Another one of the earliest home movies that we have of me as a kid is me doing a commercial for the board game “Operation.” (I’m not sure why I felt like our home videos needed to have ads every few minutes, but, I made sure that they did. There’s even a Christmas morning video where I explain that we will be opening some more presents “after these messages.”)  If you watch the video carefully, there’s a moment where I turn over the lid of the box expecting to find all of the little bones and other assorted items that you’re supposed to remove from the guy in there, and they aren’t there.  The only thing that’s still there is the rubber band.  I play it off pretty nonchalantly and just demonstrate the game with the rubber band.  But, this reinforces one of the inherent flaws of the game Operation, which is that it comes with about a dozen tiny little pieces that are very easily lost, as demonstrated by the fact that I was doing a commercial for the game after I’d already lost 99% of the stuff that came with it.

Here are my thoughts on some of the other board games that defined my childhood.

MONOPOLY –  This is one of those games that you might think that you like, but you’re probably wrong.  If you haven’t played it in a while, you forget that it takes basically all day to play, and it’s actually not that interesting.  It’s exciting at first when there are lots of properties to buy, but then it quickly becomes about paying rent and taxes and I get enough of that in my actual life.  Also when I played it growing up everyone in my family was too nice to each other during it, and tried to help everyone out if they were about to go bankrupt by making deals with them to help them stay in the game, which meant it never ended.  There’s a game of Monopoly that we started in 1998 that is actually still going on today.  The only way for the game to go even remotely fast is to just be merciless and try to destroy everyone, and my family was just not cut-throat enough to play it that way.

CLUE – This is my favorite board game to this day.  I grew up playing the 1956 edition which was my mom’s when she was little.  There was something so cool about how it came with the little tiny weapons that you moved from room to room as you took your guess, even if I didn’t quite fully grasp the fact that you were solving a murder when I was first playing it.  I remember one time when I was in first grade and I had my friends Michael and Robbie over (they were younger than me), and I wanted to play Clue with them and they couldn’t read yet.  I had them play against each other and I ran back and forth between them reading the cards to them and telling them what to do.  They hated it and we had a miserable time.  There have been lots of newer editions of Clue the years, including one that my kids got for Christmas last year, which for some reason ditches Mrs. White and replaces her with a new character called Dr. Orchid. The movie “Clue” is also fantastic and you should check it out if you’ve never seen it.  (I once met Christopher Lloyd at a comic convention and told him how much I loved it.  He seemed surprised, because I was probably the only person trying to talk to him about “Clue” instead of “Back To The Future.”)

MOUSE TRAP – No one ever actually played this game the way it was supposed to be played according to the directions.  Everyone just built the contraption and then set it off.  The places where it would usually mess up were that the first marble wouldn’t hit the pole hard enough to get the second marble moving, or the diver guy would not fall into the pool, or the diver guy falling into the pool wouldn’t do anything and the cage would not fall down.  We found that if you turned the guy backwards on the springboard it worked a lot better than if he was facing forwards.  I also feel like we used to fill the pool with water sometimes just for laughs but I don’t recall if that had any impact, positive or negative, on how well the trap did or didn’t work.

DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS – This is a game from the early 1980s that was used as a way for parents to teach their kids about stranger danger in a way that hopefully didn’t scare them too much.  There were cards with questions on them about what you would do in certain situations, like if a stranger offered you candy, or if someone you didn’t know tried to pick you up from school and stuff like that.  There were a few blank cards where you could write your own scenarios.  I came up with, “What should you do if a stranger came to your door and wanted to cook for you?”  (The answer was that you should not let them in.)

RUN YOURSELF RAGGED – You might not have heard of this game.  I don’t think it was very well known.  We found it at a garage sale one year.  You basically had to get a marble through an obstacle course that consisted of a bridge, a catapult, some little jumps and some other stuff, all by manipulating some little levers and buttons.  It was super addicting, and it was cool because you could play it by yourself, or you and your buddy could compete for who got the best time.  It was also great because you could just dive right in and start playing, there was no pretense like with Mouse Trap or something where you had to set the thing up first; they knew kids had no time for that.  When I was in third grade we had a Board Game day at school where you could bring in a favorite board game and we set up stations around the classroom where you could go around and play them.  I brought in Run Yourself Ragged, and at first people were like “What the hell is this?” but by the end of the day there was a huge crowd around that station and people were going nuts over it.

