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So I got my first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine tonight.

My wife got vaccinated a while ago because she is a community college professor, and therefor both a state employee and an educator, both high-priority categories. Our kids are all too young to be vaccinated (so far, as things stand, who knows what the rules will be a few months from now) but I read something recently that basically said the vaccine is good and necessary protection but not 100%, more like 80-90% resistance, whereas kids (non-immunocompromised kids, and we are very lucky to have an inherently healthy brood) just seem to have natural immunity of about ... 80 - 90% resistance. So an unvaccinated low-risk child is in about as good shape as a vaccinated low-risk adult. So, yay?

It feels like a turning point in this whole saga. I mean, duh, of course, but at the risk of sounding solipsistic it feels like we collectively have reached a turning point in this entire saga, as I'm seeing lots and lots of people posting their vaccine status updates every day. Conceivably, the natonal vaccination effort could be complete by the Fourth of July, they say. So it seems appropriate, in this pandemic-diary-within-a-blog, to specifically call out the day I got the shot.

There's so many things I haven't yet documented about the past year-plus, and partly that's because there were long stretches where things just looked and felt so dire and draining and I couldn't bring myself to play amateur first-draft historian. But now that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps I'll go back and fill in some standout moments.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (9) - It Can Get Weirder

In this post (and likely a couple more) I’m going to talk about one of my childhood friends who I’ve never mentioned on the blog before. We were never close friends by any stretch. But there was a brief period during middle school, seventh and eight grade, when we hung out a lot, mostly because he would invite me over to his house and I would go because I had nothing better to do. And we would just lounge around his room, where he had a tv and a bunch of comics. He was the only person I knew who was more into comics than I was, and he introduced me to some specific issues which still loom large in my memories. For blogonymity purposes I will refer to this friend as TD, which is short for teenage dirtbag. He was a very decent human being, but he had longish hair and wore a denim jacket and listened to heavy metal (in fact he loaned me his copies of Metallica’s Master of Puppets and Iron Maiden’s Live After Death on cassette, which is what got me into heavy metal back in the day) so in our small town hierarchy he was definitely considered part of the dirtbag crowd.

Anyway, I rode my bike to TD’s house one Saturday and we hung out with Knight Rider playing in the background and I picked up his copy of Uncanny X-Men Annual #9. It was a couple of years old by then, but that’s more or less the point: via TD’s collection, I could access comics I had missed even if they weren’t hugely historically important. I had read X-Men #1 because the town library had Son of Origins, in which it was reprinted. But a random annual from two or three years ago? If not for TD I would never have been aware of it.

Although ironically this annual has since been reprinted, and I own the collection which includes it. Because, as it turns out, it was historically significant, which only became clear in hindsight. I am getting ahead of myself (as usual) so let me come in again.

X-Men was nearly one of Marvel’s also-ran titles. From 1963 to 1975 it was just kind of there, a team book about younger heroes united by their common origin as mutants rather than gods, radiation-related accident survivors, inventors, aliens, etc. (As Stan himself wrote in Son of Origins, the book was nearly titled “The Mutants” but he was talked out of it because that was too technical/scientific a term to appeal to the kiddies.) It didn’t have top-tier art (save for a bit of Kirby at the outset) and only had a dash of Stan Lee’s plotting, so it was fine but never truly great. In fact it switched from new ongoing stories to reprints from 1970 to 1975 and no one really cared. Then in ‘75 Chris Claremont took over as writer, right around when the whole team lineup was revamped, and over the course of the next five years it went from quasi-cancellation to producing one of the greatest modern classic epics of all, the Dark Phoenix Saga. And it kept getting better from there.

The general consensus is that Claremont elevated the writing on X-Men in two major ways: he amped up the complexity of the plotlines and he ladled on the soap opera dramatics. Claremont deeply grokked the utility and appeal of continuity. He was willing and able to look back at stories that had been written by those who’d worked on X-Men before him, identify interesting loose ends, and directly connect his new stories to those old strands of the tapestry. Of course he also had a million ideas of his own, and a lot of them were slow burn long plays. In the original days of Marvel, a good idea for a story had to fit inside a single issue of disposable media. If the resolution of said story idea required any background context or explanation, it would usually show up in a huge word balloon dump in the second to last panel. But by Claremont’s time it was no longer an ironclad rule that comics were for eight year olds with short attention spans. The audience was assumed to be reading almost every issue, and the writers could plant seeds in one book that wouldn’t bear fruit until later. Claremont excelled at this, particularly via layered plots. Any given issue of X-Men might see the team dealing with a threat, but also see one member of the team dealing with a personal issue on the side, and also have a scene in the middle that didn’t involve the main threat at all. The next issue would see the personal issue escalate to full blown threat, while the new plot from the previous issue crept closer to directly impacting the team, plus another new subplot would be introduced. On and on the wheels within wheels would turn, so that every time a particular plot culminated it had been building for a while, without any down time, because the narrative was constantly multitasking.

And it wasn’t as predictably formulaic as I’ve summarized. Sometimes a subplot would be introduced but not followed up on immediately, either because the pacing of the main plot didn’t have room for it, or because Claremont was deliberately slow-rolling to avoid a boring pattern. Or both! Overall it was nuanced, thoughtful longform storytelling which really did make every issue a must-read, because you never knew when something was going to be innocuously introduced that would pay off big later, or in fact when those big payoffs would suddenly materialize. And as I’ve tried to explain previously, every issue being important is a feature, not a bug, to fans who want to immerse themself in that kind of self-rewarding familiarity with a fictional universe.

All of that is just the plot stuff, and as I mentioned there was another facet, too: everything was emotionally heightened. These slow-burn plots which showed the danger coming from a mile off didn’t just involve random evil-doers. It would inevitably be some long-lost family member, or a former lover whose grudge was really a broken heart, or a jealous ex-friend or ex-mentor. And that was just the external conflict, while at the same time within the X-Men were rivalries and unrequited love, distrust and disputes, an intricate web of relationships and complicated feelings which were neither a distraction from the main event slugfests, nor bolted on, but integral parts of the overall whole. It’s quite a feat to be able to pull that off, and yes, of course, after many many years of constantly having to raise the stakes while still basically maintaining the recognizability of the intellectual property, Claremont got excessive almost to the point of self-parody. As evidenced by the ability to distill it all down to a joke meme template by way of the animated series.

But that was later. In the 80’s - and this is a story about me, reading comics in 1987, remember? - Claremont was at the top of his game.

