When my mother died a few years ago, we had been estranged for a long time. In fact, we were so estranged that I didn’t even know she had moved back to Michigan. To the best of my knowledge, she was living in a house that she and my late sister bought together in Utah. When I was given the unwanted task of taking care of her estate, I put the address in Google Maps, and was stunned. She hadn’t just moved back to Michigan; she had moved back to Hastings, Michigan, a town where we had lived for a number of years before and after she and my dad had split up. I honestly didn’t even need Google Maps when I saw which street she lived on. We had lived in two different houses not three blocks away from where her new house was.
We lived in one house on Grant Street in 1969, the year before I started kindergarten. It was a two-story house at the top of a hill overlooking the elementary school that I would someday attend, Northeastern. It was my parents’ second house. The first one was a tiny house right across from my Grandma and Grandpa McClain’s house in nearby Delton. This one was large enough that I could have my own room. It was red with white trim and a pretty house. I had happy memories there.
Me, riding the Batcycle down the sidewalk by Grant Street. I always wore a cape.
One of the great things about downtown Hastings back then was that they really went all out when decorating for the holidays. I loved Christmas. Heck, I still love Christmas, in part because of the memories made here. There were tinsel decorations, and trees, and lights everywhere you went, and there was a little hut that was open in the evenings where you could sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what you wanted for Christmas. Santa would give you a little candy cane when you were finished. I love candy canes and peppermint, really, to this day. My mom took me numerous times to tell Santa what I wanted for Christmas. She was making a list for the grandparents and for the aunts and uncles. I was the only grandchild on my dad’s side of the family. I was the oldest of only four on my mom’s side of the family. The problem was, I only ever asked Santa for one thing that year: a Meijer truck.
Now, if you’ve never heard of Meijer, it’s understandable. It was a regional grocery store chain started in Greenville, Michigan in 1934. It expanded over west Michigan fairly quickly, and one of our weekly things to do when my dad got paid was to get groceries at Meijer Thrifty Acres, as they billed it, in Battle Creek. Well, really it was a suburb called Urbandale, but you’ve probably at least heard of Battle Creek. One of Meijer’s charming qualities was that every store had Sandy, the electric horse that you could ride for a penny. Due to my dad’s influence, I was all about that cowboy life. I used to watch The Lone Ranger with him on Sunday mornings. It was his favorite show as a kid. So, every time we got groceries, I rode Sandy.
Sandy, still ready to ride for a penny!
Grocery shopping was such an integral part of our week, we always went out to eat before we went. Sometimes we would eat in Battle Creek at the Ritzee, sometimes back in Hastings at Dog ‘n Suds. It was always a place where we could eat in the car.
Look how fancy it was!
After dinner, we’d go get our groceries. I always looked forward to the cereal aisle, where I’d get to choose my cereal for the week. What was it going to be? Coco Puffs? King Vitaman? Ka-Boom? Quisp or Quake? Sugar Pops, maybe? On the way out, I’d get to ride Sandy, and the adventure concluded. My dad worked third shift, so that was most of our family time for the whole week. It’s no wonder those trips remain in my memory! On the way home, I would try to figure out what all the illuminated signs were for. I knew the Meijer sign well. It had a distinctive M shape, and started with the same letter and sound as McClain.
Meijer logo, 1966-1984
I would ask what each store sign was when they were all lit up, and my mom or dad would tell me. I started to memorize them so I could recognize them instantly. I played the same game with my Grandma McClain. And when I saw a Meijer truck, delivering a load to the grocery store, I knew that one for sure, every time! One one particular trip to get groceries, Meijer had their own Tonka truck for sale for Christmas. I loved Tonka trucks. I begged for the Meijer truck on every trip. My mom and dad would put me off. “Maybe for Christmas,” they’d always say.
So, back in Hastings when I went to visit Santa in his little shack (I actually called it an outhouse, because we had one at my grandparents’ cabin in northern Michigan), the only thing I would ask for was a Meijer truck. My mom must have been so frustrated. This kind of obsession is still one of my personality traits. Once I get the notion that I want something like that, I will get it, no matter what.
And lo and behold, what did I get for Christmas? That’s right, a Meijer truck.
I’ll be on the lookout for one of these at vintage toy shows. I think it would make a fine addition to my memorabilia shelves in my new office.
