Adios, Sundance

"Count backward from one hundred."

I'm lying on a thin blanket and staring at three powerful-looking lights mounted to the ceiling. People in blue gowns and white masks move all around me; I know this not only because I can hear them but also because they keep popping up above me in my field of vision.

"One hundred..." I say.

My left arm lies against my side, an IV needle sticking out of a soft patch of innner elbow and trailing a long skinny tube that snakes somewhere behind and above me. I've got wires attached to various points on my chest and legs. My calves are wrapped in massage sleeves that are supposed to prevent blood clots. Something is beeping.

"Ninety-nine..."

The last time I was in a place like this, I was fourteen years old and about to have my appendix out.

"Ninety-eight..."

Now I'm having an orchiectomy, a word that I saw for the first time on Friday and that I've had to ask three different medical professionals how to pronounce.

"Ninety-seven..."

I've heard stories--probably bullshit--about anesthesia not working, about people being immobile yet able to feel every clamp, every retraction, every suction, every scissor snip, every scalpel slice. Again, probably bullshit, but when you're on the table, bullshit becomes a living, breathing thing.

"Ninety--"

And then it's over. I can see faces again--nurses', my doctor's--as they're moving my rolling bed back into place in the recovery room.

"How do you feel?" my doctor asks me.

She's a young woman who didn't in any way fit my expectations of what a urologist should look like when we had our first appointment last Friday. She didn't fit my girlfriend Shannon's expectations, either, when she met her for the first time that morning. I knew this from her narrowed eyes and the whispered, "We'll talk about this later..."

"Are you feeling okay?" my doctor asks again.

"Yeah," I say. "Big changes for Butch and Sundance."

"Who?" she asks.

I gesture vaguely at my crotch. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They just became the Lone Ranger."

The Condition of My Condition

I’ve fallen lots of times on my bike, and it’s always the same. My tire catches on the lip of a curb or slides on some loose gravel, and there’s a sudden shift of weight and space. My body tightens and I imagine my face registers something like shocked surprise. The world as I know it—a carefully balanced ride from here to there—has radically and swiftly rearranged itself, and I’m struggling to catch up.

But that only lasts a split second. The thing to do then is understand that you’re falling and nothing is going to change that. Just ride out the fall and wait to land. Then pick yourself up.

When I heard from my doctor the afternoon of the sonogram and he told me that I had a mass on my right testicle, a weird calm came over me. I took a deep breath, heard the word Okay in my mind, and understood that I had given in to the fall and was waiting to land. Got it. A growth. So what do we do now?

My schedule immediately filled. Appointment with a urologist. Biopsy of the growths that the CT scan turned up. Insertion of a port for chemotherapy. Surgery on the morning of the 28^th.

Okay.

The big news was that this was almost definitely not a recurrence of my germ cell cancer from ten years ago; it was a new one—testicular. I’ve never so much as won a fruit basket in a raffle, but apparently I’d hit the cancer lottery twice.

But I’ll take that bad luck because it’s more than balanced out—not even close, really—by my good luck at having the friends I have, and who have leapt into action with a swiftness and focus that makes Seal Team Six look about as efficient as the DMV.

So with all of this in mind, I’m shifting the focus of this “Queasy Writer” blog (a title that is probably going to become more literal than metaphor). I’m going to do my best to update daily or near-daily in order to chart this new journey and the people who help me along the way. It will be a way for people to stay updated on my progress, and I’ll try to make the details of my particular cancer, its treatment, and (fingers crossed) my recovery as lively as possible.

Please Lie Still While I Crush Your Balls

When most people hear the word “sonogram,” they probably conjure up pleasing images of a young man and woman holding hands and expectantly watching a screen while a nurse gently slides the wand-like apparatus over a smooth round belly.

Sadly, this isn’t exactly what happens in a testicular ultrasound.

I’d been dreading this test from the moment my doctor said I needed one to find out if this was in fact a recurrence or something new. I had one ten years ago, and even though it came out negative, it was still pretty much the worst part of that cancer experience. Would a normal person think this? Probably not.

I went in early. The waiting room was empty except for a woman sleeping under the television and an older couple who was having an animated conversation in what I thought might be Hawaiian. I tried to focus on the TV—some morning talk show was on—but I couldn’t follow the interview.

“Verasky?”

I turned to see an attractive woman with glasses who looked like she was about seventeen.

“Versaci?” I tried.

“Oh, okay. Sorry. Come with me, please.”