So, Uncanny X-Men Annual #9. It’s the X-Men, plus the New Mutants (once the X-Men grew up and were no longer teenage students of Charles Xavier they had to create a whole spin-off to keep the school-for-mutants thing viable) … IN ASGARD! Now, I had never really been into Thor comics, I knew who he was and liked him in The Avengers comics but wasn’t super familiar with the Marvel version of the Nine Realms, but this was a year or so after I had done a deep dive into Norse mythology for a school project so I was primed. And frankly, even after years of reading Spider-Man and other random comics, this opened my eyes to just how unlimited the possibilities were in a shared universe like Marvel’s continuity. Most of the big titles tended to build up their own little corners, where Doctor Strange handles the mystical stuff and the Fantastic Four do science-fiction exploration adventures. But why not mix and match with wild abandon? Why not take the mutants, some of which don’t even look human, and scatter them across Alfheim and Nidavellir and every realm in between, with fairies and dragons and witches galore? Why not take Loki’s current scheme, which has already gotten Thor out of the picture, and progress it to its next logical conclusion, installing a new Thor under Loki’s thrall, a mortal who already has experience with weather control and being worshipped as a goddess, the X-Men’s Storm? Storm was actually powerless at that point, due to some other previous subplot where her mutant abilities were “permanently” (spoiler: not really) neutralized so she was a soft target for Loki’s manipulation - take this hammer and reclaim the skies! The X-Men annual was actually the second part and conclusion of a story that started in New Mutants, where Loki abducted the underage mutants to remote corners of his world. And that was a follow-up from a previous project Claremont had masterminded where the X-Men and Alpha Flight had teamed up to fight Loki, and soundly defeated him, with Loki swearing revenge. (So it’s all four of those comics, the X-Men/Alpha Flight crossover and the New Mutants and X-Men sequel, that eventually got collected, once Claremont was firmly established as a Big Deal because the X-Men were the Biggest Thing Ever.)

The comic I picked up off TD’s floor was a great read, extra long and ridiculously dense, where the rest of the X-Men go to Asgard to rescue Storm and the New Mutants and have to throw down against Loki, physically and philosophically. And to give credit where it’s due, even though I knew next to nothing about the current X-Men storylines or the Thor-adjacent stuff, I was able to understand most of it, because Claremont wrote in such a way that things were never totally impenetrable to the newcomer. There was definitely a suggestion that certain details could be found in earlier sources, but the main thrust was clear enough. But most of all, it was the very everything-but-the-kitchen-sink nature of the story, opening my mind to the possibility that mutants didn’t have to always just fight a government trying to regulate them out of existence and/or Magneto, and Asgardian warriors didn’t have to always just fight ice giants and fire giants.

I don’t know that I’ve ever expounded on this theory here before, but if you look at speculative fiction and break it roughly in half with sci-fi on one side and fantasy on the other, you’re often as not breaking it down into stories set in the future or set in the past, and/or on secondary worlds which resemble our archetypal concepts of those timeframes. When you have speculative fiction clearly set on Earth in the present, usually the imaginary element is limited - one time travelling robot and one time travelling resistance member, or one clan of vampires living in secret in the shadows, etc. If the introduction of the speculative leads to chaos, it’s horror; if it’s orderly, it’s urban fantasy or plausible sci-fi. But somewhere in the middle of that diagram you have the present Earth, plus tons of other secondary worlds, plus outlandish sci-fi inventions, plus magic, plus monsters, and equal measures of chaos and order, and that’s a superhero comics universe. People love to use the phrase “anything can happen” to describe an exciting fictional premise, but my hot take is that nothing comes close to embodying that philosophy the way that superhero comics do. So why would you build silos within that premise, to have the sci-fi and the fantasy co-exist side by side but never interact? If the universe allows for anything and everything, then don’t be coy about it. Jump in and splash around, like Uncanny X-Men Annual #9.

Reading that book in TD’s room deepened my love for superhero comics in general and got me more interested in the X-Men specifically (which was good timing because about four years later a relaunched series’ X-Men #1 would become the best-selling comic of all time to that point - I bought all five variant copies). I clearly remember reading some other specific comics at TD’s as well, which had their own repercussions on my fandom, and I’ll get deeper into those next post.

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Well, let's see if the WiFi works a little better today with decreased demand. Today the bino and the little girl went back to school in person. It's the first day since way back on Friday the 13th of March, 2020 that this has been an option. Our fair city's schools have adopted a hybrid model for this home stretch of the school year, so my little ones will be attending class in the school building on Tuesdays and Thursdays (and continuing virtual distance learning on M/W/F) from now until the end of May. Assuming this all works and doesn't result in massive case spikes and another emergency shutdown. Fingers crossed.

The little guy is still doing fulltime at-home school-via-Zoom because, well, he's really not so little anymore. He's 12, he's in seventh grade which means he should be at the middle school, and the city only agreed to resume in-person instruction in the elementary schools. Which makes sense, it really does, I think it was the correct and responsible decision. Elementary school is designed to keep the same cohort of kids together all day in the same room, limiting the chances for exposure cross-contamination etc. Whereas middle and high schoolers all jumble together in the hallways every 45 minutes as they constantly change classes throughout the day. I get it, I do. It just sucks for the little guy, who's sick of being stuck at home and misses his friends.

I'mma take him out to McDonald's for lunch and then maybe buy him some new books. Hopefully that will make up for the unfairness of it all, somewhat.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (8b) - So Close and Yet

I know I promised that in the next post I would go back to good old Earth-616 and the “real” Marvel Universe, but then I realized I couldn’t let go of the New U without talking a bit more about D.P. 7. Hence this sub-bullet (b) addendum to the previous post. If nothing else, this blog is best characterized as a series of loosely connected digressions, so of course this long-form series about my personal history with marvel Comics is going to have its share of going off into the weeds.

You might not know it from reading the previous post, but I actually loved D.P. 7. Not merely “well out of all of these very mediocre series in this conceptually flawed standalone continuity, I guess this one is at the top of the list” but active, devoted love. To this day I still have copies of every single issue, including the annual and the one-shot from a Return to the New U event many years later. And a lot of those issues I bought in real time from the newsstand, but a lot of them I had to hunt down after the fact. The failures of the New U became apparent pretty early on and even as it limped through its second year and into its third, retailers were more and more skeptical and less and less likely to order and stock the issues.