The entire idea of collecting comic books for monetary value was foreign to most kids in 1978. They were cheap reading material. But the appeal of the recent #1 issues from DC Comics, Firestorm and Steel the Indestructible Man was hard to pass up. So, when a #100 issue found its way to the stands, it was also a rare day, because most of the popular comics of the time from DC were in the three hundreds or even four hundreds. That’s not why I bought Showcase #100.
Showcase #100, art by Joe Staton
Showcase #100 got my attention because of the sheer number of characters on the front cover. I didn’t even care what the story was about, I just had to know what was going on to bring all these characters together. I knew the Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, the Atom, and Adam Strange from Justice League of America, and I knew the Spectre from various JLA/JSA crossovers and teaming up with Batman in Brave and the Bold. But then there was the Creeper, who I remembered from my early childhood, as well as the Hawk and the Dove! Way up there in the corner were the Metal Men. And look! Far in the back center were the Teen Titans! With this many characters, the adventure had to be serious.
The fabric of space and time seemed to be tearing as characters from every location and era seemed to be gathering at once in the same place. And then it was revealed inside that there were even more characters than depicted on the cover. Such an odd mishmash of heroes! Even the Inferior Five were involved. Well, as it happned, the Earth was being ripped from its orbit and being carried away, and it was up to this hodgepodge to fix it!
After a satisfying, though quick conclusion, everything was safe again, and it was only then that the secret of the colossal team-up was revealed. These were all characters who had either been introduced in the Showcase title, or had been revamped in Showcase! That’s when I remembered the Hawk and the Dove appeared in Showcase #75, which I had when I was very young, back when comics were just 12 cents.
Showcase #75, art by Steve Ditko
I had just gotten Showcase #94 the previous summer with the New Doom Patrol, so I kind of wondered what had happened to the title that it was only up in the 90s over ten years later. Still, I thought that was a pretty cool gimmick, and admired whoever thought of it. We didn’t use the term “meta” back then, but this was as “meta” as it got!
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!
Following the massive success of Star Wars, magazines were keen on remembering movies of times past that were similar in theme and genre. Science fiction was for a time no longer simply the milieu of nerds. One of the first such magazines was Science Fantasy Film Classics, which debuted with this issue:
Science Fantasy Film Classics #1
Naturally, because Star Wars was on the cover, I asked my grandma to buy it for me, which she did. She loved how much I read about everything that interested me. But this particular magazine had something that caught my dad’s eye, too. It had a feature about Forbidden Planet, the 1956 science fiction version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He had seen Forbidden Planet when he was 12, so in a a way, it was very much his Star Wars. I had read the article, but didn’t think very much about it, because in 1978 there was no way to see a movie like Forbidden Planet unless it was shown on television, and 1956 movies were too old to be profitable in prime time. Cue the CBS Late Movie.
Back in those days, the CBS Late movie would come on following the news, up against Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show. They would fill a two-hour time slot with whatever content they had readily available. Reruns of McCloud back-to-back with another hour drama like Kojak, or MASH, followed by a 90-minute classic movie. So, imagine my surprise on Friday, January 6, when my dad roused me out of a deep sleep at midnight because, “JIMMER! FORBIDDEN PLANET IS ON!”
I was instantly awake. We had just talked about Forbidden Planet that week. Mind you, we were only able to watch it on our 9″ black and white TV, but it hardly mattered. As I watched the movie, enthralled, the C-57D floated through space similarly to the starship Enterprise. The links to the familiar didn’t end there. Here was Robby the Robot, whom I’d seen on Lost in Space. Chief Quinn was played by Richard Anderson, who I knew as Oscar Goldman. Police Woman’s Lt. Bill Crowley, Earl Holliman, was Cookie.
Earl Holliman as Cookie, with Robbie the Robot
Forbidden Planet was like the best episode of Star Trek ever. The C-57D is dispatched to determine the fate of the Bellerophon, a scientific research vessel that had been sent to Altair IV 20 years before. There, they find one original survivor, Dr. Morbius, and his young daughter, Altaira. The rest of the Bellerophon crew is dead, including Altaira’s mother. Morbius, the lone survivor, is not happy to see the crew of the C-57D, and wants them to simply go away. He has been studying the lost civilization of a race called the Krell, who harnessed the powers of the mind to create incredible scientific advances. Morbius himself has been able to created incredible technologies like Robbie the Robot, who acts as servant, manufacturer, and protector to Morbius and his daughter. When the captain, played by a very straight Leslie Nielsen, inform him that they are required to investigate, Morbius tries resisting them at every turn. However, he is foiled by his daughter Altaira, who has grown up without peers on Altair IV. She is very interested in the captain and his crew, and therein, a very Kirklike struggle begins.
