Most people who know me are very aware that I am a fanatic about super-heroes. I have many thoughts on the subject.
Some of my rabid fandom can be traced back to Saturday morning, and eventually weekday afternoon, and later still Sunday morning, cartoons. There were individual cartoons for Superman and Batman and Spider-Man. One of my favorite ones was Super Friends, which had many different incarnations. It featured Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman, and various teen sidekicks. Later the show expanded to include many other characters, including the Flash, Green Lantern, and near the very end of the series, Firestorm, the Nuclear Man. (Firestorm become one of my favorite characters a little bit later, when I found a large collection of old comic books featuring him in a used book store. (To clarify, I found the comics in a used book store, and the comics featured Firestorm. The other interpretation of my sentence is much funnier, but not true.))
I should mention that you can read all about these characters on Wikipedia. There are entries for every single one of them, although I only provided links in this blog entry for some of them.
Another show I absolutely loved was Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. This show featured Spider-Man, Iceman, and Firestar. Iceman is one of the founding members of the X-Men, and Firestar was at the time a very new and rather minor character from the pages of New Mutants, which was a close relation of the X-Men. It's not really clear why these three were put together. Firestar was apparently used because the more popular character of the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four wasn't available for some reason. But still, there wasn't really a precedent in the comics for these characters to work and live together.
I didn't know any of this at the time, though. It was a really fun series, and it had all sorts of other characters thrown in on an episode-by-episode basis.
One more show from that time period to mention is The Incredible Hulk. The big green fellow has had several cartoon series all to himself, but I remember this one especially well. It scared the stuffing out of me. I think there's a good reason for this. Angry adults are scary to children anyway, and if you throw in the fact that the angry adult will transform into a large green monster who likes to smash things, it is absolutely terrifying. In most stories, and certainly every cartoon story, the Hulk somehow never manages to hurt anybody, but I've had many dreams where this guideline was violently violated.
I remember a "friend" from nursery school who would occasionally double over, grab his head, and say, "Oh no, I'm ch-changing...!" I would run very very very fast to the nearest adult, every time. What a jerk!
In the time that I've grown up, there have been many more cartoons involving super-heroes, and most of them have been extremely cool. In fact, right now I am watching an episode on DVD of Justice League Unlimited, which is a SPECTACULAR show. This episode is especially great. The witch Circe transforms Wonder Woman into a pig, and at the end of the episode Batman is forced to sing a lounge-singer-type love song in front of a crowd in order to change her back. Somehow Wonder Woman finds out that he did this, and taunts him with the knowledge by humming the song as she walks away from him.
The other major influence that informed my love of all things super-heroic was my cousin Sam. He is two years older than me, and when I was little he was the epitome of all things cool to me. He collected comics, and drew super-heroes and other stuff all the time. So, I started collecting comics and drawing super-heroes. Today he is a professional graphic artist, and a very good one, but I don't think he reads comic books anymore. I still sketch a little bit, but by trade am a mathematician and teacher, and I still read comic books all the time. I'm trying to cut back on my collecting, because the darn things are increasingly expensive and I am increasingly mature, but I still read my old ones all the time.
Neither of these things were what I wanted to write about today, but that's ok. I'll write more next time.
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