small hometown of Mesic left a lot to be desired, and I never saw another issue of DCP until #26, a couple of years later. I never even got to read the second part of the story that it opened with until I was in college. I admire the Maestro, as he’s sometimes called. He defined what DC characters looked like for an entire generation. You may not know his name, but you know his art.
The 1982 DC Comics Style Guide
1984 Super Powers Action FigureDC Heroes Roleplaying Game
It’s hard to believe that 10 years have passed since the first time I set up as an artist at C2E2. It felt like a big gamble to even see if I could get in, but I did. The timing was so incredibly tight, but it all worked out in the end. The Solution Squad print comics had just come in two weeks earlier, and I felt like I was juggling a lot. I had applied for Solution Squad to be a part of the first open-invitation round of ComiXology’s Submit program, and again, to my astonishment, it was accepted! The online comic went live on April 24, just two days before the convention. It felt like everything was falling into place.
Using our contact at Rink Printing in South Bend, who had printed our comics, we had prints made up of Jordan’s final character designs, as well as professional business cards. I borrowed a display rack from our local comic shop, bought a navy blue tablecloth with criss-cross square patterns on it, like graph paper, and off we went. How many comics should I bring with me? I had no idea, so I just brought them all. They were still in the back of the minivan.
I have to admit, we were nervous when the morning started. The table was expensive, $425, which was not a small investment. Not a lot of interest or people stopping by. Jordan and I were just kind of soaking in the atmosphere of the place. C2E2, even in 2013 was a huge convention, with easily 50,000 people in the convention hall over the three days. Jordan got a few commissions, but I was getting more and more nervous by the minute. I was scheduled to speak at a panel at 12:45, moderated by Josh Elder, of the non-profit Reading With Pictures. I had met Josh the previous summer as he spoke at the Kids Read Comics event in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he seemed very happy to meet an actual teacher interested in making educational comics. So, he invited me to be on the panel with him and Dr. Carol Tilley, the leading expert on Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent, and just a general expert in comics reading history, period. Just before 12:45, I grabbed my dress shirt and my favorite Batman tie, loaded up my laptop, and headed to the nearest restroom to change.
Josh Elder, Carol Tilley, and me at our panel, “Comics and the Common Core State Standards”
To my utter amazement, when I got there, the room was packed. There were easily more than 200 people in the room, maybe closer to 300. I had never spoken in front of that many people before, let alone teachers and professionals. I have to say, I was nervous about how a comic book teaching math would be perceived by actual teachers.
Josh opened the program, talking about how comics had helped him to learn to read as a child. He always cites Transformers #4 as the specific issue. And his tagline of “Hooked on comics worked for me” always gets a chuckle. That gave me a natural segue going into my part of the presentation because my hook into reading was Superboy #165, from…a few years before Josh’s comic. I started my presentation with a very bland, but effective opening slide:
My opening slide. Always good for a laugh from teachers!
As a teacher who had had far too many Power Points read to me in my career, I knew this would get a laugh, and it did. There was even a smattering of applause. I immediately went from near-shaking to relaxed. As I went through each slide, I introduced the audience to the characters I created and explained how I used them in class to introduce and teach math concepts. There were lots of murmurs from the crowd, and laughs exactly where I hoped they would land. And when I closed with the final slide, explaining that the Squad flew around in the Coordinate Plane, I thought the place was going to fall apart. There was raucous laughter; thunderous applause. And I got goosebumps. What just happened?
Still makes people laugh!
I listened to Carol’s presentation, and I never fail to learn something from her. But I was feeling just a rush of energy that made it hard to concentrate. After the whole panel ended, I was absolutely mobbed. People rushed up to shake my hand and tell me what a great thing Solution Squad was. One teacher said, “This is the most creative thing I’ve ever seen a teacher do!” and that nearly brought me to tears. Jordan, who was at the panel, escaped to get down to the convention table. They could read the writing on the wall. And when they got to the table, there was aleady a crowd. Talk about effective marketing! We had been sitting virtually alone for two hours on the first day of the convention and now we were swamped. After 20 minutes, I finally got back to the table myself, where there was a line of people waiting to talk to me.
One of the people waiting to talk to me was young fourth-year Chicago teacher Amy Hopkins, who bought an entire class set of 30 comics from me. Amy used Solution Squad in her class and even had her students write letters to me about how much they enjoyed the comic. Amy and I have been good friends ever since.
I made another friend that day in Bob Cassinelli, who worked at Gail Borden Public Library in Elgin Illinois. Bob invited Jordan and me to appear at his comic book show, Comic Book Mania, which we were pleased to do. I set up at that show for years afterward.
And I can never forget Bruce Nelson. Bruce was a teacher in Indianapolis who specialized in STEM education. Bruce told me about the Lilly Endowment Teacher Creativity Fellowship, a $10,000 fellowship for Indiana teachers that would allow me to fund my creative pursuits for a summer project. He told me all about how to apply. I did, and I won one of the 100 Fellowships. Less than a year later, I had a check for $10,000 in my hand. I guess the $425 convention table paid off!
After this convention and specifically my panel appearance, Josh Elder invited me to work with him and Reading With Pictures more closely as they tried to complete their work on The Graphic Textbook. I was brought in as a math consultant first, to work with de facto editor Tracy Edmunds, who became yet another good friend, then as a letterer for some of the anthology’s stories, and even an uncredited assistant editor of sorts, making corrections to some of the art in the book. I ended up designing the Teachers Guide using my very limited skills in InDesign, and co-editing that book along with Tracy Edmunds. Thanks to a shift in the Common Core State Standards, which moved prime numbers from a sixth grade standard down to a fourth grade standard, I was asked if my Solution Squad story could be included in the book, which I immediately agreed to. Later, this book would be bought by Andrews McMeel and published as Reading With Pictures: Comics That Make Kids Smarter, which got me my own author entry in the Library of Congress.
This one fateful event changed my life in myriad ways, leading to many more panel and convention appearances, inspiring me to travel all over the country talking about comics and education, making friends and earning accolades as I went. My life in comics was a cascade of new experiences, friendships, and uncountable rewards.
All told, we sold 83 copies of Solution Squad #1 that weekend, and even though those were respectable numbers for an unknown comic book about math heroes, I still remember posting on social media, “I feel like I’ve caught lightning in a bottle.” It was one of the best feelings of my entire life.