IT FROM THE PIT –  This was one of those games that looked way cooler in the commercials than it actually was.  My brother got this for Christmas one year and it didn’t work.  We exchanged it for another one which promptly broke.  I want to say we exchanged it one more time after that and that one broke as well.  Whatever motor or mechanism made the monster reach up and grab you just was not up to the task.  This game was a piece of something that rhymed with both “It” and “Pit.”

GUESS WHO – This is another one of my favorites.  It was just so simple and fun.  This is another game that has gone through a lot of different editions over the years; I don’t think any of the characters in it are the same anymore.  In college I made my own version of Guess Who by printing out pictures of all my friends, making cards of them and putting their pictures onto the board.  It was super fun to play because instead of asking questions like “Does your person wear glasses?” we could also ask stuff like “Did this person go to high school with us?” or “Is this person currently single?”

DREAM PHONE – Yes, this was a game for girls, but, any kid who grew up with a sibling of the opposite gender ended up playing games that you otherwise would not have, and honestly I think that’s a good thing.  Dream Phone was super high-tech because it actually talked to you to give you clues.  You were trying to find out which guy at school wanted to date you.  Depending on which part of the map you landed on, you could call and get some information about what clothes he wore, where he liked to hang out, what foods he liked, etc. and then rule people out by process of elimination.  (It was kind of like Clue in a way, now that I think about it.)  The thing I always thought was funny was when you called to get a clue about what food he liked.  The clue would always be, “He’ll eat almost anything… except _______.”  And then as you kept calling you would find out another food he would not eat.  “He’ll eat almost anything… except pizza.”  “He’ll eat almost anything… except hot dogs.”  “He’ll eat almost anything…. except popcorn.”  “He’ll eat almost anything… except ice cream.”   “He’ll eat almost anything… except cookies.”  Are we sure this dude will eat almost anything?

SORRY / TROUBLE – These were basically the same game, but one had cards and one had dice in a pop-o-matic bubble.  That’s it.

CANDY LAND – This one was very simple to play (you just drew cards to see what color space to go to), but the artwork on the board and the colorful characters really captured the imagination.  At least for me, as a kid, I remember wanting to know more about the characters because they seemed so interesting and cool looking.  The art style and even some of the names of the characters have changed over the years, but the one pictured here is the one I remember best.

13 DEAD END DRIVE – I really can’t comment on this one too much because I don’t remember it very well.  I think my younger siblings played it more than I did.  I am only including it here because I think it’s another one like Mouse Trap where you tended to just set all the stuff up and then set it off without necessarily playing the whole game.  It was a house with a series of traps in it where you could try to take other people out.  I think the game makers tried to combine Clue and Mouse Trap into one game, and at least by my vague recollection I think they succeeded.

ASK ZANDAR – And this is yet another game where I don’t think people really played the actual game that much, you just took out the Zandar crystal ball or whatever and asked him stuff.  He was basically a glorified 8-Ball that talked and cost a lot more money.

CONNECT FOUR – My brother is going to kill me for putting this one in here, but, when we were kids we got Connect Four for Christmas one year, and then shortly after that one night when we were saying grace before dinner, he said “Amen, Connect Four.”  I think he was trying to express his gratitude to God for receiving Connect Four for Christmas?  I’m not sure, but “Amen, Connect Four” continues to be an inside joke in the family that is referenced often.  (Sorry, Josh.)

CHUTES AND LADDERS – As a kid, I didn’t really like this game.  It just seemed way too easy to get sent way the heck back to the beginning at any moment.  As an adult I don’t like it because I realized one of the things you get sent down a chute for is READING COMIC BOOKS!  Dude, screw you, Chutes and Ladders.