I love this movie, and the more I saw it over the course of years, finally in color, then in digital widescreen format, I loved it even more every time. I picked up the novelization at a yard sale years later, and, as I always did, I read it cover to cover, trying to glean every last bit of information from it.
Perhaps most importantly, though, my dad and I bonded over something that we now had in common, and even though I was up until 2 AM, I got my full night’s sleep, waking up late. But I was dreaming of Altair IV.
Hot on the heels of the great treasury-size All-New Collector’s Edition #C-55 featuring the double covered Legion of Super-Heroes came what very well may be my favorite comic book of all time: All-New Collector’s Edition #C-56, Superman vs Muhammad Ali!
All-New Collector’s Edition C-56, Superman vs. Muhammad Ali
With another fantastic wraparound cover, this time by Neal Adams, Superman vs. Muhammad Ali sounded initially like a dumb idea. Of course Superman could easily beat Muhammad Ali in a fight–any fight. I had watched Muhammad Ali fight all through the 70s. I had seen virtually all of his title defenses and losses, including his loss to Leon Spinks on February 15 that year. So, by the time Superman vs. Muhammad Ali came out, Ali was no longer the champ. That diminished the power of the comic book not at all.
Now, Neal Adams was primarily known as a Batman artist. He had done lots and lots of Batman stories. But his Superman covers were just beyond compare. As much as I love Curt Swan’s artwork, when you bait-and-switch a Curt Swan story with a Neal Adams cover, that’s a pretty big shock.
Superman #233, art by Neal AdamsSuperman #317, art by Neal Adams
As soon as I opened the Superman vs. Muhammad Ali comic, it was different than any other Superman comic I had ever read. The opening double-page splash was just Clark Kent, Lois Land, and Jimmy Olsen walking down the street, yet it invited me to stare at it for several minutes. I’d never seen a street in a big city before, but it was easy to imagine that this is what one might look like. I almost felt worldly just taking all the details in.
Superman vs. Muhammad Ali pages 2-3. Art by Neal Adams
It doesn’t take long to get into the action, as the trio find Muhammad Ali shooting hoops with some local kids and naturally, an alien lands to challenge Ali to a fight against his champion. Because in the 1970s, this was not out of the ordinary at all. I loved comics then! When Ali refuses, the alien threatens Earth with destruction by firing two missiles at the planet. While Kent sneaks off to change to Superman, he rushes to the missiles, but finding that they are made of plasma and he passes right through them. By flying in circles at superspeed, Superman creates a wind tunnel powerful enough to affect the mass of the missiles, which then detonate in the ocean. The don’t detonate harmlessly, however, as a tidal wave is set into motion. Superman stops that by slamming his fists together to make a shockwave. At the same time, the aliens, called the Scrubb (unfortunately) have launched two more missiles, that Superman is just a fraction too slow to intercept.
The Scrubb missiles explode. Original coloring.
Now, all of this occurs in just the first dozen or so pages of a 72-page story! It was not a reprint. It was not a collection. This was something special. In effect, Superman challenges Ali for the right to fight against the Scrubb champion. But of course, things being equal, Superman would easily win. But it’s revealed that the Scrubb homeworld orbits a red sun, so Superman wouldn’t have any powers there anyway. Ali agrees to train Superman but they are given only a short time to manage this before they fight each other for the right to go up against Hun’Ya, the Scrubb fighter.
I’m not going to spoil the rest of the story because it really is a lot of fun. There are twists and turns and a pretty big surprise that fooled me as a 13-year old, and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. Trust me, you need to read this comic book. I promise you, it all makes sense in the end.
I studied every page of this comic book for the next year, and that’s not an exaggeration. By the time the next summer rolled around, I had my brother and sister record an audio version of it with me, using the tape recorder I had received for Christmas. You could tell that DC was gearing up toward the big event, and I started buying more Superman comics. Gary Grossman’s book, Superman: Serial to Cereal got a new printing, which I also bought. This was the first time I learned of the Fleischer Superman cartoons of the early 1940s. I had known about the radio show, but had no idea that there were Superman cartoons before 1966. I had also never seen a single episode of Adventures of Superman, the long-running TV show of my dad’s youth. The book explained that Superman had his own movie serials too!
