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.
One of the last things I recall about living in Tustin was attending a three-day camp with the rest of my sixth grade class. We were staying overnight for two nights in cabins and had a number of activities that we could participate in. There were people swimming, canoeing, playing volleyball and basketball. One of the memorable parts of the camp was learning about drugs. We learned about marijuana, which I had literally never heard of before. We learned about the effects of alcohol. We learned about barbiturates. When they named several barbiturates, I piped up when I heard the name of one I knew. “I’ll allergic to phenobarbital!”
The camp presenter laughed and said, “I don’t think so. You’re probably thinking of something else.” But no, I am allergic to phenobarbital. I’ve been filling it out on forms my whole life. As it turns out, I was given phenobarbital to keep me docile after I had surgery when I was four years old. It did not work, as I had seizures because of it. And that’s how I know. Oh, those experimental 60s!
But the key memory I have of the camp defined pretty much my entire adult life, and I can’t believe I almost forgot to include it in my memories. I was playing basketball with a bunch of kids that I didn’t know. The sixth grades from three different elementary schools were all staying at the camp at the same time. I was no great shakes at basketball then. I had played organized basketball for exactly one practice before my stepfather forced me to quit in the winter of 1976. As mediocre as I was, I was still athletic and very tall. But as we played, I noticed a kid trying to shoot baskets off to the side of the basketball court. He was receiving a bunch of verbal abuse from some of the more talented kids on the court, and it really made me angry. I didn’t like seeing him get bullied like that. So, I stopped playing with the jerks and went over to play with that kid.
I don’t know what his disability was. I had no background for that. He was verbal, though impaired, but he clearly had severe coordination problems. He was having trouble even getting the ball up to the rim. I spent half an hour helping him to figure out how to make a basket. We got his hand directly behind the ball so he would have enough strength to get it up there, and then it was a matter of accuracy. Aiming for a spot on the backboard was the key. All the while, they boys were still taunting him…and me. I told the kid to ignore them and we kept going.
Finally, the ball went in. He cheered. And I’m not kidding, I thought he was going to cry. And then I thought I was going to cry. I had never felt anything like that in my whole life. It was like a flood of warmth overcame me. I put the ball back in his hands and he did it again. I had never seen such joy in a human being in my life, and I’m not sure I had felt that for myself, at least not in the same way. I had helped someone feel good about themselves. The kid thanked me over and over again, and I just nodded and said it was no big deal. Well, it turned out it was a very big deal for both of us. He had new confidence, and I had a new avocation. I wanted to teach people. I wanted to have that feeling again and again. It was addictive, and a far better addiction than any drug…even phenobarbital.
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!
