Learning to read in the 1960s with Batman comics and the Batman TV show, it’s small wonder that I identified with Robin, the Boy Wonder. Always at Batman’s side, Robin gave kids, boys especially, someone to project themselves onto. Wouldn’t it be cool to be Batman’s sidekick? To ride along in the Batmobile? Robin was portrayed as about 16 on the Batman TV show, but in the comics by 1969, he was going off to college, so mark him down as 18 years old. He got aged up just a bit so that Batman would have darker solo adventures. He was still around 18-19 years old in comics in 1980, when the New Teen Titans got started. Time passed oddly in the DC universe. Yet, still, he led a whole superhero team at a pretty young age and had a lot more responisbility than most kids his age. When Marv Wolfman and George Pérez matured him for their book, it was time for a new Robin to be at Batman’s side. Dick Grayson abandoned his Robin identity in New Teen Titans #39, which I bought on my very first visit to a comic book store, mentioned here.
This was an exciting time to be reading The New Teen Titans. Longtime readers had been introduced to their newest member, Terra, and many fans thought she was just great. But when it was revealed that she was actually a spy working for Deathstroke, the Terminator, well, the wheels were about to come off the wagon. Suddenly, Dick Grayson discovered that his entire team had been ambused and were missing, and he was fresh out of yellow capes. By summer, the conclusion of “The Judas Contract” storyline was about to conclude, and Dick Grayson needed a new costumed identity.
So, after 44 years of being Robin, Dick Grayson became Nightwing. Now, before we get too far, here, I just want to point out that many barbs have been thrown toward this costume as somehow being inspired by disco because it has a raised collar. Uh, no, you mooks out there. It was inspired by the circus. You know, like Deadman? The other superhero in a circus costume?
Dick Grayson, having been a circus performer, obviously went back to his history to pull out that costume design. It was 1984, for crying out loud. Disco was gone.
Anyway, the comic where this transformation took place, Tales of the Teen Titans #44, was published in July 1984. I had just finished my freshman year of college, the second semester of which being much more successful and enjoyable for me. I had a steady girlfriend whom I had started dating in February, and I was down in Kalamazoo visiting her, when this comic book came out. But I also had a rare opportunity. My brother and sister were also in southwestern Michigan, with my mother and stepfather. They were staying couple of towns over at my stepfather’s parents’ house. I volunteered to come over and get them, and take them to the movies. My mother agreed. So, my girlfriend and I drove over to pick them up. Let’s see, I was 19 at the time (the same age as Nightwing), so my brother would have been 13 and my sister, 12. I took them to see what every kid that age should have seen that weekend: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Despite the more, uh, terrifying aspects of the Raiders prequel, they had fun and I had the unique feeling of being a true older brother, taking my younger siblings to the movies in the summertime, something I hadn’t really gotten to do, living apart from them as I did.
I enjoyed the Nightwing character, especially the part where Grayson was honoring Superman’s Kryptonian heritage as well. For many, many years of World’s Finest, the Batman-Superman teamup comic, Robin worked closely with both men, and I thought it was a nice touch to make a callback to that time. Nightwing was originally a costumed identity that Superman took on in the bottled city of Kandor, naming himself after a Kryptonian bird. Jimmy Olsen, of course, was his Robin, taking on the name Flamebird.
From Superman #158
Unbelievably, Dick Grayson has been Nightwing now for 39 years, almost as long as he was Robin. There have been some, let’s say, unfortunate choices along the way. The mullet, the ponytail, both a few years after they had been in style, for example. Having him be shot in the head and becoming an amnesiac, leaving a scar that looks like his symbol? That was rough. But more recently, the character has been given a new life, using his inhertiance to make life in his city better than perhaps Batman ever could. It’s good stuff.
It’s easy to get jaded by adolescent behavior when the kids are growing up substantially differently than you did. “These kids spend all their time on their phones!” “They never go anywhere! They don’t even want to learn to drive!” I hear it all the time. But as I was scrolling through TikTok one night before I went to sleep, as I often do, I kept encountering a band called Burn the Jukebox. They were doing a cover of a Foo Fighters song. I thought, you know, they’re not bad. And I watched a couple more of their videos, and I have to tell you that I was impressed by their range. They covered bands like No Doubt, Alice in Chains, Rage Against the Machine, and even A-Ha and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Then I got hit with a brick. They’re 15 and 16 years old.