I was born into Batmania, but clearly there had been more to Superman than had met my eye! It was at this point, even before Superman the Movie would be released in December, that my favorite fictional character was shifting from Batman to Superman.
Returning home to my dad’s house on the Night Bus was a transition. I felt like a different boy. And to be certain, I was. I went from being a timid kid who thought he was lazy, worthless, and stupid, to a kid who was coming out of his shell, beginning to gain confidence in who he was and his place in junior high and the greater world. I was able to dress and wear my hair like the other kids in my class for the first time in my life, and I no longer feared getting beaten every day.
My dad being out of work meant that he was home a lot, when he wasn’t out plowing driveways or doing the odd construction job. My aunt Nancy, his younger sister, had moved in with us, which helped with expenses. We only had a two-bedroom trailer, but we converted the dining room next to the kitchen to a small bedroom for her by putting a curtain across the full width of the trailer. Nancy was closer to my age than my dad’s age. When I was 13, she was 22. My dad was 34. She worked in Traverse City, a half-hour drive away, at Grand Traverse Auto. She was a secretary, and she would come home, telling us stories about working in “the city,” And to us, Traverse City was just that. Mesick had a stable population of 376, according to the 1970 census. Traverse City had over 18 THOUSAND people living there!
We travelled to Traverse City fairly often, especially when it was time to do laundry. My grandma had a small washing machine, but no dryer, and in the summer, she would do the wash and hang it all on a line outside. It came back in smelling like fresh Michigan air. But in the winter, we would make weekly trips to the corner laundromat at the end of 16 Road to use the coin operated machines. But about once a month, we would go to Traverse City to do laundry at one of the big laundromats. There was one on the south side of town, right next to a 7-11. While the loads of wash were running, I became introduced to the Big Gulp. I would have an occasional can of Coke at home, or Mountain Dew if I was working for the Amidons. Otherwise, I was allowed two 12-oz. cans of Meijer-brand soda per day. But on laundry day, I got to drink 32 ounces of whatever I wanted! I was high-energy by the time the wash was ready for the dryers.
These trips were also fun, because they would include lunch at a restaurant. My grandma, my aunt, and I would settle in at Chicken Coop quite often, which was just down Hammond Road. We could eat our whole lunch while the wash was in the dryer. But it was a special occasion when we ate Chinese food.
What you have to understand about the 1970s is that Chinese food in America was less Chinese than it even is now. La Choy was a brand that you would find in stores, and my mother had been a fan of La Choy Chicken Chop Suey. There were even painful commercials that sang, “La Choy makes Chinese food swing American!” But there was a Chinese restaurant in Traverse City that served food closer to what we have now in American Chinese restaurants and my grandma loved it. Born in 1914, my grandma had dropped out of school after 10th grade to help support her family. She worked in a Chinese-owned restaurant in Battle Creek in 1930, which of course was during the Great Depression. She had a special affinity for the culture and the food, but she had never made any in my presence because my grandpa and dad, I’m sorry to say, called it “Chink food,” They were pretty free with their racism against the Chinese, and every other non-white race, for that matter. My dad claimed that he had tried Chinese food but it “tore him up” and would insist on a cheeseburger. So, when it was my grandma, my aunt, and me, we were free to get what we wanted. That patriarchy thing ran strong.
My first love was egg rolls. Mind you, I hated cooked cabbage. HATED it. Whenever my mom made it, it stunk up the whole kitchen. But in an egg roll, I found it delightful. And when I discovered hot mustard, I was done. I could live on egg rolls for the rest of my life. I tried everything they put in front of me, but I always ordered egg rolls. This tradition helped me bond with my grandmother even more, if that was possible. It was legitimizing something she loved that the other males in the family made no secret of despising.
Coincidentally, a comic book that had been released at about the same time as my return from my mother’s house put quite a different spin on race. All-New Collector’s Edition C-55 came out in January, and it quickly became one of my favorite comic books ever. Once again, it was one of these great treasury-sized comics, and the cover, to this day, is still my favorite of all time.