But D.P. 7 deserved better. It was extremely akin to X-Men, spiritually (which makes this a worthwhile transitional post because I am definitely going to talk about X-Men a lot in installment 9), at a time when X-Men had gotten really, solidly, consistently good, but right before it absolutely blew up and became the most insanely popular comic EVAR. Both were team books, very heavy on the soap opera and the pathos, and taking the point of view that normal people would be distrustful of others with powers, fearing, hating and hunting them.

One big difference was that the seven protagonists (the rest of the title was an abbreviation of Displaced Paranormals, no mutants in the NU) didn’t have a wealthy patron like Professor X or a place to hide away from the outside world like Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. They spent most of their time on the run, so it was kind of like a hybrid of X-Men and Hulk, with our heroes doing good where they could, almost by accident, while staying one step ahead of the authorities.

But on the other hand another similarity with X-Men was the near-constant raising of the question, “Are these powers a blessing or a curse?” In the Marvel U, no matter what your powerset that question must be asked because simply having powers brands you as a mutant, target of Sentinels, object of fear and loathing to the public at large. But at the same time, as many people have pointed out over the years, most mutants can pretty easily hide what they are, so long as they wear their ruby quartz glasses or keep their bone claws sheathed.

D.P. 7 doubled down by making almost every paranormal’s powerset a kind of monkey’s paw. The set-up starts as a buddy story when Randy meets Dave. Randy is an ER doc and Dave is brought in on a gurney having some kind of episode. Also Dave is over seven feet tall and hundreds of pounds of pure muscle. Dave freaks out and is trashing the place but Randy helps subdue and sedate him, with a partial assist from ghostly black arms that pop out of Randy’s chest. OK, so, Dave is the brick, but his powers are a curse because he used to be a normal-looking 5’11” guy and then he started rapidly growing, which was physically painful to the point of freaking out as above. He’s like the Thing or the Hulk except, of course, more “realistic”, though still plenty attention-grabbingly ugly within the context of the New U. He’s gone bald but has a foot-long beard, his body is hairy (and most clothes don’t fit him) and he’s big as the broadside of a barn. Randy has not just arms but an entire ghostly manifestation that lives inside him but can come out, fly around, phase through stuff but also interact with stuff, and then transfer what it sees to Randy’s mind when it returns. How is this a curse? Eh, it really isn’t, it’s just weird, although as the series goes on it turns out Randy has multiple black ghosts inside him with slightly different personalities, and one of them has no compunctions about straight up murdering people who threaten Randy, which bothers the good doctor. Also if anyone at the hospital found out Randy was a paranormal he might lose his job. So classic X-Men “mutant burden” stuff really.

(Notice the writing credit on page 1 up there, by the way - Mark Gruenwald, the same scribe who wrote Squadron Supreme. Gru was awesome.)

Anyway Dave and Randy hear about a place called The Clinic that claims to cure paranormals and Dave definitely wants to be cured, because it’s nice to be strong but he feels like a freak. And Randy would just as soon not have to worry about his ghost(s) popping out at inopportune moments. So they go to the Clinic and become part of a therapy group of seven, so we meet Dennis (Scuzz), Charlotte (Charlie), Jeff, Lenore and Stephanie.

Scuzz is just a kid of 15, a burnout who literally burns things. His body constantly secretes a substance that disintegrates matter, so his clothes have holes in them with wisps of smoke. When he concentrates he can disintegrate specific things faster. Obviously this power is kind of a bummer, and it gets worse later when Scuzz has a girlfriend for a hot minute until she realizes being intimate with him is physically painful.

Charlie is a dancer who can manipulate friction, making surfaces more sticky or more slippery. The biggest bummer is that she hasn’t learned to control this power, and that makes it hard for her to dance in an ensemble where the other dancers might slip and break their necks if she inadvertently turns off the friction on stage.

Jeff has super speed. He vibrates constantly and looks blurry. He needs to eat almost constantly (a downside to superspeed other superhero comics have also explored). Bit of a mixed bag.

Lenore is an elderly woman whose skin glows constantly with a white light that puts people to sleep. She tests it on Jeff in the group session and he simply stops vibrating. As the series goes in it turns out this is an energy transfer, giving Lenore temporary strength and also de-aging her. But in the early going she feels compelled to wear long dresses, gloves, hats, veils, etc. to block the light and avoid inadvertently putting people under.

Steph is an attractive housewife with four kids. She can heal people by touch, or if they aren’t sick or injured, she can rev up their energy and metabolism. Much like Lenore temporarily helps Jeff, Steph temporarily helps Dave, easing his muscular growing pains. Dave immediately falls in love with Steph, but as mentioned she’s married. And her power really doesn’t have a downside! But her husband, who of course is a jerk, still thinks she’s abnormal and demands she not come home until she’s cured.

Once again, you can see the heavy-handed New U adherence to “realism” at play, but I think because it’s an ensemble cast it works a little better. One character with a single power which is either (a) uncontrollable (b) harmlessly useless (c) as much curse as blessing or (d) all of the above can get real old real fast, but when you put seven characters like that together, they compliment each other, and you can get closer to some of the big propulsive comic book action that I, age eleven, was really interested in. Plus Gruenwald created some pretty likable characters. Dave was fascinating, basically a sweet guy who used to be easygoing but is Not Handling Well At All the weirdness his life has turned into. Scuzz was also intriguing, deeply unlikable but with some depth that came out eventually. Randy was the responsible one, Jeff was the jokester, Lenore was the surprisingly hip old lady. I was ride or die with the Displaced Paranormals, who were basically doing a riff on the Fugitive once they realized the Clinic wanted to “use” them (in a nefarious master plan never really fully articulated) and went on the run, only to be hunted down by other paranormals working for the Clinic.

The first year or so of the series was solidly great, as far as I was concerned, and had an interesting arc from the seven escaping the clinic, trying to hang together as a team, then breaking apart and getting picked off by hunters one by one, taken back to the Clinic and brainwashed. It wasn’t perfect, and it still managed to rankle with some telltale New U bits. At one point while they’re on the lam, Scuzz suggests they use codenames for each other because you never know who might overhear them and call in a tip to the Clinic. Dave would be Mastadon, Randy would be Antibody, Jeff/Blur, Charlie/Friction, Lenore/Twilight, Steph/Glitter (she glowed a little when she used her healing power), and Scuzz dubbed himself the Duke of Disintegration. The others basically laughed at him and said that was dumb comic book kid stuff. Again, the mind boggles that Jim Shooter thought 25 years of Marvel superhero comics should be celebrated by creating an imprint that left out or pointedly insulted most of the tropes of Marvel superhero comics. It’s entirely possible (he said, with hindsight) that this was a tipping point, the beginning of the shift from making comics for kids - precocious kids who could decode $2 words and keep track of tons of continuity and character minutiae, but still kids - and making comics for adult lifelong fans. If you were eight years old when FF#1 came out, now you’re 33, so here, have some comics about adult responsibilities and disillusionment with a sprinkling of Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown, for the discerning mature reader, Not For Babies. Which is probably the most damning thing you could say about the ol’ New U, in retrospect.