CROSSFIRE – This is the prime example of a game where the commercial made it look 1,000,000 times cooler than it really was.  If you grew up in the 90s, I know you remember the commercial for this game.  The kids playing it fly down on hoverboards into an arena that is on fire.  The narrator proclaims, “It’s sometime in the future. The ultimate challenge. Crossfire!” And then the kids proceed to play the game while lightning flashes in the background and the song blares: “CROSSFIRE…. You’ll get caught up in the…. CROSSFIRE…. CROSSFIRE…. CROSSFIRE!!!!” Close-ups of the kids shooting at each other, their sweaty faces, them reloading their guns.  Finally one kid wins, and the kid who loses spins around like crazy and gets blasted into the sky and out of the arena.  I don’t know who made that commercial but A.) I hope they went on to direct like a Star Wars type of movie and B.) I also hope they got sued for false advertising because in no way does this commercial set the realistic expectation for the fact that you are just trying to shoot some balls at slightly larger balls that have pieces of plastic around them into your opponent’s side of the board.

BIG JOHN – This was a game that my dad bought us, I’m sure.  It was a giant toilet, and you fill it up with “scuzzies” (because I’m sure they could not say “poop,” and also they are green because I’m sure they weren’t allowed to make them brown, but that’s what they represent).   You would load the scuzzies into the toilet, and then take turns flushing the handle.  Sometimes nothing would happen, sometimes the scuzzies would shoot out of the pipe at the bottom of the toilet at you and that meant you lost.  It was like Russian roulette but with poop.  As I am writing this I feel like I must be leaving out some aspect of the game play but I actually really think that was it.

That’s all for now, but this might be another blog topic that warrants a “Part Two” in the future, so stay tuned!

I recently asked my 6-year old son if he had any New Year’s Resolutions.

He considered the question carefully. Then, after a long, thoughtful pause, he replied confidently, “Play more video games, and watch more TV.”

I was about to tell him that that’s not how resolutions work. That you usually make a resolution to improve something about yourself, or give up a bad habit or something like that. But then I thought a little bit more about his point of view. All he was really saying was that he wanted to spend more time doing the things that he enjoys doing. And maybe there’s some wisdom in that.

In the movie Multiplicity, Michael Keaton’s character says, “It’s like work comes first, my family is a close second, and I’m a distant third bringing up the rear.”

Can anyone else relate to that feeling?

What’s that one thing you’d do, if you had time to do it? You probably haven’t even thought about it for a while, because it gets pushed so far down your list of priorities. It’s a lot easier to sacrifice the things that we want to do than to sacrifice the things that others except us to do.

And while my son’s resolutions of watching TV and playing video games are what sparked me to write this, that’s not really what I’m talking about.

What’s your passion? What’s that little voice inside you saying?

is it something creative, like writing? Drawing? Painting?

Something musical? Dancing? Singing? Playing an instrument?

Maybe for you it’s something athletic. Is it joining a team and playing a sport? Running a marathon?

Is it traveling? What places are on your bucket list? What trip have you always wanted to take but never planned?

Maybe it’s photography, or filmmaking. Maybe it’s cooking, or gardening. Maybe it’s a class you want to teach. Maybe it’s something you want to make or to build. I don’t know what it is. But you do. Because it’s that thing that when you do it, it recharges your batteries. It gives you energy, rather than tiring you out.

There are two quotes that sum this all up much better than I ever could.

Dr. Wayne Dyer said: “That music that you hear inside of you, urging you to take risks and follow your dreams, is your intuitive connection to the purpose in your heart since birth. So listen to your heart, and don’t die with that music still in you.”

And Ferris Buller said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”

I’ll leave you guys with that. Happy New Year!

In my senior year of high school I had an amazing group of friends.  We called ourselves The A-Team.  (There will be a whole separate post about this group, I can’t do them justice in just this brief introduction to my latest comic book blog installment.)  We were out bowling one night, because, why not?  It was that perfect era of lots of freedom and little responsibility.  We had driver’s licenses, we had cars, we had disposable income, we had free time.  Of course, let’s go bowling, let’s stay out late, and let’s go to Taco Bell afterward.

There were two relative newcomers to our crew, Mike and Jeff, out with us that night.  They were acquaintances, familiar faces I knew from the halls of high school, but I’d never really talked to either of them much before.  They were friends with Tom and Greg, who had invited them to join the crew for the antics of the evening.

It was my turn to bowl, and I was walking up to the lane carrying my Brunswick Laser when I overheard Mike saying something to Jeff.  “I gotta save Batgirl, man!”  I stopped for a second.  Did he just say Batgirl?