Luke, Virgina, Ethan, and Carter, of Burn the Jukebox
Once you reach a certain age, it’s honestly difficult to tell how old kids are, even if you’re a teacher. Some 16-year-olds look like they’re 22. Some look like they’re 12. So, when I saw one video celebrating Virginia’s sweet 16, I was taken aback. These kids have been playing together for three years! They post something new just about every day, and their skills are already impressive. They’ve done tours already, too.
The Internet, being what it is, provides the expected negative commentary: “They reek of privilege!” “That guitarist has a million dollars worth of pedals.” They answer with maturity and unexpected candor. Their parents were musicians, too, and are very supportive. And they’ve bought their equipment with gig money, you know, just like a “real” band would. And believe me, they are a real band. It’s great to hear them honoring the past with the songs they perform. But they also answer their critics who say they should make their own songs. They DO. They have their own original songs that they perform and release. It’s just that the cover songs they produce draw views to their various channels. It’s a successful tactic; it’s what got my attention.
This is the kind of story that makes me happy. It’s kids being kids, following their dreams, not allowing negative people to tear them down, and proving naysayers wrong. Good on these kids!
After high school graduation, I went to work in the same factory where my dad worked: Four Winns Boats. I started at $4.25 per hour, which was significantly better than the minimum wage at the time, $3.35. I was a vinyl puller, also known as an upholsterer. I was one of the people who took the wooden frames that made boat seats, stapled foam on the boards, and stretched the sewn vinyl seat covers over the frames, stapling them down with an air-powered staple gun. It was repetitive work, as there were only two kinds of seat frames I was responsible for, the ones that formed loungers. There was a seat and a back. Each set was two seats and two backs. Someone down the line would assemble them together so that the back-to-back boat seats would expand out so that you could lie down on them. In very short order, I was the fastest puller they had. It was virtually mindless work, and I enjoyed it after four years of high school.
The only problem with the job is that it came with a price. I had to quit my high school baseball team, while we were still playing in the state tournaments. My dad had arranged this job, and if I continued on in the tournament for two more weeks, the job wouldn’t be there anymore. Regrettably, I folded up my uniform and turned it in. I felt like I was letting my friends, teammates, and coach down, but on the other hand, I felt like it was time to grow up. I would need this money for college, especially because my dad lived by the philosophy that since I was 18, I had to pay my share of the rent, even though I didn’t even have my own room in his one-bedroom apartment. I slept on a futon in the living room. I also needed to buy a car, and soon.
Ironically, my high school graduation gift from my parents was a car, a 1974 Chevy Nova that my dad had bought for himself. He got my mother to donate $350, half its perceived value of $700, and he gave me the car; allegedly. My mother was furious. Basically, she paid him $350 for his car and he “gave” it to me. Until he didn’t. Right about that time, my aunt and uncle’s car broke down completely and they needed a replacement immediately. My dad gave them my car. How he gave them MY car, I’ll never know, but like Vin Diesel says in those stupid Fast & Furious movies, it’s about family. I guess. So, there I was, without the car that had been given to me as a gift. It took a few weeks, but along with the graduation gift money I had received from some of my more scrupulous relatives, I scraped up enough to buy myself another car, this time a 1974 Ford Pinto station wagon. Since I paid cash for it, this one had a title in my name and no one was giving it to anyone! I loved that car. It was orange and had mag wheels for some reason. I removed the AM radio it came with and installed an AM/FM/cassette boat stereo and speakers from Four Winns in it with my own hands. Electronics class at the Wexford-Missaukee Area Vocational School really paid off! I even bypassed the normal fuse box so that the stereo could play without the key in the ignition. Now I had freedom that no one would ever take away from me. Because my dad worked second shift and was a supervisor, I was not allowed to work on the same shift, so I worked days. That and having a car freed up my evenings to do whatever I wanted.
