ORIGINAL FICTION: "Superheroes are Gay" (Part 2)

NOTE: This is part two of the story. It begins here http://www.republibot.com/category/tags/superheroes-are-gay
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There was a time when “Comic Books” was more or less synonymous with “Super Heroes.“ I was never much in to that, though. I read lots of comics as a kid: Richie Rich, Archie, Chip n’ Dale, your basic Gold Key crap. I had a stack of ‘em a couple feet high. I got older, and started getting “Weird Tales of Space” and “Fightin’ World War II Commandos” and stuff like that. When I was exposed to superhero comics at all - at summer day camp while waiting for my folks, or on the porch of my grandparent’s house where one of my cousins had misplaced ‘em - I solidly disliked them. Particularly Marvel. I hated Marvel. The artwork was crap, the coloring was lurid, the stories were incomprehensibly mired in their own backstory. DC was better in that their artwork generally made an effort to look like the actual things they were trying to represent, and their stories were generally stories, but ‘better’ only brought them up to take-it-or-leave it level in my eyes.

The first superhero comic I can remember reading was when I was six or seven years old. Some kid - undoubtedly dead now - had some dumbass Marvel comic that he shared with me while we were waiting for the school bus. It was about a guy with a high-tech glove that could change matter from one sort to another. He hugged his mother without turning it off first, and she turned to dust or water or something. It scared me in the way you can only really get scared when you’re in first or second grade.

“What do you think?” He asked me when I handed it back to him.

“Superheroes are gay,” I said, trying to hide my fear under a veneer of derision. It was my first-ever assessment on the genre, my ‘first word’ on the subject, if you will. I haven’t seen too much to make me change my opinion in the lifetime since. The kid beat the crap out of me, and I can still remember the pain. It’s funny. I can remember my first beating from - gosh - forty four years ago, but I’ve got no conscious memory of the walloping I took just yesterday.

I was a senior in high school when Marvel went bankrupt, and was purchased by DC. They ran a year-long Maxi-series about someone called “The MacGuffin” who’s actions resulted in the history of both universes being folded together as one. I could not have cared less. I was 23 or so when my friend Ian forced me to read them all, and I gradually began to warm up to the superhero comics, and the DCM in general. Not a huge mania for me, but I followed Green Lantern along, I enjoyed “The Syncretist,” I had every issue ever written of “The Tick” (Which wasn’t DCM, but you know what I mean), and JL-T was kinda’ fun. Even still, all of them - excepting The Tick - would take a back seat to “Lost In Space: The Next Generation,” which I claimed to read for the stories, but it was mostly for the good girl art, and Freddy Fortune, a hilariously dirty knockoff of “Richie Rich,” and “Flaming Carrot” and stuff like that. I just never connected with superhero comics the way others did.

It was about ten years later when the first real-life superheroes started showing up.

To Be Continued...
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