My Heroes Haven't Always Been Cowboys

After a not-so-bad day at work, I came home and turned on the TV.  The DVR was recording Smallville.  I started to do a little cleanup, starting with the table between my couch and the door.  Top of the stack, and regretfully placed in the gaming bookshelf, was my copy of Mutants & Masterminds.

I bought M&M for Aaron's supers game (which I have since dropped out of), and quickly became very, very impressed with its use of d20/OGL rules to create an incredible set of rules for superhero gaming.  The system works, and incredibly well.  I lifted one of the templates from the book, made a change here and there, and boom - I was playing the Guardian again.

Up until I was 13, I read very few superhero comics - almost exclusively, I read licensed stuff from Marvel:  Star Wars and G.I. Joe.  For whatever reason, probably as a result of reading friends' copies, I started getting into the Avengers.  At this time in Marvel's history, Steve Rogers had lost the Captain America name and costume;  as a budding Captain America fan, I was cranky, and immediately shifted my loyalties.  I bought Iron Man #225 at a Convenient Food Mart in my home town.  This issue's particular significance?  It was the first issue of the Armor Wars story, wherein Tony Stark has discovered that no small number of armored supervillains are using his own technology in their devices and armors, and Stark is unwilling to stand for this.

I knew a little bit about Iron Man going into this - a not-superpowered guy has this series of powered battlesuits that makes him the equal of just about any super out there.  In '85, I was not yet a cyberpunk, but I loved technology more than anything.  OMNI magazine exposed me to bleeding-edge science and research in every field under the sun.  All of a sudden, I'm caught up in Iron Man's adventures, and the more I read, the more I liked him.  He was fragile outside the armor - had first developed the armor to keep himself alive, in fact.  His alcoholism had cost him nearly everything, and while he came back from that, it was not an easy journey.

Through high school and afterwards, Tony Stark/Iron Man and the Avengers supplanted the Star Wars saga in my personal hero's journey.  I watched Stark take on damn near anybody in the Marvel Universe who wore a battlesuit and clean their clock (Doctor Doom being a notable exception, but they did tangle a few times while I was a regular reader).  Then came Justin Hamner's project - a monster battlesuit called Firepower, developed using Stark technology and US government money.  I watched Tony go into the battle with Firepower with his typical arrogance and reliance on his gear ... and saw the red-and-silver armor that I had so loved destroyed without so much as dinging Firepower.  I saw Tony disappear into his workshop and build a new red-and-gold suit, intending to clobber Firepower with it, and then destroy the suit and get out of the hero business forever.  When Hamner used Firepower to wreck Stark properties, the new Iron Man showed up and delivered twelve kinds of payback.  I cheered.  I had well and truly found my hero.

My brother was a big X-books fan, and that worked out nicely for us.  Every month, he snapped up X-Men and X-Factor and The New Mutants, and I bought Iron Man, Captain America, and Avengers/West Coast Avengers/Solo Avengers.  We grabbed the big honking crossover annuals that Marvel used to do.  We spent hours talking about the pros and cons and good and bad of what we had read, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with a dozen or so fellow comics fans.  We watched the Marvel Universe expand and contract.  We discovered icons, sometimes in unusual places.  Matt became a fan of the old Captain Mar-Vell, and when I found a copy of the Death of Captain Marvel graphic novel (the first one Marvel ever did) for his birthday, it was like I'd given him a Gutenberg Bible.  Eight months later, he gave me the X-Men graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills for Christmas, and my world shifted just a little bit.  GLMK remains one of my favorite comics stories ever, and there are scenes from it that I'll never forget.

Despite my preference for the Avengers, I found a lot to like in Chris Claremont's run on the X-books.  In Nightcrawler and Longshot, I found two more heroes I could happily follow - during a siege in Dallas, Longshot's exchange of words with a reporter summed up being a hero so flawlessly that it lives alongside Raymond Chandler's "down these mean streets" essay as favored inspirational material.

I knew little enough about the DC Universe - who the biggest players were, but not much more.  I loved the first two Superman movies, and recognized that the Superfriends was dreadful.  Tim Burton's Batman amazed me, and I started looking into this other universe just a little bit.  On the advice of my ol' pal Erik, I started reading the Legion of Super-Heroes - beginning with the issue after the destruction of Earth.  Holy shit, did this amaze me.  Here was a team with real history.  Decades of it with each other - relationships that began and grew, and sometimes died.  With each other, they didn't use costumes or code names.  They were old friends, lovers, rivals - everything that real people become after years of involvement.  And they had something more to deal with - teenage versions of themselves running around trying to prove themselves.  I was captivated.  Zero Hour broke my heart - the Legion were heroes to the end, even as they were inextricably caught up in the cause of the Universe's death.  After ZH, I drifted away from the Legion - mostly because I was getting serious about finishing up this here degree, and something had to go.

I soldiered on with Iron Man, War Machine, and the Avengers.  Then came that train wreck called The Crossing.  Suddenly, my hero had become a villain.  And there was a 16-year-old Tony Stark from some parallel universe.  And I was done with comics for a good long while.  My canon diverged forever from what saw print.

In the decade-plus since then, I've briefly gotten back into Iron Man comics, but I get distracted so easily now.  There's the Civil War story going on, and IM's been villified again.  I know it's all allegory for the Bush regime, but I just don't care.  That is not my Iron Man.  May 2008 will probably be another milestone for me, as I've got faith in Jon Favreau to give me a terrific IM movie.

My involvement in comics fandom is limited to movies and TV now.  Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movies have floored me.  The Hellboy movie made me wish I'd read every issue of the comics.  Batman Begins left me staggered by its sheer bad-assitude.  The first two X-Men movies were genius, and had enough nods to fans to make me squeal.  Bruce Timm and Paul Dini gave me the DC Animated Universe and countless hours of joy (and, hey, the second greatest love of my life began with a midnight showing of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm).  Smallville and Heroes are weekly fixes for me.

I'm going to start picking up more titles here and there.  Probably a couple books from Marvel and DC, and trades and the like from other sources.  I want ideas.  I want to see what does and doesn't work.  'Cause, you see, I've got this idea...