Anyway, end of the first year-long arc, Dave is the last one standing, goes back to the Clinic to help bust everyone else out, teams up with Randy to confront the man who ran the place. And … they won? So it kind of reset the premise, now instead of the Clinic being a hostile enemy it became a refuge for paranormals and a breeding ground for more soapy drama. The new twist was that, without an authoritarian in charge, the Clinic degenerated into cliques and gangs carving out little fiefdoms and squabbling with each other. And this very well could have been an interesting avenue to explore long-term, heck almost anything tension-heightening is interesting in a character-driven story where you dig the characters. But, as usual, editorial micromanagement and behind-the-scenes shenanigans did a number on the New Universe. I mentioned last time that the whole thing was Jim Shooter’s baby and Star Brand was his avatar? Yeah, Shooter got pushed out and in a weirdly petty bit of creative salt in the wound, they turned Star Brand into the ultimate villain and he vaporized Pittsburgh, which precipitated a war, where they drafted paranormals specifically? D.P. 7 had no choice but to go along with this event-driven storytelling even though it was way out of line with the series’ overall vibe. And it never really recovered.

There are comics, from Green Lantern to Avengers to Justice League to Exiles, which I have faithfully collected for 10+ years at a stretch, so the fact that I own all 34 issues of D.P. 7 ever published is barely noteworthy. But I do wish I’d had the opportunity to read that title for 10+ years. Oh what might have been.

With a capital T

Holy crap you guys it just occurred to me: you know how in the U.S. the national drinking age is 21 and most bars are open until at least 2 a.m. and so college kids will often go out on the night before their actual 21st birthday and the bouncer will usually let them in because as soon as it hits midnight they can legally buy alcohol and indulge in their first couple of hours of state-sanctioned drinking? Right?

Today is St. Patrick's Day, or as those of us who know our way around an ale or two call it, "Amateur Night".

Tomorrow is the bino's birthday.

Birthdays and St. Paddy's are fixed dates. They don't move around on the calendar based on lunar cycles or the desire for federal holiday three day weekends. My little girl, for example, has had her birthday fall near and far from Easter, including right on it once, but I couldn't tell you off the top of my head, for example, when the next time the conjunction will be.

BUT I can say with absolute certainty that if the bino's friends take him out the night before his 21st birthday in order to do shots at midnight, they will be attempting such a maneuver ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY. Which, by the by, in that year will fall ON A FRIDAY NIGHT.

Holy. Crap. You. Guys.

One reason why this fact has eluded me so far may have something to do with an ironic recent development: the bino, at the ripe old age of 8, has taken a pretty strong anti-alcohol stance. He hates it, and will declaim as much loudly and often. He does not find Homer Simpson funny in the slightest. And he gives me and my wife a lot of guff about our own imbibing.

Of course this can and probably will change over the next decade or so. I don't remember feeling the way he did at his age, my parents drank and I just accepted it as the way things were, but he is his own person and has to chart his own course. Maybe his 21st birthday's adjacency to Amateur Night will end up mattering on some level, and maybe it won't. Time will tell, we shall see, too ra loo ra.

Another layer of irony here is that his hardcore teetotaler stance has really solidified over the past year. As in, 375 days and counting of Pandemic Life. So, yeah, full disclosure, we've been doing a fair bit more drinking at home over the past year than any time earlier. It's been a year in which my wife got me a beer box subscription for my birthday AND my dad got me a completely different beer box gift card for Christmas. It's been a year of staying in on the weekends instead of getting a sitter and going out, but still enjoying a glass or two of wine or some bourbon or dark rum based cocktail or other while we watch a streaming movie and order in pizza. It's been, in short, a bit of a year.

It's also been a year in which my wife has still had to go to campus to run lab sessions for her job, which both increases the need for relaxation rituals and makes the schedule a bit odd, to boot. This semester, for instance, my wife is on campus for early morning labs Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Fridays she works from home, but for all intents and purposes she considers Thursday her personal Friday night for unwinding with a choice beverage or two. I bring this up only to point out yet another ironic convergence, as tomorrow happens to be a Thursday and, as mentioned above, is also the teetotalling bino's birthday. So! We have settled on a compromise: my wife and I will be enjoying some fine Irish beers together tonight, in honor of the holy man Padraig, and on Friday my wife likely has plans with a small COVID bubble of her friends which will also involve libations. But on Thursday, on the bino's birthday, there will be no drinking. We can be abstemious for the one day that's supposed to be all about him. At least, that's the compromise my wife and I came up with, we haven't exactly submitted it to the bino for approval as such, but I'm sure he'll be on board with minimal amounts of guff.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (8) - New Beginnings (Part Two)

The Marvel Universe, meaning the tapestry of interconnected superhero stories in comics, began with the publication on Fantastic Four #1 in late 1961. Yes, there were other superhero comics published by the same company under different names back in the 30’s and 40’s, and some of the characters who debuted in those WWII-era magazines (including Captain America and Namor the Sub-Mariner) would be brought back and incorporated into the Marvel Universe in the 60’s, which might complicate the reckoning of a proper ‘beginning’. Meanwhile Spider-Man, Marvel’s flagship character, wouldn’t debut in Amazing Fantasy until 1962 and wouldn’t get his own ongoing title until 1963. If you talk about other stalwarts of the MCU like Thor and Iron Man, they too were not present at first, technically. But nonetheless, FF #1 was the launch of the modern superhero phase of Marvel Comics, if for no other reason than Marvel Comics themselves always referred to it that way. The Fantastic Four was the first family, the progenitors of superheroes as we know them. The Marvel Universe began in 1961.

So quick math will tell you that the 25th anniversary of Marvel Comics was 1986, and if you think they were going to let that pass without acknowledgement, you don’t fully appreciate what a relentless hype machine Marvel Comics, the company, always had been and was perfected into by the Reagan Years. In my memory there were two big markers of the anniversary which were readily apparent to my young eyes. One was a special format for the covers of all the ongoing superhero titles in the summer of ‘86. I remember buying several of these off the newsstand at the time.