Jeff laughed.  “What are you talking about?”

“I gotta get back to the comic store!  Batgirl’s still sitting in the bag, and she needs my help!” Mike said.  “I can’t believe I just left her there!  She needs my help not to die!!”

(What I did not know at the time was that Mike was referring to the cover of Batgirl #2, in which she is holding up a sign that says “Please Help Me Not To Die.”)

When I got a chance a little bit later I asked them what they were talking about.

“We go to the comic book store every Wednesday, after school,” Jeff explained.

“It’s a place called All Heroes Comics,” Mike elaborated.  “I’ve been going there for years.  When I was a kid I used to ride my bike up to the store on the weekends.”

I was in disbelief of what I was hearing.  “And now you guys go every week?”

“Yeah, Wednesday is the day the new comics come out.  We usually get there just as Chuck is opening up the boxes and putting them out on the shelf.”

I couldn’t even process this.  I had never had any friends who read comics, and now I had just met two guys who were way more hardcore than I was.

“What comics do you read?” Jeff asked.  I was wearing a Superman t-shirt and asking them obsessively about their comic book shop routine, so I don’t think it was a huge leap of logic for him to assume I was into them too.

And yet, I actually struggled for a moment to answer.  I had been “away” from comics for a while.  There wasn’t anything that I was actively reading or collecting, and even those occasional trips to a comic store or orders from Entertainment This Month had become so few and far between that they were essentially non-existent.  The most recent thing I had checked out were a few issues from the conclusion of the “No Man’s Land” storyline that had played out in the Batman comics, which I had picked up on a whim from the newsstand at Wegmans.

“I’ve been reading some of the Batman stuff,” I said.  “Superman’s always been my favorite though.”

“You want to come with us this Wednesday?” Mike asked.

“Yeah, that would be awesome!” I replied.

That Wednesday, right after school, I got to be part of the weekly ritual and go with Mike and Jeff to All Heroes Comics.  I had never been there before, and actually did not even know of this store’s existence until now.

(The comic store I had gone to previously from time to time over the years, which I will not name here, was not big on customer service… in fact the owner of that place acted like it was a huge inconvenience to help you with anything.  I actually always felt bad any time I asked my dad to stop and grab something for me, because I knew he was on his own to try and find it!)

“What’s up, fellas!” Chuck, the owner, said as we walked in.  Mike and Jeff had the timing down to a science; there was a stack of newly-delivered UPS boxes on the counter that Chuck was just about to open, as he gave the packing list a quick once-over.

He grabbed the top box and popped it down on top of one of the long-boxes full of back issues.  He sliced open the tape with a box cutter, expertly avoiding doing any damage to the books inside.  He took out small stacks of comics at a time, separating them into piles of copies of each new issue, and calling out the title as he did.  “Amazing Spidey,” he said, starting a stack of the latest issue of Amazing Spider-Man.  “Cap,” he called out, starting a pile of Captain America.  And so on.  Mike and Jeff would grab the issues they collected as soon as they hit the table.

It was like being a kid on Christmas morning, only you got to snag the presents you wanted as soon as Santa took them out of the sack.  And it happened every freaking Wednesday.

Mike told Chuck he had a few things to pick up in his bag, also.  The bag, also known as a pull-list, was essentially an in-house subscription service.  You gave Chuck a list of the titles you collected, and if an issue came out and you couldn’t stop in to get it right away, he would set it aside for you.  It also became an unofficial layaway for those weeks when you had more books than you could afford…!  You could stash some in the bag to grab on a future visit.  Mike used the opportunity to rescue Batgirl #2 from her place in layaway limbo and save her from the untimely demise she was apparently headed for on that cover.

I was hooked.  I went from guest appearance on the All Heroes outing to series regular, hitching a ride with Mike and Jeff every Wednesday after school whenever I could.  There was something so exciting about buying the comics literally as they hit the stands.  And, each week on the ride to and from the store, we’d talk about what we were reading, what was good, what wasn’t.  Our tastes intersected a bit but also varied.  I was the only one reading Superman and Justice League.  Mike and Jeff both read the X-Men books.  We all read Batman.

