My wife went on a shopping trip recently with my folks, a simple grocery run that had turned into a larger excursion. As anyone with an infant knows, shopping while trying to watch a nine month old is incredibly challenging, so my parents went along to watch him while my wife got our groceries. Throughout the trip my father would turn and wander down an aisle without really saying anything to anyone until someone noticed he was missing; or else he would see a toy for my son and exclaim “Oh, cool! Hey dear, do you think he needs this?” My wife told me later that day, “Now I know where you get it from.”

I can blame my father for a lot of things, my short attention span while shopping for instance, but one of the things I will always be grateful for is my love of random or obscure comic book characters. When I was a child, I was in and out of the hospital a good bit. My medical condition kept me from participating in outdoor activities as often as my younger brother did. I couldn’t play dodge ball for instance because no one wanted to be responsible for hitting my trache and, you know, killing me. So I read…a lot.

I was an advanced reader for my age, reading Stephen King by the time I was eight or nine years old. I had a love of superheroes since I was toddler, due in no small part to the Christopher Reeve “Superman” movies and the “Spiderman & His Amazing Friends” Saturday morning cartoon, among others, but I certainly wasn’t a regular comic reader. My dad read Marvel Comics’ “The Mighty Thor” quite a lot, but the old English always turned me off the book. Then one day when I was around 11, out of sheer boredom I decided to crack open my father’s comic boxes. What I found inside would change how I viewed and read comic books well into my adult life.

Inside these epic boxes of awesome were some of the oddest characters I’d ever laid eyes on. Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy, Howard the Duck, and some mortal guy posing as Thor. Seriously? Where the heck was Thor and how was anyone not the slightest bit upset about this? His name was Eric Masterson, an architect who through a series of events, too detailed to go into here, was granted Thor’s hammer, along with his godly powers. Mind blown.

After years of thinking “The Mighty Thor” was one of the most boring superhero books I had ever seen I finally had a way in. Here was this average guy, hanging out with a bunch of Norse gods, and I finally had someone to translate the old English for me! I read everything that was in the box, even some of the Simonson stuff (which years later I would come to understand as the definitive Thor, but I was too new to know this at the time).

ROM: Space Knight, I didn’t know what to make of it at the time, but I liked C3PO and R2-D2 so this had to be cool. Howard the Duck, I’m one of 2 people I know on this planet who enjoyed the 80’s movie, so of course I dove right into these. Marvel Treasury Edition #12 was the first of these I read, Howard the Duck and “The Defenders”? How could that not be awesome? Another issue, wait, the band KISS is in a Howard the Duck comic? Insanity! Dr. Bong, funniest villain name ever.

And last, but most certainly not least, Devil Dinosaur! Jack Kirby gave quite a lot to us comic nerds. Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Thor, The New Gods. I don’t think he made anything quite as insane as Devil Dinosaur though. Based on an alternate earth where Dinosaurs and primitive humans co-existed, it was just completely different from all the other books I had seen. If you get a chance, check these books out, you may be surprised at what you find.

Years have gone by and that collection has since been sold. I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 years trying to rebuild it. I’ve done a pretty decent job of it too. Well except the ROMs, mostly because I had forgotten until recently. I hope one day I’ll be able to share these books with my son, and he won’t look at me like I am out of my mind.

Thanks for reading, I hope you’ll come back for more of my musings on all sorts of geektactular things. Talk to you later….