She introduced herself as Hailey and told me that she was a sonogram technician and would be doing the procedure today.

“That’s perfect,” I said.

As we walked down the hall, I asked, “Have you done a lot of these?”

“You’ll be my second.”

In the small, dimly-lit room, she walked me over to a bed and pulled a curtain around. I felt like I had to come clean.

“Okay,” I said. “A couple of things. First, I’m a little tender down there right now. And second, I’m a huge baby when it comes to my balls.”

She just looked at me.

“I mean, I’m definitely going to be your worst patient of the day.”

She laughed nervously. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

“I’m sure I won’t,” I said. “But listen. If I pass out, I want you to just go ahead and do the procedure while I’m out.”

She stared at me. “Can you please take off everything below your waist and sit on the bed? I’ll be right back.”

I stripped and waited. I heard footsteps before the curtain pulled back and there was another woman standing there. Also attractive.

“I’m Natalie, and I’ll be doing your sonogram today.”

“Did I freak out Hailey?”

“A little bit, yeah.”

I gave Natalie the same spiel, all in the interests of full disclosure.

“Well, you just relax, and we’ll go slow.”

“Okay, but I want to apologize in advance for the undignified behavior that you’re about to witness.”

She snorted, then arranged me on the bed, a towel over my thighs just below my scrotum, and a towel over my penis just above my scrotum. She spread some gel on the edge of the sonogram wand, which looked like a little vacuum cleaner attachment.

“This might be a little cold,” she said, and moved the wand down to my balls.

At the moment I sensed contact, my entire body tightened up and I clutched the top towel in my hands. The force pressing down on the most sensitive part of my body was more than I could bear. This was worse than I remembered, worse than I could have imagined.

“I haven’t touched you yet,” Natalie said.

It didn’t get much better. She told me to just breathe normally, and I thought I did, but then she warned me not to hyperventilate. She also mentioned at least twice that it was taking a little longer because she was going so slow.

When it was over, I said, “You’ve been doing this for a while.”

“About thirteen years.”

“So, I know a radiologist has to read this, but can you tell me what you think?”

She looked at me. “I really can’t.”

“I can’t help thinking that if I’d been a better patient, you’d tell me something.”

She smiled. “Go ahead and get dressed.”

Just before I left, I said to her, “You should be grateful. Now you’ve got a ‘this one guy.’”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the next time someone gets anxious on the bed there, you can just say, ‘Listen, I had this one guy…’”

She laughed. “You take care, now.”

With that procedure out of my mind, I could focus on something else. Like my certainty that I had a growth.

The News

So, the tests.

My doctor sent me for another blood test that day, on October 11^th. Just to confirm the first results. Of course, they did.

Then a CT scan on the 17^th. Chest, abdomen, pelvis. I hadn’t had one in a while, but it’s amazing how fresh the details stay. Choking down almost a full liter of barium in the hour before the scan. I did have my choice of flavors—mint, bubblegum, or orange—but there’s no hiding the chalky texture. For the record, I picked orange, but it really should have been called “vaguely orangish.”

Another part of the CT is the iodine dye that they send through an IV. The technician, a young guy named Eric with a bone-grinding handshake, put the line in my arm and fastened it with what later felt—when he pulled it off—like duct tape. He began to tell me what the iodine would feel like, but I stopped him and said that I’d been here before.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m starting it now.”

A puddle of heat spreads across the back of my throat. I swallow reflexively, but it’s not going to go away. In fact, it grows. I can feel the warmth leak slowly down the length of my spine and pool in my crotch. It’s not pleasant. It’s made even less pleasant by the fact that those two big containers of barium are now pushing urgently against my sphincter.

“We’re almost done,” he says, as if sensing my discomfort.

And then we were.

The results came in the following Monday. I was sitting in my office, ready to bike home but waiting for my doctor to call with the results. Finally, the phone rang.

“How are you?” I asked him.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I wish I could say the same for you.”

He told me that I had “multiple growths” in roughly the same vicinity as last time. He said that he’d never heard of a ten-year recurrence of germ cell cancer. We made an appointment for the next day so that we could go over everything in more detail. I knew it was coming, but clearly a part of me still believed that the two blood tests had all been a giant mistake. And then, as if I needed another reminder that we’re all prisoners in our bodies and slaves to what they might do to us, I got cold, my hands—and, presumably, the rest of me—turned white, my head started to hum, and I felt like I was going to throw up.