All-New Collector’s Edition C-55
This cover, by artist Mike Grell, was something I studied for hours. As you can see, it’s a double cover, illustrating on both front and back, and on the front cover, you see Superboy in the sweet spot, as he should be, as the titular character. But the composition also puts Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy, who I knew were the three founding members of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Oh, sure, Karate Kid is in the background there, too, but I assumed that was because he was popular enough to merit his own short-lived title back in those days. Now, the problem is, all those yellow guys they’re fighting? They’re Lunarites, and this is going to get a bit ugly.
Yikes.
In this comic, the future has been altered so that the United Nations disbanded in 1978, and various nations went to war. The “Chinese Empire” left for the moon and over the next thousand years, became the Lunarites. The writers of the Legion books had long had a whitewashing problem, as just a few years before this, they explained that all the Black people in the future had gone to an otherdimensional island called Marzal that was only sometimes on Earth, off the coast of Africa. DC Comics was going a long way to explain why there weren’t any people of other races depicted in the 30th century setting of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and they did it poorly. I’m hoping that this coloring was supposed to be understood as some kind of evolutionary change, but it’s possible that it was just laziness.
Regardless of the racial undertones, the cover of this book was a textbook in anatomy, perspective, and inking, especially feathering and hatching. I learned a lot while studying it.
Possibly the worst film I ever saw in my life was one my dad took me to see in Traverse City at the State Theater, downtown. On the heels of Star Wars, we would go see anything with a science fiction-sounding title, and Starship Invasions fit the bill. Starring Robert Vaughn and Christopher Lee, this movie stank up the place.
Movie poster
I am just going to quote this summary by viewer Paul White: “Captain Rameses and his Legion of the Winged Serpent brigade are out to claim Earth for their dying race. Out to save Earth is an alien guard patrol located in the Bermuda Triangle, the League of Races. LOR leaders warn Rameses that he’s breaking galactic treaty rules. The alien villain responds by launching an invasion which telepathically drives Earthlings to suicide. The LOR implore UFO expert Professor Duncan to help them. Eventually, the two alien forces battle. Will the Earth be saved?”
Yes, you read that correctly: “…telepathically drives Earthlings to suicide.” This is one of two things that stand out in my memory about this film. A terrible-looking flying saucer, shooting little bolts of lightning at our planet from its central antenna. Cut down to Earth to see people killing themselves. This horrifying scene, and the worst robot effect ever made. I could literally have made a better robot in my Grandpa McClain’s garage. Zero stars, both thumbs down, and the only reason I bring it up is because it was so horrifyingly bad.
But I got to see a movie with my dad, so everything was okay in the end. We laughed all the way home.
One reason I didn’t see my mother very much after I went to live with my dad was that we lived so far apart. My mother and stepfather had settled on living in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and my dad and I were in Mesick to stay. It was a three and a half hour trip by car. What you have to realize is that in 1977, there was a nationwide speed limit of 55 miles per hour that was instituted during the Ford administration in 1974 in response to the oil embargo the nation was facing at the time. That made trips back then interminably long. So, my mom and stepfather picked me up on their way down to their parents’ houses for Christmas and brought me back with them for visitation on the way back. I got traded for my brother on the way down, so he got to spend some quality time with my dad and grandparents without me there. We picked him up on the way back north.
As I mentioned before, my stepfather’s parents were great, treating me exactly the same as any of the other grandchildren. Christmas at Steve’s parents’ house was fun, with a houseful of step-cousins. I still remember the clamor over Star Wars among the kids. Each of them was given a little knockoff wind-up robot to play with. There were no Star Wars toys for Christmas that first year, but the market was definitely there. We duelled with lightsabers in the form of gift wrapping tubes. I wasn’t given a wind-up robot, but I had fun watching the younger kids play with theirs. I was the oldest, and that year, I was given not a child’s gift, but a young adult’s gift. I received my first tape recorder!
JC Penney cassette recorder
It may not seem like a big deal now, but it sure was then. My step-grandmother had been thoughtful enough to include a three-pack of cassette tapes and off I went. I recorded everything that was happening, using the included condenser microphone. And as was usual back then, my imagination soared with ideas of how I could use this wonderful gift. When we arrived at my Grandma B’s house, I asked my cousin Peter if we could record some of the old-time radio shows from my Uncle Mike’s reel-to-reel player that we had listened to a few years before. I went home with a cassette tape with War of the Words on the first side and half of the second side, and the origin of The Lone Ranger following that. I’m pretty sure everyone was wishing they had bought me an earphone too at that point, because I was playing it non-stop.