After a few weeks of picking up whatever caught my eye, I took the plunge and started a bag.  My initial pull-list included all four Superman titles, Batman, Detective Comics, JLA, and Incredible Hulk.  (I would add and drop various titles as the years went on, but to be honest, that core lineup stayed relatively the same through all of the various pull-list incarnations.)

That fall, Jeff and Mike went to college a couple of hours away, whereas I was going to a school closer to home and commuting.  I still went to All Heroes solo every Wednesday, and sent the guys emails about new stuff that came into the store or any funny stories about people who came in or things that were said.  (There were some regulars at the shop that we enjoyed running into, like the married guy whose wife didn’t know he collected comics, and he had to come in really quickly when he was doing the groceries.  Or the guy that we nicknamed “The Spy” because he always seemed to have inside info about movies and comics that no one else knew.)  Of course, when the guys were home for breaks, we all stopped in together so they could clear out the massive accumulation in the bags.

I’ll never forget the year we took the galacticness to the next level and went to a comic convention together for the first time.  The three of us drove from Rochester to Chicago for Wizard World in 2002, armed with a stack of swag that Chuck had asked us to try and get signed for him if we could.  We returned with comics autographed by the likes of Sean Chen, Rob Liefeld, Greg Horn, Jeph Loeb, Greg Rucka, Adam Kubert, Humberto Ramos, and many more, and were rewarded with absolutely insane discounts from Chuck for many visits after that.

At that convention my fandom also came full circle, in a way… I met Lou Ferrigno, who of course played the Hulk on that TV series that had sparked my interest in superheroes in the first place when I was just a kid.

I remember when we were planning our trip to Wizard World Chicago we kept referring to it as a “once in a lifetime” trip.  How wrong we were…!  It was just the beginning of a new level of fandom.  The thrill of meeting the writers and artists who crafted the books you’ve collected for so long, or shaking the hand of an actor who first brought them to life for you as a kid, was something that just couldn’t be a one-and-done.  One year later, in the summer of 2003, Mike and I drove all night in a rainstorm from Rochester to Philadelphia, because I just absolutely had to meet Allison Mack (who played Chloe Sullivan on Smallville, and who I had a massive crush on).

At other conventions throughout the years I would also meet some of the other individuals who were instrumental in my initial immersion in the world of comics.  At Dragon Con in 2011, I met Peter David, who wrote many of the earliest Hulk comics I had when I was little.  My dad came to the convention, too… what a surreal moment, meeting the guy who wrote some of those first comics I ever had, with my dad, who bought them for me!

I still go to All Heroes comics, although I don’t have a pull-list bag anymore.  Instead, I’m back to the “whatever catches my eye” approach when I can find the time to go in, which sure isn’t every week.  I’ve taken my own kids into the store a few times, usually on Free Comic Book Day every May.  My daughter particularly likes the Duck Tales comics, and in fact enjoys looking at some of the very issues I read when I was little when she goes to sleep at night.

Mike and Jeff are still two of my best friends.  We collaborated on film projects together in college, including a semi-animated adaptation of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s “The Ultimates” (think “motion comic”) with us and our friends doing the voices.  (You can find it on YouTube if you’re so inclined.)  We went to each other’s bachelor parties and weddings.  And, now that we all have kids, we’re just as likely to text each other in excitement about new episodes of PJ Masks as we are about the latest adventures of the superheroes we’ve enjoyed reading for so many years.  (I’m not kidding about the PJ Masks part.)

All of this eventually brings me back to where this series of blogs all started, which was back-to-school shopping with my wife, surrounded by images of every superhero you can think of on every lunchbox, every backpack, every pencil case, and any other product you can think of, and Amanda commenting that I must love the fact that superheroes are everywhere now.

And I do.  And I also don’t.

I can only compare it to that feeling you get when you love a certain band that no one else has heard of, and you have all of their CDs and you know every song by heart and you’ve seen them in concert and you’re their biggest fan.  And then, one day, they blow up and become mainstream, and suddenly everyone is into them.  But, they all only know the one or two songs that play on the radio.  They don’t know the band the way you do.  And instead of being excited that everyone else is into them, you get kind of weirdly possessive.

Those kids who are wearing Hulk t-shirts didn’t learn to read with Hulk comics, and everyone who liked the movie “Man of Steel” didn’t spend their formative years devouring every Superman comic book they could get their hands on.