One of the first things I did was go to a movie by myself. Yes, I could have gotten a date, but this was special. Return of the Jedi was out in theaters, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by taking a girl to see it. I had already suffered enough jibes from my former classmates for liking this genre. It wasn’t like it is now. So, one evening, I plopped down in a seat by myself in the Cadillac theater with a big bucket of popcorn and a Coke, and settled in. Toward the end of the movie, an unfamilar emotion washed over me. You see, Star Wars had come out when I was 12 years old, the summer before I started junior high. Luke Skywalker was a simple farmboy. When its first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back was released, three years later, I was a high school sophomore. I literally drove my family to see the movie with my learner’s permit in hand. Luke was in his adolescence very much the same as I was at the time. And now, at the end, Luke’s hero’s journey came to fruition, as he proclaimed himself an adult. “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” I didn’t need to be beaten over the head to recognize the parallels. I had come of age. Young, yes, but I was paying my own way. I had a job and a car that I had bought with my own money, and would soon be on my way to college and the rest of my life. The possibilities were endless.
June was filled with graduation parties, so there was always somewhere to go in the evenings. I loved grad parties. All the turkey, ham, and roast beef you could eat, always on the same rolls. I think everyone used the same service to get their food. There was almost invariably a keg, too, but I wanted nothing to do with beer. Pop was my drink of choice, and Mountain Dew was my favorite. Coke would do as well, though. Since I was now paying for my own food, I appreciated free dinners almost every night! Quite often, when I stayed until the end of a party, I would do my good deed and help clean up, and parents would often beg me to take home leftovers. I would, and those became my lunches at work, wrapped up and packed in my Igloo cooler that I had bought the previous summer for the Christmas tree trimming patch. I took that cooler everywhere, even to the drive-in for movies.
When my brother Jeff, who was 12 at the time, came for visitation that summer, I took him to the drive-in so that we could see some cinematic masterpiece like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. We made a bag full of popcorn using the air popper my dad and I had gotten when I was in eighth grade, and put a six-pack of pop in the cooler with ice. I had a dub of Michael Jackson’s Thriller on cassette, and my brother thought it was the greatest album ever made. We played it again and again. It felt good to be a big brother, because I knew what he was going through at my mom’s house.
I took girls to the Cadillac drive-in, too. You might as well just queue up Bob Seger’s Night Moves, so I don’t have to go into detail. I know I remember going to see Flashdance at the theater with one of my high school crushes, but I didn’t see much of the movie.
Later on in June, I traveled down to Kalamazoo for Western Michigan University’s orientation. I had to take a couple of days off work to do it, and I didn’t appreciate losing the money, but it was highly recommended for incoming freshmen. I had never driven a long-distance trip like that before, so it was exciting. What was not exciting was driving the Pinto, which didn’t have air conditioning. When I got there, I saw parents dropping off their kids everywhere, and I was just all by myself. It felt strange but exhiliarating at the same time. We got marched all over campus, touring the facilities, taking placement tests, even applying for work-study for fall. We were also introduced to some of the slightly off-campus offerings, like Bilbo’s Pizza. Named, of course, for the main character in The Hobbit (which I had never heard of), it was a Middle-Earth-themed pizza place, complete with round oaken tables and dark lighting. The only pizza restaurants I had ever sat down in were Pizza Hut and Little Ceasar’s, which yes, had sit-down locations back then.
This was well before Hot ‘n Ready, and even before Pizza! Pizza! was a thing. It was still a cheap-looking place, nothing at all like Bilbo’s. So my small-town self was impressed by the ambience that a real pizza place provided. And the pan-style pizza was pretty good, too!
That visit made me excited. I could hardly wait to start a new life on campus. I had kind of walked away from several of my high school friends at the time. When my two best friends (I thought) planned their graduation parties together and left me out, I got the message that I was not wanted. So, I started making new friends. One of my newer friends was Brian Goodenow, a Pine River student I knew from my class at the Wexford-Missaukee Area Vocational Center. We had been in the same electronics class. Brian was a DJ at WATT, AM 1240, which was only a short drive from my apartment. I spent a lot of time hanging out with him while he was on the air. And I made another new friend at work, Ron Radawiec, who had also gone to Pine River. Ron’s dad had just opened up the very first video rental store in Northern Michigan, so Ron and I would often rent movies to watch at his house when we had nothing else to do. I found the video cassette recorder to be a magical tool, and I envied theirs. Of course, you couldn’t afford to own movies. No, the average cost of a VHS movie was $80-90 back then. That’s why you rented them! Three-dollar rentals were expensive, but nowhere near the cost of a newly released movie. And because of my Pine River connections (it was the high school where all of my Tustin Elementary friends went), I even got a visit one night from Janet Johnson and Robin Byers, my sixth grade crushes, with whom I had also reconnected at the vocational school. They were there for nursing. It seemed like my world was getting bigger than the isolated Mesick High School experience.