On the way back up to the upper peninsula, we stopped to pick up Jeff, and I ran to my room to retrieve my earphone. It was just a little one-piece earphone that came in a small leather case. I had bought it at a garage sale for 10 cents, but it worked great! Now I could listen to my recordings and not bother anyone. I grabbed some batteries from my grandparents too, so I could listen to it in the car. Thank heavens for prepared grandparents. They always had extra batteries handy.
I had a nice week with my mom and brother and sister. I treasured those few moments we got each year, being together as a family. My mom surprised me with my very own track suit. It was blue, with red and white stripes down the sleeves and the sides of the pants. And she embroidered my name on the back. I thought that was super cool.
When it was time to go home again, they had a surprise for me. I was going to go Greyhound…by myself. The plan was for Steve to take me to the bus station in St. Ignace, a 45-minute drive, and then I would ride to Cadillac on the bus, where my dad would pick me up. The problem was, the bus left at midnight. I was kind of scared. What if I fell asleep? I’d never stayed up all night before. They assured me that it would be all right. So, armed with fresh batteries for my tape recorder and the novelization of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I got on the bus in the middle of the night and rode five hours home. It’s only 4.5 hours now, but you can drive faster now than you could then.
The Route of the Night Bus
Can you imagine sending your newly-minted 13-year-old son on a bus by himself without even a cell phone or even identification in this day and age? It was an adventure. The bus driver assured me I could go to sleep and that he would wake me up in Cadillac, but it was too exciting.
The Greyhound SceniCruiser
The bus trip was uneventful. My dad picked me up early in the morning, and we went to the Big Boy for breakfast before heading back to Mesick. I asked my dad for a quarter to play the jukebox at the table. That’s one of the cool things about Big Boy back in the 70s; there was a mini-jukebox at every single booth. You could play three songs for a quarter. Fleetwood Mac was on the jukebox, as well as the disco version of the Star Wars theme by Meco. That was hilarious.
Tabletop Juke Box at Big Boy
I started going over the menu, since this was such a rare treat to have breakfast at Big Boy. We’d shared many a lunch and dinner there, but never breakfast. My eye was drawn to something that sounded wonderful: the Mexican Fiesta Omelet. It was an omelet filled with chili and American cheese, with diced raw onions and tomatoes on top. Its origins as Mexican are sketchy. It’s questionable whether chili originated in Texas or northern Mexico. Be that as it may, that’s what it was called on the menu. The flavors of this omelet exploded in my mouth. It was one of the most wonderful dishes I’d ever eaten. And it came with hash browns? So much the better! To this day, it remains one of my favorite foods.
When I told my dad that I had a recording of the very first radio episode of The Lone Ranger, he got excited. The Lone Ranger had always been his favorite fictional character. We used to get up at 6:30 in the morning on Sundays just to watch it on TV together. When we got home to the trailer, I crashed for a while, and then when I played the radio show for him and it was fun to see him as excited about something as I was. He was equally excited that now we didn’t have to go to my grandparent’s house to listen to music. We could listen to cassette tapes at home. It’s funny, growing up without a lot of money. You tend not to take things for granted after that.
While I liked spending time with my mom and brother and sister, I was now finally back home again where I belonged. I had a home where I was safe and warm in my tiny room with my sleeping bag. I had a snowmobile. I had my comic books and trading cards and magazines. But most importantly, I had my dad, my grandparents, my aunt, my dog, and my friends and teachers. And I had just traveled a couple of hundred miles, alone. The timid, beaten boy who had gone to live with his dad a year before was gone. At the end of 1977, I was someone else, entirely. And I liked him.
I had spent 11 solid months living with my dad, and at last, as of December 5, I was officially a teenager! This was the first birthday I’d spent with my dad and Grandma and Grandpa McClain since I turned six. My grandma made a cake, of course, and on Monday night, we had dinner, followed by cake and ice cream. My dad had unfortunately lost his job at Suburban Furniture earlier in the fall, and had started a new job selling Case tractors at a dealership, and by winter, that job had evaporated as well. He was now doing odd construction jobs for our neighbor and landlord, Dick Amidon, and was helping my grandpa plow driveways.