Extreme close-ups of the title character (or a representative character for a team book), a border showcasing the biggest superhero stars of the time, and the 25th anniversary logo in the upper left - what’s not to love?

The other way Marvel decided to commemorate the occasion of 25 years since FF#1 was … by creating an entirely new, separate, fictional superhero universe. They promoted for months and months that they were going to be launching not one but several new titles, interconnected to each other but with no connection to Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, etc. The name for this bold new storytelling imprint was “New Universe” and in 1986 if you were into Marvel comics like I was, it was inescapable. I totally had this promo poster hung up in my childhood bedroom:

As I said in the previous post, some part of me enjoyed the challenge of catching up on the Marvel Universe’s twenty-plus years of continuity as a young fan in the 80’s, but another part of me longed to have been there from the beginning. I cannot possibly have been alone in feeling this way. Marvel was banking that lots of kids my age would be super stoked to be able to pick up new #1 issues at the dawning of a brand new comics world, to position themselves to be veteran fans who had been there from day one. I was eleven-almost-twelve, this made tons of sense to me! I was on board!

So much so that I made a momentous decision: for the first time in my young life I was going to subscribe to a comic book. Every Marvel comic in the 80’s had a house ad for the ongoing series that you could have delivered to your door every month, at discount rates. I had never availed myself of this before but I reasoned there was no better time to jump in with both feet than on the cusp of this New Universe. But of the eight titles being offered, which one would I choose?

The poster up above shows the eight titles in the New U, which I will now briefly explain:

D.P.7 - seven strangers who develop powers meet each other when they all come to The Clinic in hopes of curing their new conditions. When they find out The Clinic has nefarious plans for them, they escape and go on the run.

JUSTICE - A newcomer to Earth from another realm (planet? dimension?) hunts monsters that have also crossed over to Earth.

KICKERS, INC. - Four football players and the quarterback’s girlfriend become private investigators after a medical experiment gives the QB heightened physical abilities.

STAR BRAND - A normal guy receives an artifact of immense power from an alien and tries to figure out how to use it for good.

NIGHTMASK - A young man with the psychic ability to enter other people’s dreams uses his gift to help people.

SPITFIRE AND THE TROUBLESHOOTERS - A young woman’s father is killed by people who want to use his construction/rescue exoskeleton as a weapon; she teams up with some fellow techie nerds to keep the suit out of their hands.

MERC - Soldier of Fortune, the comic book.

PSI-FORCE - Five teenagers, each with different psychic abilities, are gathered by a former spook who wants to keep the kids out of the government’s hands. He is killed but together the five kids can psychically summon his ghost, Psi-Hawk.

How much would each of these books have appealed to 11/12 year old me? D.P. 7, Nightmask and Psi-Force would be in the top tier. Kickers, Inc. and Justice would be solidly second tier. Spitfire and Star Brand would be third tier “meh”. And Merc is the kind of comic I have always actively disliked - no super powers, no costumes, nothing sci-fi or fantasy at all, just weapons-and-vehicles fetishization. (Not that I knew what a fetish was when I was 11. But Marvel already had the Punisher and I never saw the appeal there, either.)

I ended up sampling all of the New U titles, eventually. I mean why not? They were 75 cents a pop, and I’m sure they doled those #1s out over four, maybe six weeks that summer. My allowance covered the full spread. But the time to sign up for a subscription, of course, was before anything had been released, and New U was very much treated as a “secret project”. The house ads for subscriptions in X-Factor and West Coast Avengers looked like this:

Underneath which was a coupon with the list of titles, unexplained, where you could check boxes to subscribe to one or more, and a form to fill in your address. All of which I dutifully did, even though there wasn't much (any) info to go on. And so, totally blind, I selected my one title … MERC. Blugh.

See, I didn’t realize at the time that Merc was short for “mercenary”. I thought it was short for … Mercury? I thought it would be the New U version of The Flash, and that idea intrigued me. Sign me up for the speedster, I thought. Then the issues started showing up in the mailbox and it didn’t take long for buyer’s remorse to set in. Not only was it a 100% superhero-free comic, but it was bleak. Mark Hazzard, the titular mercenary, was a jerk. I’m sure there was a nuanced and ironic exploration of PTSD or something buried under the gunplay and explosions, but I was a kid who wanted to see demigods in spandex perform miracles and make the world a better place, not thrill to the exploits of a middle-aged divorcee who would murder Sandinistas for a paycheck. So my first (and last) experience with a direct mail subscription from Marvel Comics was not an altogether fun one, but I chalked it up to a learning experience: check something out for yourself before committing to paying for a year’s worth up front.

What’s wild is how my personal experience with the New U is in its way a microcosm of everything that went wrong with the New U. Or maybe I should say the most extreme, egregious example of what went wrong. For go wrong it very much did. The next bold leap forward in sequential storytelling of modern fantasy, to ring in the 25th anniversary of the Marvel U, lasted less than three years. Most of the titles got cancelled before hitting 25 issues, let alone 25 years. Whereas that was 35 years ago now, and the main Marvel U is still kicking along happily while the New U is just a funny footnote.

Many people have done post-mortems on the New U in the decades since, but to vastly oversimplify: they took the wrong lessons from the Marvel U. The prevailing wisdom in the mid-80’s, which still more or less holds up today, was that Marvel Comics really did do superheroes in a way they had never been done before. They kept the costumes and outlandish personas, the physics-defying superpowers, the larger-than-life battles between good and evil, and then in addition they layered in other elements of pathos. (Not my theory, but I plug it every chance I get: DC Comics, Superman and Batman etc., grew out of the pulps, and they are about archetypes. Marvel Comics, the FF and Spider-Man etc., grew out of monster comics and romance comics, and they are about human psychology.) The Fantastic Four was a family with all the messy interpersonal dynamics that entailed. Spider-Man and the Hulk were outsiders, at odds with the world. Iron Man had deadly shrapnel lodged in his chest close to his heart. The X-Men were caught in endless cycles of unrequited love, inconsolable grief, guilt and shame and every other flavor of self-doubt and self-loathing. All of which made those superheroes, radioactive blood and adamantium claws and all, seem more human and feel more real. On top of that, the ongoing storylines incorporated failure alongside the successes, and consequences which complicated every action, again all with the explicit aim of giving the stories and characters a veneer of verisimilitude.