Moreover, it felt like my life had come full circle, going back to when I first went to live with my dad. Like Luke Skywalker, I had completed the first leg of my hero’s journey.
Spoilers for Season one of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds follow. Go watch it!
I love this show. I really do. I have watched all 10 episodes of the first season six times each. I will likely do so again before the new season begins on June 15. Yet, according to the person I was for over 50 years, I should hate it with a fiery, red-hot passion.
Confused?
Strange New Worlds is a prequel series to TOS (The Original Series), also known as Star Trek. It takes place about six years before Captain Kirk takes command of the Enterprise. In the year 2259, the Enterprise is commanded by Captain Christopher Pike, whom, as TOS fans know, ends up paralyzed in an accident. He appears in the season one two-parter, “The Menagerie,” which utilizes the original pilot (entitled “The Cage”) for Star Trek, but with a new wrapper featuring the characters the series ended up with. Pike is so bad off, he can only answer questions with one beep or two, to indicate yes or no. In that episode, Spock commandeers the Enterprise to return Pike to Talos IV, where Pike can live a life free from his metaphorical prison with the help of the mental illusion powers of that planet’s inhabitants.
Captain Kirk with Captain Pike
In Strange New Worlds, Christopher Pike is in his prime, at the height of his powers, one of which has to be his remarkable hair.
Captain Christopher Pike, played by Anson Mount and his hair
This Pike is unlike most captains on Star Trek. He is charming and affable, yes, but he freely mixes and mingles with his crew, often inviting them to his incredibly spacious cabin for gourmet meals, which he prepares.
Pike, with his Number One, Commander Una Chin-Riley
But Pike also has a slightly dark side. When he appeared in Strange New Worlds‘ predecessor, Star Trek: Discovery, Pike experienced his grisly future through the magic of Klingon time stones. Pike knows what’s coming and deals with this knowledge in different ways throughout the series.
We are given a number of other characters familiar to us from TOS, including Number One, a younger and more emotional Lieutenant (not Commander) Spock, and communications officer Uhura, a fourth-year cadet from Starfleet Academy. We also get to know Dr. M’Benga better, as he is the Chief Medical Officer of this Enterprise, instead of a guest star who specializes in Vulcan physiology, assisting Dr, McCoy. Even Christine Chapel is on board, as a nurse, maybe, but not simply a subordinate to the CMO. Chapel is an expert on manipulating genomes and can even make genetic disguises for the crew to blend in with alien races. This is where the old version of me would have gone ballistic.
Let’s start with Chapel. I love Jess Bush in this role. She’s spunky, she’s smart, she’s charming, and she and Spock have become good friends over the course of the season. They have incredible chemistry together. Gone is the pining nurse who can never have or know the Vulcan science officer. On TOS, Chapel appeared as if she had no clue who Spock’s betrothed T’Pring was when she appeared on the Enterprise viewscreen. Uhura even asked who T’Pring was. On Strange New Worlds, Chapel and T’Pring know each other and even worked together to deceive an alien who had taken over the Enterprise. This is clearly not a strict prequel, paying attention to what has aired before.
There are a whole lot more of these instances in the 10 episodes. Everyone, for example, seems to know about Vulcan mating rituals, where on TOS, it was so secret, McCoy didn’t tell Kirk even after he learned of Spock’s condition due to Pon Farr. “It is not for outworlders; intensely private,” Spock says. Yet the human characters in Strange New Worlds joke about being hit with lirpas, the traditional Vulcan weapons used in Kal-If-Fee, the mating ritual by challenge. All that said, I don’t care. The Vulcan episodes with T’Pring are fun, bordering on shenanigans. They even use callback music during a dream sequence with Spock fighting himself in “Spock Amok,” just as he will eventually fight Kirk in the “Amok Time” episode of TOS.
The Gorn, seen in the TOS episode “Arena,” are super fast and extremely aggressive in this show, very much unlike the Gorn captain whom Kirk defeated. They are a combination of the Xenomorph from Alien and the Predator, from the movie of the same name. Despite this retroactive continuity, this actually provides some entertaining and deeply moving psychological storylines featuring Lt. La’an Noonian-Singh, played by Christina Chong. She’s one of my favorite characters on the show, as she’s dealing with a whole lot of trauma and doing the best she can to get by. The Gorn episodes are not only reminiscent of TOS, but of the science fiction/action movies of the 80s. It’s a great addition to have a formidable villain that’s not a Klingon or Romulan, despite its lack of attention to the continuity of the franchise.