The next thing I knew, I was standing in my kitchen and calling my son, whom I was supposed to pick up in twenty minutes. Somehow I had biked home, but I had no memory of the ride. It was gone, just like the fragile security I’d been living in.

Guy Walks into a Doctor's Office...

…and gets told that he has cancer again after ten years.

Sorry, pretty shitty punchline. But it’s the one that I’ve been dealing with since Friday, October 11.

When I finished my chemotherapy for germ cell cancer back in September of 2003, I’ve been going back for regular tests make sure I was still cancer-free. For the first year or two, these tests were intense—blood tests and chest, abdominal, and pelvic CT scans every three months. For a year after that, they dropped to every six months, and then annually. After five years, no more CTs; just blood tests.

My anxieties experienced a similar decline. I thought about my cancer constantly for the first few years, then occasionally, then pretty much not at all.

So this year—my ten year anniversary of being cancer-free—I almost didn’t make an appointment. I’d started to get the feeling that my doctor didn’t need or want to see me anymore. In fact, on my nine-year visit, he turned me over to a physician’s assistant. I figured I was in the clear.

The nurse had just taken my temperature and blood pressure, and I was waiting in the little room for someone—my doctor? another PA?—to come in. As I waited, I Googled “blood pressure charts” because the numbers the nurse recited to me seemed a little high. I was worried that I might have hypertension.

I’m trying to recreate that moment in my head. I’m hunched over in the stiff-backed chair, one hand holding my phone while the other one scrolls through Google hits and waits for them to load. While they do, I stare at my black Vans, which are starting to fade out to gray in the toes a little. One shoelace looks a little loose.

I want to savor this moment because it’s the last moment of peace that I remember. Funny thing is, it didn’t seem peaceful at the time (Do I have high blood pressure? Do I need to get a new pair of shoes?). I thought these were real worries. A few seconds later, they became laughable.

My doctor walked in. He was looking at an open folder in his hands.

“Your tumor markers are up,” he said.

Ba-da-BUM

Thanks, folks, you’ve been great. I’ll be here all week.

The Evolution of a Page

Time has really gotten away from me. I can’t believe that my last entry was way back in June. Between now and then I’ve been to Chicago twice, taken a trip up the California coast to look at colleges with my high school senior son, and waded through armies of costumed fans at Comic-Con.

Oh, and I finished my book.

To recap, the book is called That Hidden Road, and it’s about my solo cross-country bicycle ride, which I made in the summer of 2010. It’s also about those parts of my life that made me think I needed to go on a long, long ride by myself.

I knew from the start that I wanted comics in the book, and I knew that I wanted to draw them myself. Problem was, my drawing skills were a little rusty and I’ve never made comics before.

As I drafted and revised the manuscript, I played around with some ideas for comics and eventually came up with three main types. Backin early December, I posted a few pages from one of these, which I called the “StuffI Saw” pages. Pretty simple idea—one page of six panels each in a more or less “realistic,” sketchbook-y style. The second group of comics I called the “Voices from the Road” pages. These would also be single-page comics, but have only four panels. The style would be a little more cartoonlike and focus on some people I met along the way who made brief but memorable impressions on me. I finished these over the summer. Finally, the third group of comics would be more sustained narrative; there’s a brief two-page story in the prologue called “Pre-Ride Jitters,” and there’s a longer (eight pages) story in the middle of the book called “Welcome to Springview Farm.”

This story covers the few days that I spent on a farm in Missouri—a farm that belongs to Jan and Bill Montgomery, who happen to be the mom and stepdad of my best friend. I didn’t want to fold that story into one of the other chapters; instead, I wanted it to stand on its own even though I couldn’t—at least early on in the writing—say why.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I decided to write a blog post that went into some detail about how part of this story came together, and I thought that the easiest way to do that would be to document the evolution of a single page from “Welcome to Springview Farm.” The page in question is the third of the story, and it covers part of the tour that Jan gave me of the farm and house.