And not for nothing, but Superman and Batman were from the fictional cities of Metropolis and Gotham, which are (again) archetypal urban centers. The FF and Spider-Man hung out in the “real” New York City. Marvel Comics, ergo, were supposed to take place in the “real” world. Which sounds great, full stop. I totally buy into all of this, for what it’s worth, and I did when I was eleven even if I couldn’t have articulated it at length. Balancing out the guy who can stretch and the gal who can turn invisible with concerns about public perception and finances is just smart, appealing storytelling. But at the end of the day, it was a way to put a dash of realism into a stew of modern myth-making. As Marvel Comics evolved over 25 years, they piled on the unreal ingredients: more alien races, magical dimensions, impossible science, fake countries, hidden civilizations, lost pantheons, and a sarcastic, cigar-chomping duck named Howard. Once you’ve had the sorcerer supreme meet the personification of time and space itself, or let one of the X-Men’s cosmically powerful children from a future timeline come back and join the team, or established numerous galactic empires and at least three subterranean kingdoms, well, how much of a claim do you have on these comics taking place in the real world?

It’s hard, even now, for me to wrap my head around the fact that someone looked at the Marvel Universe as it stood in 1986 and thought that losing that specific facet - not that the comics had a realistic take on their characters’ psychologies, but that they nominally could exist in the real world - was a huge problem. And that the guiding principle for a new universe should be that it was “the world outside your window” requiring as little suspension of disbelief as possible. And yet, that was the elevator pitch for the New Universe.

To reframe the eight New U titles a bit more: two were about psychic powers (Nightmask and Psi-Force) which some people believe might possibly exist in our world; two were about low-end science fiction technology (Spitfire and Kickers) like robotics and human enhancement, which are arguably plausible; and two were about aliens (Star Brand and Justice) which, again, some people believe exist. One, deep sigh, had no fantastical elements whatsoever (Merc, of course) and really only one had something like the anarchic bonkers anything-goes spirit of traditional superhero comics (D.P. 7, which, unsurprisingly, turned out to be my favorite of the bunch and clearly was the one I should have subscribed to).

And of the three that were the most outre, each had its own guard rails. The superpowers in D.P. 7, such as they were, were all very humble. One character was the brick, but he was only remarkably strong and tough, not an invulnerable Hercules. One was a healer, but only for minor injuries. One could disintegrate things, but only by directly touching the thing and secreting a kind of bio-acid. Powers as they might manifest while still obeying most of the laws of physics and biology, in other words. Justice (which I never read beyond sampling one issue) turned out to not be about aliens after all, because the main character wasn’t from another world, he had been brainwashed into believing a delusional fantasy about monsters and the knights who hunted them. I think some evil corporation did the brainwashing, it was the 80s, lots of stories went down like that.

Star Brand, one could argue, was as traditional comic-booky as D.P. 7 or maybe moreso. This was the central Superman figure of the New U. With his gift from aliens (literally a brand in the shape of a star on his palm) Ken Connell gained phenomenal powers - he could fly, he was superstrong, he could release tremendous energy. To offset this in the overall spirit of the New U, Ken was as everyman as could be. As tragically pathos-filled as the original Marvel Comics heroes could be, it’s worth noting that they were all pretty close to the classic hero molds all the same. Heart shrapnel or no, Tony Stark was still a child of privilege, CEO of a successful company, wealthy and handsome. Reed Richards was also independently wealthy, and a genius, before taking off in his doomed rocket, and Sue Storm was a gorgeous socialite. Even Peter Parker was a genius, from a humble home but with easy access to New York City’s best schools and science demonstrations. Ken Connell, to fit into the New U, was a nobody. Tall, lanky, not particularly handsome. Worked as a mechanic in some forgotten suburb of Pittsburgh. Solidly lower middle class. Directionless. Was hung up on a local hot/mean girl who wasn’t interested in him, and had a less-attractive female friend who was clearly interested in him but he didn’t reciprocate. Put a pin in this and we’ll come back to it in a moment.

Anyway, so there’s this continuum from no powers to exotic gadgets to psychic abilities to vaguely superheroic powers, and right from the get-go there’s a line in the sand that can’t be crossed. The New Universe was never supposed to get too far away from that baseline realism. So all the bad guys were straight out of generic mid-budget 80’s action movies: terrorists with suitcase nukes, unscrupulous corporations, Communist soldiers (both renegade and state-sanctioned), unethical scientists, yuppie scum. Whereas the Marvel Universe started out of the gate with Monster Island and Doctor Doom, and escalated quickly to Galactus the Devourer of Worlds and Ego the Living Planet, the New Universe was determined to keep things grounded. I suppose they succeeded, but you also might call it failure to launch and not be wrong, at that.

Surprise, surprise, as it turns out, people (especially kids) don’t read comics for the realism! Making “as realistic as possible” the guiding principle for a comics universe is like finding out a kid likes french fries and handing them a salt shaker and expecting them to not just be satisfied but thrilled. A little pathos goes a long way, but it’s the gonzo storytelling about extraterrestrial armadas and mystical pantheons that keeps the burning heart of superhero comics beating. Arguably the creators of the New U wanted to appeal to a different, broader audience than the die hard superhero fan kids, but even if that were the case, all that meant was they were entering into direct competition with those aforementioned mid-budget 80’s action movies. Every story tells the same story, and when you want to do so on film with live actors but not spend a hundred million dollars, you make a version of the story with human protagonists and antagonists, fake guns and a few explosions. The secret weapon of comics has always been that it costs the same to produce a two-dimensional color picture of Captain America and the Fantastic Four teaming up to fend off an invasion of New York by Antimatter Nazi Hyper-Wolves as it would cost for a two-dimensional color picture of an average schmoe riding the bus in Cleveland and thinking about which parts of werewolf lore might be real. So with budget being a non-factor, why would you ever choose the latter over the former?

To stand out in an already crowded field, I guess? To be more nuanced, more sophisticated? Maybe. But then why tie it specifically to Marvel Comics’ 25th Anniversary? Why look at the undeniable success of Spider-Man and the X-Men and say “Let’s get rid of everything that inspires the imagination, and focus almost exclusively on a single component of the secret sauce, and repackage and sell that!” But that’s what they did, for a little while. They thought the Marvel Universe had lost its way by getting too overstuffed with nonsense, and they offered a severely heavy-handed overcorrection that nobody else was asking for. Ironically, the imprint line went away and some of the characters much later became supporting cast in the regular Marvel Universe, traversing the multiverse to get to the true home of superheroes after all.