Comics, when they are done right, work on multiple levels.  Ideally, you should be able to pick up a single issue of any series, and get a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end.  You get to experience one adventure of the titular hero.  With the serial nature of the series, that adventure will undoubtedly leave one or more things unresolved, or even more likely, end on a cliffhanger, compelling you to want to pick up the next installment of that title.  However, something really incredible happens if you read more comic book titles.  Very frequently, with the “shared universe” that these stories occupy, characters and even plot points will spill over from one series into another.  You don’t have to (or, at least, when it’s done right, shouldn’t have to) read every series to get a whole story.  But, if you do, you start to get a larger sense of scope and scale, and almost feel like you live in that universe as well.

That is something that, as a kid growing up, I assumed would always be unique just to the comics.  I never thought it would or could carry over into the screen adaptations of my favorite heroes.  The closest it ever got was usually a quick reference in the form of a throwaway line or joke, like in “Batman Forever” when Bruce Wayne mentions Metropolis.  That’s right, he MENTIONED Metropolis, and at the time, that in itself was mind-blowing, because it implied that Superman must exist somehow, somewhere, in this reality as well.  (Around the same time, an episode of “Lois & Clark” mentioned Gotham City, and I almost lost my mind.)

And yet here we are today, in a world where we have multiple Marvel movies coming out each year, full of cameos and crossovers and post-credit scenes that tease at what’s coming next.  There’s also the slate of DC superhero shows on the CW Network, where you can occasionally see an episode of Supergirl end with a title card proclaiming “To Be Continued on The Flash,” or a Flash episode telling you to tune into Arrow for its conclusion.

When the movie “Captain America: Civil War” came out, I was seeing it in the theater for the second time, and it was up to the scene were Cap is assembling his team at the airport in Germany.  Clint Barton opens the door of his van to reveal the last member of their team: Paul Rudd as Scott Lang.  A kid a few rows ahead of me excitedly told his dad, in pure disbelief, “That’s Ant Man!  That’s Ant Man!!”  The movie Ant Man had just come out the year before.  His appearance in Civil War, a movie already chock full of other heroes, was apparently the surprise that put this kid over the moon.  (It’s not like the kid had been talking through the whole movie, either.  Something about Ant Man showing up really got this kid stoked.)

And that’s when I realized, that that feeling of being part of a larger universe that I got from reading the comics, that feeling of being “in on it” when you caught a reference to something you had read before… it’s not unique to comics anymore.  They’ve finally managed to successfully translate it.

And I realized another thing, too.  In my own, weird, perhaps snobbish protectiveness of the comics, with that “I listened to this band before it was cool” sensibility where I felt like I was somehow “more” of a fan than everyone going to the movies or watching the shows… my fandom started with a TV adaptation too.  I never would have discovered the comics if it hadn’t been for watching the Bill Bixby TV show with my mom when I was little.  That copy of Incredible Hulk #324 wouldn’t have jumped out at me on the magazine rack at age 4 if I hadn’t first been introduced to the startling metamorphosis that occurred whenever David Banner grew angry or outraged in its television format first.

Maybe that kid who got so psyched to see Ant Man show up and hang with Captain America will ask his dad to take him to the comic book store so he can read about where that character comes from.  Or maybe he won’t.  And either way, it’s okay.  Because these movies and shows are introducing these characters to an audience who otherwise might not have known them at all.  (And, for those die-hard fans of the band that goes mainstream, there’s still comfort in knowing the lyrics to every deep track…!)

The long-boxes full of back issues that make up my collection are full of stories, frozen in time, that don’t just tell the tales of the fight for truth and justice.  They tell my story, too.  From a four-year-old kid who loved to see a man-monster going berserk with rage, to a 12-year-old who found inspiration in the adventures of a man from Krypton, to a young adult who made a couple of lifelong friends with a weekly trip to a comic book store, those comics are like signposts on the road of my life, each one carefully bagged, boarded, and filed away for posterity.