One of the most striking differences in Strange New Worlds is the Enterprise herself. The ship has a luxuriously massive interior, in no way compatible with the original Enterprise that everyone knows. Just take a look at the difference in the bridge scenes, as they look out the viewscreen.
A tale of two viewscreens
Ridiculous? Maybe, but you know that if Gene Roddenberry had had this kind of money to spend and technology to utilize, he would have. This new bridge is glorious. And thanks to Episode 10, “A Quality of Mercy,” we know that this is the same as what the Enterprise would look like in their version of TOS. We are simply being asked to accept that this is what was intended, and I, for one, am willing to go along with it 100%. Honestly the art design of this show hits me in the sweet spot, combining mid-20th-century sensibilities with a view of the future that TOS Matt Jeffries gave us almost 60 years ago. It looks like the late 1950s exploded through futuristic technology. It’s like Disneyland’s Tomorrowland on steroids and I’m here for it.
One of the best ways that Strange New Worlds ties itself to the Star Trek franchise is through the music. There are callbacks and call-forwards to other great Star Trek themes. Nami Melumad grabs cues from everywhere and melds them flawlessly with her original pieces. It really works. I’ve been waiting for this score to drop forever, and today, it finally did. I look forward to writing to this music for a long time to come.
Strange New Worlds has a “truthiness” quality to it. It presents things as they might have been, could have been, or maybe even should again on Star Trek, and just tells good stories around them. I’m okay with that. I’m not just okay with that, I’m 100% onboard. With literally hundreds of Star Trek episodes and a dozen movies to limit story choices, at this point, are we really going to worry about the combination to the safe in the captain’s quarters? Ten years ago, I might have, but life is short, and the more I get to see of this show, the better.
One of the many, many reasons I re-retired from teaching was the new policy that my administration was trying to put forward. They didn’t like zeroes. During my interview, they asked me if I would cooperate with their new policy to not give zeroes for incomplete assignments, but to assign half the points even if they turned in nothing. I said sure, because I really didn’t care how grading was done. I was more interested in student learning.
But when it came time for me to get my students prepared to have a quarterly grade check in nine weeks, I told them that they really didn’t have all that much to worry about for the assignment portion of the grade, and here’s why:
Let’s say that I counted each completed assignment as four points, which I actually did. Four or four hundred, there’s no difference because it all scales. And let’s say that I gave five assignments for a grand total of 20 points. Once again, we’re just keeping things simple here. If they completed just one of the four assignments and got the full four points, they would pass. They looked at me like my head was on backward. I said, no, really, let’s take a look. If you get half credit for doing absolutely nothing, and just did the last of the five assignments, let’s see how that looks:
2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 4 = 12
Congratulations, 12 out of 20 points is a 60% score, and that, according to the standardized school grading scale was a D-; a passing grade! You can look like you’re doing the work, even when you’re not.
Now, many people are going to try to argue with me here, and let me warn you. You will lose. It doesn’t matter what the assignments were worth. Make it 100 points per assignment.
50 + 50+ 50 + 50 + 100 = 300. And since the assignments are worth 100 points each, that’s 300 out of 500, or…60%. it’s the same. You do one assignment out of every five as well as you can and your homework grade will look like you tried. Now, mind you, if you actually want to pass, you’ll need to score higher than 60% on the assessments, but don’t worry about that, because we were encouraged to give multiple chances to take those.
We were being asked to lower our standards to such a point that almost nothing mattered, and that’s just a bitter pill to swallow when you’ve just come back from a year and a half of retirement.
Hello there, and welcome to my brand-new weblog. My name is Jim McClain. I’m a recently retired teacher, having spent 35 years in public school classrooms, 31 as a full-time math teacher. I’m also a comic book creator, a childhood abuse survivor, a tabletop gamer, a dad, a husband, a baseball fan, a cartoonist, and at times I fancy myself a writer. I’d like to invite you along as I reflect on a full life, wearing many hats. I’m currently a substitute teacher collecting a pension, and I have a lot of time to think. Sometimes those thoughts turn into words, and this is where I intend to put them.