I was there, I saw it go down, and it’s easy for me now to play hindsight visionary and say that it could have worked, if all the new titles had been as unashamedly super-hero-y as D.P. 7 and Psi-Force at minimum, and if there had been room to grow into the crazy cosmic stuff organically, and if relative realism had been an accessory feature, not absolute realism the be-all-end-all point of the whole thing. Then again, maybe not. Maybe Fantastic Four #1 and those wild times in the 60’s caught lightning in a bottle in an ineffably unique way.

Quick return to Star Brand: it’s well-known lore on the interwebs at this point that Ken Connell was based on Jim Shooter, then-EiC of Marvel whose brainchild the New U was, and who wrote the Star Brand series at first. And a lot of the details of Star Brand’s supporting cast were pulled directly from Shooter’s life. I don’t mean to slag the man for injecting autobiographical realism into Star Brand. But the results speak for themselves, as Star Brand did not become an iconic classic. The problem with Superman is not that he’s Cary Grant handsome, or that he has a prestigious job as a reporter for a major metropolitan paper. There actually is no problem with Superman, which is why he’s still around. People don’t put up with the nonsense attached to superheroes - be that the bullet-proof powers OR the diabolical nightmarish foes OR the unlikely handsomeness and wealth and fame etc. - because they want the imperfect humanity buried underneath it all. They actively love the nonsense, every bit of it, and some imperfect humanity highlights and contrasts that nonsense in ways that makes it even better. That’s the lesson.

Also, obligatory Stay Woke call-out: although the New U came into being twenty years after Black Panther was introduced in Fantastic Four #52, guess how many New U headliners were people of color? Did you guess zero? Ding ding ding! Ken Connell was white (as is Jim Shooter), and so was Justice, and so was Nightmask, and so was the woman who operated Spitfire, and so was Mark Hazzard. Of the five Psi-Force kids, three were definitely white, one was an Asian girl, and one was a black boy. Their mentor was Native American. Of the Kickers, Inc. the one who got quasi-powers was white, as was his girlfriend and one of the others, with the remaining two one black guy and one Hispanic guy. D.P. 7 broke down as three white dudes, two white ladies, a black dude and a black lady. For a “bold leap forward” it was a lot of the same old, same old in that regard.

NEXT POST: Back to the Marvel comics proper, as I finally reach the obsessive point of no return ...

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (7) - The Big Picture

I think a larger point I’ve been trying to make here (in my usual charming dance-around-it-until-the-heat-death-of-the-universe way), with regards to my evolution from someone who was aware of Marvel Comics to a lifelong dedicated fan, is that being a comic book fan is a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing behavior. Which, on the one hand, is pretty obvious, as demonstrated by the fact that you could say the same thing about being a fan of anything. Doesn’t matter if it’s other storytelling mediums, from classic cinema to daytime soap operas to prog rock, or seemingly non-narrative interests like Texas Hold’Em or antique cars or the NBA. The deeper you get into something, the deeper you can get into something, and you usually do, which means you can get even deeper, and on and on and on. But on the other hand, understanding the influences one musician had on another or what older forerunner led to a certain coupe model or sports strategy or whathaveyou is both deeply satisfying yet completely unnecessary. You can appreciate athleticism or say “that’s a beautiful car” without the prior references and touchpoints taking up any space at all in your brain. And that’s a perfectly fine and valid way to engage with things, and people do it all the time!

But superhero comics, with their serialized storytelling and their foundations of continuity, have an unparalleled and powerful way of getting their hooks into you. Or into me, at least. Unless you happened to be the right age with money to burn at the right time, said time being the day the first appearance of Superman or the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man hit the newsstands, whatever your personal first comic was you’d be coming in on the middle of the story. In the earliest days of comics (decades of DC’s publishing, and a fair amount of Marvel’s pre-superhero output) this was actually a non-issue because they didn’t emphasize the ongoing nature of one big sprawling story. Monthly issues were self-contained stories, so that any given offering could be someone’s first comic ever and a comprehensible entry point. The publishers assumed kids read comics for a few years and then outgrew them, so every few years stories would get recycled. The core concepts of the characters, meanwhile, remained constant in the spirit of not fixing what ain’t broke. So everything did a timeless kind of treading water, narratively speaking.

Marvel’s superhero comics didn’t take long to break the rules of the game. The Fantastic Four fought Doctor Doom something like three different times within the span of the title’s first twelve issues. And at first glance it might seem like there’s very little difference, in terms of creative output, between running the exact same Superman versus Lex Luthor story fourteen months apart, and running two similar FF versus Doom stories five months apart. To the casual, occasional or intermittent reader that’s true enough. But to the dedicated fan it’s night and day. By the third time Doom (or the Mole Man or the Super-Skrull or whoever) fights the FF, they’ve learned more about him and he’s learned more about them. The stakes are higher because it’s an ongoing feud, and the story logic can be more complex, with fewer deus ex machina solutions and more ‘oh, that makes sense, he would have been ready for that this time because he applied the lessons from last time’.

Marvel tried to balance things, erring on the side of caution at first. The earliest non-#1 issues of Marvel superheroes would literally recap the heroes' origins, just in case a kid picked up #2 or #3 as their first exposure. They wouldn’t be so put off by having missed the beginning of the story that they would give up; they’d get a crash course to bring them up to speed and then continue along with the rest of the audience. Later the recaps went away but the writers and editors made liberal use of footnote captions. A character’s dialogue balloon would say something like “But it can’t be YOU -- you’re DEAD!!!*” and that asterisk at the end would tie to a caption at the bottom of the panel that said “* Last time Hero saw Villain was when he was falling into a radioactive volcano in Tales to Blow Your Mind #145 - Editor” This addendum acknowledged the past continuity and provided the bare minimum context, while avoiding putting clunky exposition dialogue directly in the character’s mouths. It also pointed the reader to a specific older issue, and maybe that kid would have a friend who owned that issue, and the kid could borrow it, and fill in the gaps and be that much closer to becoming a dedicated deep reader. (Later still it would be theoretically possible to obtain any issue at any time from a comic shop or comic dealer at a convention or a mail order service, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)

Of course not everything could be recapped or footnoted, and not everything needs to be, and that’s the real endorphin-buzz potential of being a dedicated fan. At some point, as the comic stories become less self-contained and more one ongoing sprawling tapestry, a reader will run across something that obliquely references the past, with no accompanying editor’s note, and the reader will recognize the reference and feel the thrill of being In The Know. For a certain stripe of geeky nerd (myself very much included) there’s nothing more satisfying than receiving affirmation that you’ve internalized some bit of knowledge which has just come up in another context. It’s absurdly specialized, of course - the only time it’s going to come in handy knowing how many times Spider-Man has met Thor is when you’re reading more Spider-Man or Thor comics - but that’s the point I led with up above: it’s all self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. The more comics you read, the more knowledge about their fictional universe you gain, and therefore the more comics you can read, which gives you more foundational knowledge, which makes you want to read more and learn more, which makes the reading you do more rewarding, ad infinitum.