In November of 1992, Superman #75 made national headlines.  It was in the newspaper and on the TV news that DC Comics was killing off Superman.  I was shocked at the thought of the most invulnerable superhero of all somehow dying, but what was even more strange and powerful to me was that everyone was talking about a comic book.  Reading comics had always been a very solitary hobby for me, and, other than the letters pages in the back of each issue where fans would write in with their comments, it was easy to feel like no one else was reading those stories but me.  Now, suddenly, the whole world was interested in something that was happening in a comic.  It was very exciting.

However, I figured I would never even see a copy of it.  The news showed footage of people lined up around the block trying to get a copy from their local comic book store like it was a big screen TV on Black Friday.  People were talking about this comic – which came in a sealed black bag – as if it would put their kids through college someday.  (Today you can probably get a copy for about $10 without too much effort.)

Imagine my shock when Mema (my grandma on my dad’s side) actually managed to get a copy when it came out!  She was one of those people that waited in the ridiculous comic book store lines!  Apparently she tried to ask for three copies, intending to keep one, give one to me, and give one to my dad.  The comic book shop owner laughed and told her it was one per customer.  She bought one copy, and gave it to my dad (I’m pretty sure she was part of the “this will put the kids through college one day” camp).  My dad gave it to me and told me it should go with my collection.  He said it was for safe-keeping, but, I think he just knew how much it meant for me to have it.  I was in disbelief to possess a copy of this holy grail of comics… but tortured by the fact that I knew that it must remain forever sealed in its immortal polybag!  It was like having the golden ticket but knowing you could never open the Wonka Bar.

I would not get to actually read the story and learn how Superman met his fate until DC published a trade paperback edition that collected the whole “Death of Superman” storyline, including Superman #75 and the issues that had led up to it.

The premise, for those unfamiliar, is that a raging monster called Doomsday is tearing across the country – heading towards Metropolis, naturally – killing and destroying everything and everyone in its path.  Superman tries to stop him, but Doomsday is more powerful than any foe he has ever faced.  It quickly becomes clear that it’s not going to be kryptonite that kills the man of steel, as one might have expected.  He has just actually, finally, met his match.

The final chapter is told all in splash pages.  (A splash page is where the whole page is just one image, rather than being divided up into different panels.  The title page of a comic is usually a splash page.)  In the last moments, Superman and Doomsday collide one last time and both fall to the ground, dead.  The issue ends with a double-page spread of Lois Lane in tears beside Superman’s body, with his torn and tattered cape flying like a memorial flag in the background.  I was 10 years old, and this sight moved me to tears.  It was the first time a comic book ever made me cry.  (It wouldn’t be the last…  Maybe when we get to the end of this blog series I’ll reveal what the other times were.)

I had assumed that this meant the Superman series was over.  But, of course, it wasn’t.  The death storyline was followed by “Funeral for a Friend,” which focused on Superman’s grieving supporting cast.  And then, “Reign of the Supermen,” in which four new pseudo-Supermen appeared on the scene in Metropolis.  Was one of them somehow the real one, back from the grave?

This was the first time that I felt the need to keep up with what was happening in an ongoing comic book series in “real time.”  And this didn’t mean waiting for a new installment every month; there was a new chapter every week.  You see, Superman didn’t have just one comic book series about him, he had four.  “Superman,” “Superman in Action Comics,” “Superman: The Man of Steel,” and “The Adventures of Superman” were four separate ongoing series, and one of them came out each Wednesday on a rotating basis.  “Reign of the Supermen” was a sprawling saga that played out across all the titles.

I couldn’t keep up with it even if I tried.  I was 10.  I didn’t have a means of transportation to get to the local comic book store.  I could get my dad to take me once in a while, but not on a weekly basis, and even if I could, I didn’t have the money to buy every single issue.  I picked up what I could at any opportunity.  Sometimes I ended up reading some of the issues out of order, or missed a chapter or two and had to try to figure out what had happened in between.  Something about that fact, though, made the whole thing seem even bigger and more epic.

There was even one issue that I had to, reluctantly, deliberately, skip.  I was at a newsstand with my dad, and of course I had to check out the comics rack to see if there was a new installment of “Reign of the Supermen.”  And there was.  Superman #80 sported a cover image of the Cyborg Superman blowing a freaking hole right through the chest of the Last Son of Krypton Superman.  It was the most graphically violent image I had ever seen depicted on a comic book cover.  I thought back to my parents condemning those old Hulk comics for being too violent when I was a little kid, leading to me eventually throwing them out.  Even though that was a lifetime ago, I just couldn’t do it.  I knew there was no way my dad would let me have that comic, so I didn’t even ask.  I walked away and left it on the rack.  (I would buy it years later from a back-issue bin; it is part of my collection today.)