My grandpa had a 1966 Ford Bronco with a big yellow plow on the front, and spent his retirement winters plowing driveways for people. In northern Michigan, snow fell much heavier than it usually did in other places, and there was always work to do. He’d get up at 4:30 in the morning and plow until seven or so, and then he’d go down to the restaurant for his usual coffee and roll. While my aunt Nancy lived in an apartment in Traverse City, her malamute/samoyed mix named Nikki stayed with my grandparents. Grandpa would take Nikki plowing with him. She loved riding alongside him in the Bronco and kept him company. I remember my grandpa teaching me to plow. It was a blast. First of all, the Bronco was a stick shift like our van, so there was a lot to do besides put the Bronco in gear and move forward. It was clutch, shift, gas, brake, clutch, reverse, clutch, gas, brake, clutch. It was not a boring activity!
After my birthday dinner, my dad had a special surprise for me. He and Grandpa and Grandma gave me a snowmobile! My dad and Grandpa had bought a used Arctic Cat Panther that had been in disrepair due to an engine fire. Together, they got it running enough for me to use. They repainted the engine cowl purple and presented it to me. I was near tears. I had wanted a snowmobile for my whole life. For those readers who don’t know, snowmobiling is a way of life in Northern Michigan. I had been riding snowmobiles with my family since I could sit on one. Usually I rode with my grandma because she wouldn’t go too fast and scare me. Don’t laugh. Snowmobiles can really fly, some easily doing over 100 miles per hour. My Panther topped out at about 50, which was good enough for me. I couldn’t wait to take it out for a long ride, but with basketball practice and games, that would have to wait for the weekend.
A lot of my friends were in band, and though I loved music, I had never been allowed to join band. Try not to be too surprised. My dad, of course, encouraged me to join band. The band teacher, Mrs. Carnahan, said that I had the lips of a tuba player, and started me out in a near-soundproof practice room, learning to play baritone. She explained that baritone music also played using bass clef, and so reading the music would be good training for tuba. It was also a lot easier to carry home for the half-mile walk to the trailer.
A rare photo of me in 7th grade! Ladybug is assisting in baritone practice.
I practiced for about a month, and then started on the tuba, and was able to join the rest of the junior high band soon after. I loved playing in band. The whole idea of listening to what others were doing and then contributing your part in concert, if you will, made me feel a lot less alone and odd. And when I started playing tuba, I could hear my horn filling the room with rich sound. I was the only tuba player, so I often carried the bass line by myself. There was nowhere to hide if I made a mistake. I sat in the back row with Margaret Saxton and Angie Alberts, who played baritone saxophone. And Margaret didn’t punch me anymore, so band was a win-win all around. The band was doing a fundraiser that winter, selling World’s Finest chocolate bars. I was given a case of them to take home and try to sell for a dollar each. And I knew just how I was going to get out of my own neighborhood where Kellie Amidon, who played trombone, would have a stranglehold on the market.
On Saturday, I dragged my snowmobile out of the garage, primed it, pulled the cord, fired the engine up, and off I went. Zoom! I drove the snowmobile across the back field and into the woods where we had been snowmobiling since I was six. I took it across a scary ridge and down into the Glengarry area out in the rural area that no one would ever attempt to cover on foot, where no one else had even tried to sell candy. I sold the entire box in one afternoon! I broke down the empty carton, stored it under my seat, and drove my snowmobile into town. You could do that with snow-covered roads. My mom had sent me a check for my birthday, and earlier in the week we had opened my first bank account. I had deposited five dollars of it in the bank and kept the other five dollars to spend. I went to Jack’s market and bought Firestorm #1. I couldn’t believe it. A new #1 issue of a hero I’d never heard of! I had just missed the beginning of Black Lightning earlier in the summer, and I was not about to let this one slip past me!
Firestorm #1
I bought the comic book, a Marathon bar, and a pack of Star Wars trading cards, total cost 75 cents plus tax. I didn’t want to spend all my money at once! I raced back home, put my snowmobile away, and went inside Grandma and Grandpa’s house to enjoy my finds. This was the quintessential experience I think of fondly whenever I remember this part of my life. I sat in my grandma’s recliner with headphones on, listening to music, while reading and eating a candy bar.
