Putting Away Childish Things
This is one of my favorite comic books. Superman #338 came out in late May 1979. I was 14 years old, and just finishing eighth grade in Mesick, Michigan. I didn't know it then, but it was a golden time to be a Superman fan. While Batman was my first and favorite hero, Superman was a natural pairing for me. They had had the Batman-Superman Hour as a cartoon in 1969, they had a team-up book (World's Finest) which was one of my favorites, and they were both in the Justice League of America.
Superman's mythology was still completely intact at the time. The bottle city of Kandor, The Fortress of Solitude at the North Pole with the giant yellow key disguised as an aircraft marker, the works. There were all kinds of Kryptonite that had different effects on Kryptonians, there were Bizarros that had their own world, Superman could fly into space without a space suit, travel through time, and the wonders of his universe knew no bounds. And Supergirl was wearing what is still my favorite of her costumes, the one with the billowy sleeves and hot pants. I was 14, okay? In the story, Superman finally succeeds in developing a way to enlarge the bottle city on another planet, so that the surviving Kryptonians from Kandor would have a home outside his Fortress of Solitude. But sadly, the entire city crumbles to dust, as the enlarging ray only worked on "animate objects," leaving the people alive but without their city. More on that in a bit.
Just as Star Wars had a major impact on me at age 12, Superman The Movie brought me right back to my comic book roots. At the time this comic book came out, Superman was just leaving theaters after a very successful first run. And I was already buying everything to do with it before the movie even came out. There was the score on vinyl, trading cards, magazines, Limited Collectors Edition reprints, and of course, the comic books. With great financial need came my first job.
There was an opening for delivering newspapers for the Traverse City Record-Eagle, and I jumped at the chance to take it. Just one problem: I needed a bike to get around. While we lived close to town, walking to school and Little League practices was getting old. Add a paper route to that, and it was time to move up. I owned a single-speed Columbia that was a good bike, but a bit small for me. So, I sold that, and my grandparents gave me a loan of $85 to buy a new Huffy 10-speed. In return, I would pay them back half of my newspaper route money each week. I thought that a perfectly fair deal, and I had my bike the next day.
The Record-Eagle only printed six days a week. There was no Sunday paper, which made Monday's paper the thickest. It had all the weekly ads. The papers were delivered to my house in the afternoon, right about 3:40 PM. The newspapers were delivered flat, and I would cut them loose and put them in my bag. Also in my bag was my battery-powered cassette recorder, which blared the Superman soundtrack wherever I went. I had painstakingly recorded the Superman score from vinyl to a blank tape in my tape recorder. My bike was stable enough that you would have often seen me riding with both my arms outstretched in front of me. I could finish the whole three-mile route in about 25 minutes unless it was collection day. That's when I had to go around and collect $1.05 per week from each subscriber. They would pay the money, and I would punch the dates paid from a card that I kept on a ring. The problem was that I had to shell out the money for the newspaper subscriptions in advance. And if they didn't pay, I didn't have the money to pay for my papers. Yes, even back then, subcontracting was the way to go for businesses. I never liked having to explain that to people, but they needed to know that if they didn't pay, I was the one on the hook for their newspaper costs.
The rest of the summer days were left to me. I deliberately took a photo of Superman #338 with the shadows of tree leaves on it. Because that was the best way to spend time in the summer, reading comics outdoors in the shade. Air conditioning was available at my grandparents' house, just across a small field, but time alone with my imagination, comic books, and drawing paper was really all that I needed. With the Copemish Flea Market being held every weekend nearby, my grandma and I would be off to pick up fresh produce for the week, while I would always find the guy with cheap comic books.
