The power of kindness

I have been thinking about comic book origins besides The Crow.

I recently got to read a collection of classic The Champions (Marvel), featuring Hercules, Ghost Rider, Iceman, Angel, Black Widow, and some Dark Star, which is why I had been interested in the first place. I'll get to that.

The first arc threw me, because there were Hercules and Hippolyta, and those are DC characters too, with similarities and differences. Okay, these are the Marvel versions, and they aren't quite like their Roman versions either. No surprises there.

(I just saw Thor: Ragnarok so thinking about mythology as reinterpreted by comic books is its own topic.)

The team origins were interesting, in that the intent was to be there for the little guy, instead of fighting all of these epic battles, and then they kept fighting epic battles. I wondered if maybe they were trying to do what Heroes for Hire did, except that the Heroes for Hire arcs I have read have all been pretty epic too. I have seen one scene of four people working out of a small office, and that was in a Spiderman collection, and they were not the only guests in that story.

Doing some research, well, if Champions was not in line with their stated goal, they were even farther from the original vision. Tony Isabella had wanted it to be two superheroes on the road, like the television show Route 66. It ended up being more of a team book, under some pressure, with specific criteria for what types needed to fill out the team.

This was also the first I had read of Ghost Rider, and there was some interesting information there too.

Tony Isabella had introduced a character called The Friend who was basically a hippie Jesus, though not identified by name. Given Ghost Rider's origins and conflict, that was not an unreasonable inclusion, and it was important to Isabella specifically because there was a lot of infernal representation but nothing celestial. An assistant editor got offended and changed it so that the friend was revealed as a demon in disguise.

"To this day, I consider what he did to my story one of the three most arrogant and wrongheaded actions I've ever seen from an editor."

There are some frustrations to working for the big comic houses, but there are for anything.

Something else unexpected was that I associated the series with Bill Mantlo. He worked on several issues, but some of that may have been that a lot of different creators were rotated in, at least partially because the series was always running late. I can't help but wonder if the deadline issues came from the interference and frustrations of the creators. That could make it hard to keep a team going. All of the subs wouldn't necessarily be great for continuity or quality either, but it could be a great place to cut teeth and expand abilities. There are silver linings.

Those are all just kind of interesting things for me, but there is also a story about how I even came to read it.

The book was a gift from Brian. I met Brian through Twitter, but that was because of Murilo, which was only because of Moon and Ba, because of The Umbrella Academy. Nonetheless, I was once able to update a booth location for Murilo, and Brian is a friend, and has given me comics advice.

Brian knew that I wanted the book because of Gin, who is always trying to get people helping each other, but that included having people share their Amazon wish lists around Christmas, because maybe we could give to each other. I think that's why he originally saw that I wanted it, but he remembered because I liked a post of his about Mantlo's birthday.

Beyond that, I had put that specific issue on my wish list because of Steve Morris, who writes about comics and loves Dark Star, and had posted good issues for reading more about her. There were things I could find and things I couldn't. The Champions Classic can be hard to find, but Brian had a copy, and he was willing to give it to me.

Yesterday's post probably needed a conclusion, about how life is messy, and being human is hard. Sometimes we find our balance by shifting too far in every direction and correcting as we can, so sometimes anger is needed, and maybe even hate, or selfishness, even if there are not areas where we should spend too much time hanging out.

We can make that easier for each other. It's easy to worry about all that we can't do, but that's a waste of time because fairly small things, like likes and retweets and taking a moment to look something up can be huge.

It would be easy to miss too, but that it is a great loss. It is so valuable to look and see that there is a person, a potential friend, a human being, a child of God, a sibling of your spirit. Great things start with just being able to see that.