Around this time I discovered the (now defunct) mail-order company Entertainment This Month.  They advertised in each issue as a way to order upcoming comics in advance and have them mailed to you.  They also offered cool free incentives, like posters, trading cards, or special comics depending on when you ordered.  I sent in a request for one of their free catalogs.  It opened up a whole new world to me.  The catalogs had a short description of what was going to happen in each issue and even pictures of some of the covers.  For the first time I had a sense of what was going to be coming out when, and which issues were the absolute “must have” essential parts of the storyline.  And, instead of getting a ride to the comic store or newsstand and trying to play “catch up” on the parts of the story I’d missed, I could send away for the ones I really wanted and wait for them to show up at my door.

This was also the first time I started to pay attention to the writer and artist on each issue.  Even though the stories intertwined, each of the four different series had a different writer/artist pair and thus had its own style.  My favorite artist, by far, was Tom Grummett on “Adventures of Superman.”  He had a very clean, fluid style that looked like it belonged in an animated series.  I looked forward to the “Adventures” issues more than the rest.

There came a point where I had to have everything that had to do with this event.  I had a poster of the four new Supermen on my bedroom wall.  I had the “Death and Return of Superman” Super Nintendo game.  I had “The Return of Superman” trading cards.  I had the novelization and junior novelization.  I had the “Superman Lives!” audio cassette.  I was obsessed.

There were a couple of kids in my class who were interested in it too.  They weren’t nearly as hardcore as I was, but, they each had a few of the issues and I could at least talk to them about it.  One day I brought in a stack of my comics to get them caught up and we passed them around during D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything And Read) time.  I also brought in my Entertainment This Month catalogs, feeling super cool to be able to show off that I knew what was coming up next.  It was nice to have a couple friends who were into the comics too, but, on a scale of 1 to 10 I think their interest was like a 4 and mine was an 11.  And, beyond those couple of guys, no one else really cared about it.

In the fall of 1993, the TV show “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” premiered.  I couldn’t believe they were making a show about Superman.  I loved it from the very first episode.  The first season especially had a real sense of wonder.  The focus on Clark Kent as a “real person” (rather than just a put-on bumbling disguise) was something the comics had been trying to develop since the 80s, but it was the first time it had been done on television.  And, with Teri Hatcher portraying Lois, it was the first time I ever really understood what Superman would see in Lois Lane.

The same couple of kids in my class who had a fleeting interest in the Superman comics also watched “Lois & Clark,” but, again, they weren’t as into it as I was.  And the rest of the world that had bought into the Superman hype long enough to buy that one black-bagged death issue had long since moved on.

I have a very distinct memory of being in the school cafeteria on a Monday and listening to my friends talking about the football game that had been on the day before.  I didn’t follow football.  But pretty much all the other guys in my class did.  And I remember thinking to myself, why is it so common for everyone to watch football that you could just kind of safely assume that if you struck up a conversation about it, odds were pretty good that the guy you were talking to watched the game.  But if you randomly started talking about “Lois & Clark” or about the comic book you just read, odds were pretty good they would have no idea what you were talking about.

This was 1993, and “Lois & Clark” was the only superhero show on TV.  There had been a “Flash” TV show a couple years before, but it didn’t last long.  As for superhero movies, you’d get one maybe every few years if you were lucky, and the quality was inconsistent at best.  (Batman Returns was in 1992, and then we’d wait three more years for the very tonally different Batman Forever in 1995.)  Superhero culture was just not mainstream, and I remember sitting in that elementary school cafeteria wishing that it was.

If you could go back in time and tell my kid self that in 2017 there would literally be so many superhero TV shows that he would not have the time to watch all of them, or that there would be multiple superhero movies every year and they would cross over with each other the way the actual comics did, it would have completely blown his mind.

Other than those couple of kids in my class who had a casual interest in the Superman comics, I still didn’t know anyone else who read them, and certainly not anyone who cared about them as much as I did.

At least, not yet.