Robert recalls:
Throughout primary school, I read superhero comic books with an obsession verging on addiction. I was fiercely loyal: Marvel was my brand, first, last, and (I vowed and believed) forever.
I started buying them in second grade, in the PX of the long-since-dismantled Hunter’s Point naval shipyard in San Francisco, where my family spent a year living in a quonset hut while my father’s ship was in drydock. My first comic book was the Avengers; their colorful costumes caught my eye, and the confusion of characters inside posed a puzzle I had to solve.
A lot of things combined to keep me hooked — the action, the quips, the graphics (especially by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko). A large part of the appeal was that the people behind the comics seemed to be having fun. They joked about their continuity errors and even, sometimes, their own momentary lack of inspiration:
(Some of Stan Lee’s self-mocking spirit undoubtedly lives on in MuseBlog.)
I liked the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, and the solitary superheroes. My real favorites, though, were the X-Men.
It surprised me recently to read that Marvel considered the X-Men “second-tier” members of its stable at the time, and certainly they weren’t nearly as interesting as they became 20 years later. But I wasn’t complaining. They were teenagers, which was cool. They were sophisticated in ways that a California kid couldn’t grasp. In their off hours, they even hung out with beatniks!
Words like “combo,” “Zen,” and “Bohemian” baffled and riveted me. My parents had to tell me where Greenwich Village was (and how to pronounce it), but they didn’t explain beatniks very well. Later the early 1960s gave way to the mid-1960s, and sometimes real life started to seem stranger than the comics.
I have a strange feeling this is how I will remember my old Bionicle books.
I have to admit, I squeed when I saw the title of this thread.
Still kind of squeeing now, actually. Half of me is falling over going “Who was your favorite superhero? Did you keep reading through the dark ages of the ’80s and ’90s? Do you still read them today? What’s your opinion on Ultimates? Best and worst Avengers teams?” and half of me is thinking ugh, he was so lucky to be that age at that time! How many people got to be the “right” age to read comic books (obviously the right age to read comic books is every age, but I mean the socially acceptable age) in the heyday of the Silver Age?
Then again, I was just talking to my friend as we came out of the Avengers movie about how lucky we were to be this age, at this time; how lucky I was that my interest in superheroes peaked at exactly the right time for all the movies to come out, how lucky we were to be seventeen and Marvel fans living in America right at this moment. And I suppose in ten or twenty or thirty years I’ll think how lucky all the kids are to be that age, at that time, seeing and doing and being whatever it is they’ll get to see and do and be. I guess life is good enough that just getting to be here at all is lucky in spades.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.
They who had fed their childhood on dreams,
The playfellows of fancy…
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,– the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!
Actually, the Marvel gang (and their fans) pretty much stuck to Utopia, subterranean fields, and secreted islands — along with undersea kingdoms, alien planets, past and future timelines, and boatloads of other dimensions. The very world, where in the end we find our happiness, never interested us very much.
I was thinking more of the way you were talking about the mid-1960s.
I’m secretly hoping that your time capsules are actually excerpts from a full memoir, Robert. But I could understand waiting a few years to publish until after you’ve won your MacArthur and built a school for Gifted Youngsters.
And look at that, a bassoon’s providing the Bohemiam baseline for Bernard’s beatnik bopping!
Oh man Robert, when you get your MacArthur can I call you Professor X or R or something?
Well, naturally.
oh that is AWESOME!!! i love older comics like old Batman comics and stuff from Mad magazine. (be warned Mad has some amount of swearing) also the older cars and stuff (volkswagon beetle (i got to like them from “The Love Bug”) and Hudson Hornet cars (weeee!) and other older cars) i like things from when my dad was a kid (1958) TV shows and other fudge. i know i know im crazy because i don’t like newer TV shows like “Monster High” and “Spongebob” or the new hero cartoons.
well call me crazy! i don’t give a damn
Bernard the Poet at the Coffee-a-Go-Go! You were lucky to be in on the ground floor right when it was all starting, but there’ve been many fine moments since!
Ohhh these are awesome. I really want to read Avengers. I have almost all the batman comics saved on my computer (yes, yes, DC, I know), and I at one point had links to almost all of the x-men comics but a bunch are probably dead
Alas!
These are great though! Didn’t realize they did commentary