Marvel pioneered this hook-em-and-keep-em-coming-back approach but DC realized its value and pivoted to a similar approach soon enough, and that sea change happened before I was born, let alone reading comics. But the thing is, when I turned eleven in late 1985, DC was leveraging 45 years’ worth of their back catalog, and had swung from timeless recycling to ongoing epic maybe halfway through all of that. Marvel had been telling the tales of a single unified universe from the get-go, starting a mere 24 years prior and really only reaching critical mass in the mid-60’s. So, point number one in Marvel’s favor, two decades’ worth of (relatively) rock-solid continuity felt surmountable. It was enough to promise a fulfilling experience without being so daunting that I felt I could never truly catch up, and any effort I put into learning the history would assuredly pay dividends going forward. Whereas four and a half decades of false starts, imaginary stories, and infinite earths at DC was both too much and too likely that something might catch my eye and turn out to not really “count” anymore.

Point number two in Marvel’s favor, they were more committed to the bit than DC, even long after DC followed their lead. It’s all well and good to realize you can wring more drama out of the culmination of a series of hero-villain throwdowns, as opposed to the fifth iteration of episodic, could-be-read-in-any-order donnybrooks. But it’s quite another thing to allow your main characters to grow and change. As I alluded to in my earlier post about learning to love Spider-Man, Peter Parker had started out in high school, and after a suitable amount of in-story time, he graduated from high school. He went to college, and he dropped out of college. He had a serious relationship with Gwen Stacy, and she died, and then he had a serious relationship with Mary Jane Watson. Eventually he told MJ his secret identity, and they got married in the summer of 1987, basically the 25th anniversary of Spider-Man’s debut. Superman had been around almost 50 years at that point and was still stuck in eternal chaste courtship with Lois Lane, never daring to reveal his double-life as Clark Kent, status quo forever. Clearly the promise (however illusory) of meaningful change was its own kind of siren call, that it was not just worthwhile to get to know the history to better enjoy the current installments, but that I had better come back faithfully for each monthly update because otherwise I might miss something important! A birth, a death, a wedding, or some other milestone! A contrarian voice might argue that missing an issue wasn’t the end of the world, that I had already missed hundreds (maybe thousands) of issues published before I became a regular reader. But, again, there’s something viscerally thrilling about feeling like a first-hand witness to history in the making. The only thing better than getting hold of some rare old issues from the earliest days of Marvel’s superhero universe would be to have been fortunate enough to grab those mags in real time off the newsstand, to have magically been eleven in 1962 instead of 1985 or 86.

Next post, I’ll talk about what happened when that "right time, right place" lightning did strike a second time, in the summer of 1986 ...

361

I believe I've been reasonably faithful, so far, in my counting of the days for the post titles in this COVID-19 series. But at this moment, since it's coming up on one year of Living Through It, I find myself trying to remember where I chose to start counting. Theoretically it should be easier at this juncture to count backwards from the anniversary, whenever that may be.

As my kids never fail to remind me, they woke up as per normal and went to school as per normal on a Friday the 13th in March of 2020, and came home at the end of the school day like any other school day, but that turned out to be the last time any of them had a normal in-school day. I don't think that's where I started counting, though. For me the last partially normal day was Monday March 9, when I went into the office but was sent home about halfway through the day after our home office decided to shut down out of an abundance of caution - not because anyone who worked for my company had gotten sick, but because there was one reported case of COVID-19 in an employee at a different company on a different floor in the NYC skyscraper where our home office is located. Therefore, Tuesday March 10 was Day One of me working from home, and the beginning of what I variously referred to as 'quarantine', 'lockdown', 'shutdown', 'WFH 4eva', 'I feel like there aren't any rules anymore', 'what are discrete units of time anyway', etc. At least I'm pretty sure that was the beginning. It's easy to lose track of things.

The bino's birthday happens to fall just past the middle of March, and his birthday party in 2020 was one of the first casualties of the upheaval. We were supposed to take him, his sibs and a handful of his friends to the local indoor trampoline place to celebrate him turning seven, but we opted to cancel it. Actually if memory serves we optimistically believed we were going to 'reschedule' it. Surely the panic over this novel coronavirus was a tad overblown by the media. Surely we weren't on the cusp of a once-in-a-century historically bad pandemic. Surely we could follow the guidance of leaders and health experts and flatten the curve. Surely the worst thing we'd be dealing with come summer was trying to explain to people that maybe we did overreact in the spring and maybe we reacted appropriately and it worked, but we'll never know for certain, and better safe than sorry, right? Surely?

Yeah, no, as it turned out. Little girl also didn't have much in the way of a birthday celebration in April. We did get some friends together for my wife's birthday in July, at an outdoor venue with almost nobody else around. Nothing much for the little guy in September (though he's not into big birthday parties anyway) and I insisted on nothing more than some nice takeout for my birthday in October.

So all of this is top of mind right now because, as I said, the one year anniversary is imminent, but also because this Friday, two days hence, we are going out to celebrate the bino's eighth birthday. Not at the trampoline place! We know the pandemic isn't over, it's not like it had a one-year expiration date. (Weirdly the trampoline place is still open for business, which on the one hand makes me happy, because venues going out of business due to the pandemic sucks. But on the other hand, just doesn't seem like the kind of place I want to take my kids to just yet. Other people obviously feel differently.)

Instead what we are doing Friday night is going to a drive-in movie. Should be fun! My wife took two of the kids to the drive-in a few months ago, and they had a good time. The food delivery to the car (because this is at the Alamo, of course, a theater I am entirely thrilled to support financially) was excellent, and the bino is probably looking forward to that more than the flick itself (Raya and the Last Dragon). His actual birthday isn't for another couple weeks, and that's when he'll get cake and his presents, so the celebration is taking over a goodly chunk of the month of March. But after missing out last year, and enduring the entire 360-some days since, he's entitled to a bit of that, I reckon.