As summer went on, though, things changed. I suddenly realized that I would be starting high school in September. And the story in Superman #338 kept coming back to me. After the destruction of all the inanimate matter in Kandor (except clothing, apparently) Superman felt so guilty about the tragedy that he was going to stay to help the Kandorians rebuild. His friend Van-Zee, however sucker punched him, knocking Superman unconscious, telling Supergirl that they needed to leave because the Kandorians had chosen a world that would only occasionally be in the same dimension as Earth. They had chosen it so that they could sever all ties with Superman and be independent. I didn't understand the term patriarchy at the time, but I got the idea. The Kandorians wanted to stand on their own and tame a new world without Superman's fatherly protective gaze looking over them all the time. I was starting to feel the same way. I didn't need people telling me what to do all the time, either. I had my first job and was earning my own money for the first time.
The comic book guy at the flea market didn't just sell comics. He traded them two-for-one. I never spent any more money there. I started trading my existing comics for the ones he had that I hadn't read yet. And over the next several weeks, my collection, started only two and a half years previously, dwindled. I would buy only one more Superman comic, Action Comics #500, before the end of summer, but in the end, that too, would be gone. I was saying goodbye to my childhood, not just to my newly-discovered free childhood, but to my stolen childhood as well.
In the fall, I started playing varsity football as a freshman. And then basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring into summer. My focus was decidedly different, and more grown up, or so I imagined. But what I learned over the four years of high school was that the social structures of high school relationships could be just as fragile as a house of cards. Most of the friendships I made through sports did not survive the four years. I was simply too different in what I believed and in what I enjoyed. I refused to get drunk every weekend like all of my peers, and my gravitation toward nerdy things remained, even though I resisted comic books. I would still read science fiction novels, movie tie-ins, and the like. In my mind, I had finally put away "childish things."
Thank goodness I came to my senses.
The rest of the summer days were left to me. I deliberately took a photo of Superman #338 with the shadows of tree leaves on it. Because that was the best way to spend time in the summer, reading comics outdoors in the shade. Air conditioning was available at my grandparents' house, just across a small field, but time alone with my imagination, comic books, and drawing paper was really all that I needed. With the Copemish Flea Market being held every weekend nearby, my grandma and I would be off to pick up fresh produce for the week, while I would always find the guy with cheap comic books.
As summer went on, though, things changed. I suddenly realized that I would be starting high school in September. And the story in Superman #338 kept coming back to me. After the destruction of all the inanimate matter in Kandor (except clothing, apparently) Superman felt so guilty about the tragedy that he was going to stay to help the Kandorians rebuild. His friend Van-Zee, however sucker punched him, knocking Superman unconscious, telling Supergirl that they needed to leave because the Kandorians had chosen a world that would only occasionally be in the same dimension as Earth. They had chosen it so that they could sever all ties with Superman and be independent. I didn't understand the term patriarchy at the time, but I got the idea. The Kandorians wanted to stand on their own and tame a new world without Superman's fatherly protective gaze looking over them all the time. I was starting to feel the same way. I didn't need people telling me what to do all the time, either. I had my first job and was earning my own money for the first time.
The comic book guy at the flea market didn't just sell comics. He traded them two-for-one. I never spent any more money there. I started trading my existing comics for the ones he had that I hadn't read yet. And over the next several weeks, my collection, started only two and a half years previously, dwindled. I would buy only one more Superman comic, Action Comics #500, before the end of summer, but in the end, that too, would be gone. I was saying goodbye to my childhood, not just to my newly-discovered free childhood, but to my stolen childhood as well.
In the fall, I started playing varsity football as a freshman. And then basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring into summer. My focus was decidedly different, and more grown up, or so I imagined. But what I learned over the four years of high school was that the social structures of high school relationships could be just as fragile as a house of cards. Most of the friendships I made through sports did not survive the four years. I was simply too different in what I believed and in what I enjoyed. I refused to get drunk every weekend like all of my peers, and my gravitation toward nerdy things remained, even though I resisted comic books. I would still read science fiction novels, movie tie-ins, and the like. In my mind, I had finally put away "childish things."
Thank goodness I came to my senses.
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