In writing this and assembling the materials I used, I found it very helpful to me as a writer to step back and examine my creative process a little more closely. As I said before, despite my lifelong love of comics and the fact that I teach and write about them, I’ve never—until this book—tried to make comics myself, at least not in any organized way. So I thought I’d give a shout-out to several helpful sources along the way, including Scott McCloud’s Making Comics, Barrington Barber’s How to Draw Everything, Bruce Blitz’s The Big Book of Cartooning, the many Facebook postings by Ed Piskor of his work on Hip Hop Family Tree, several Youtube videos by Alison Bechdel about the construction of Fun Home, my friend and comics goddess Mary Fleener, and conversations with students much more talented than I am in this regard.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how the story came into being. I think I got the idea within the first hour or two I spent with Jan and Bill. They're incredible people who are also pretty wacky, and as Jan showed me around and told me stories, I realized that the written word alone couldn’t do justice to this bizarre and comic experience. I was going to have to tell the story through comics.

Coming to this realization was the easy part. In writing this book, I’ve found that the most challenging part of memoir comes in trying to shape and narrativize your experience. Fact is, there’s a lot of dead time in our lives, but story demands at least some kind of structure. To get there, we need to arrange, amplify, and discard the pieces of our experience and hope to hell that in doing so we arrive at a meaningful truth. With comics, one’s experience becomes even more fragmented—literally, by individual panels. Plus, the canvas is much smaller, and the words that make it in must be pared down yet still work effectively in conjunction with the corresponding image.

Because I’m a textual kind of guy, I started with a script, though that’s a little generous of a description. It was really more of a sketch with words—lines of dialogue loosely coupled with some ideas for images. The draft was long and rambling, and like most drafts, I ended up axing close to half of it. The section of the script that covers this particular page reads as follows:

Springview Farm is filled with strange and wonderful creatures…

Underfoot, the invisible barn cat

Goosey and Goofy (two llamas)

??? (pygmy goat)

A Watusi bull (image of me taking its picture while it’s trying to mount cow)

      Jan:  “Oh for the love of Mike, don’t show them that.”

      Me:  “Why not?  It’s nature!”

Jan:  “It’s Eskimo!”

Me:  “Huh?”

Jan.  “I don’t like the word ‘nasty,’ so I say ‘Eskimo’ instead.”

Inside the house is just as interesting…

Fisherman lightswitch

Stuffed owl that watched me.

Jan’s closets

      The Fairy Closet

      The Shower Closet

      The Memories Closet

            Closeup of Chuck and Dewey poster

Jan’s dolls

The events depicted on this particular page took place in late June of 2010, and I didn’t really start drafting this script until almost a year later (fortunately, I had my photographs and journal from the trip). Like most of the drafting I do, I didn’t pause too much to double-check details. For example, I couldn’t remember the name of Jan’s pygmy goat, so I let that go. I also didn’t know what kind of bull they had (just that it looked really strange), so I let that go and filled in “Watusi” later, after calling Jan. At that point, I knew that the goat wasn’t going to make it on the page, so I didn’t bother to find out its name (sorry, pal). As I wrote, I also knew that part of my brain was thinking in terms of comics. I had an idea about what to do with that bull, and I see in the writing that I had an idea for both the image and the word balloons.

The next step was to sketch the panel breakdowns. I  saw that there was way too much material here to fit coherently, so I had to narrow it down, to start shaping the experience into narrative. I wanted to make this part of the story unfold as a kind of a “walking tour,” but the big question was, What to keep? Two parts of this section jumped out at me: the Watusi bull and the dolls. For the moment, I put the dolls aside. I knew that I wanted the panel with the bull to be big—the width of the page. In part, that was out of necessity; there was too much image and dialogue to cram into a smaller panel. I figured the rest of the page would break down in a steady rhythm of three equal-sized panels per row. I laid out the panels as textboxes in Word, and they came out like this:

To accommodate this layout, I had to start this page with the bull scene, so I moved the the material in the script that comes before—the cat and the llamas—onto the previous page. That seemed to work well in terms of rhythm, where my introduction to the various animals would climax with the bull, and he’d be at the top his own page in a panel befitting his size and, uh, horniness.

Now, back to those dolls. Sifting through photos, journal entries, and memories, I recognized that the real “punch” of my tour of the farm was Jan’s collection of creepy dolls. Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m terrified of dolls; it all dates back to an episode of Night Gallery that you can read about here.

Because I wanted the “weight” of the page to come down on these dolls, I reserved the bottom row for them. With three panels left in the middle, I had to pick and choose from the remaining details. I knew I needed one of Jan’s closets in there (she has an interesting array of closets in the house), and I went with the converted shower closet, because it’s just so Jan. I also liked the light switch cover where the switch became the naked fisherman’s penis (again, very Jan). It seemed like it would be an interesting visual to pull off, so to speak. I also liked that it comes right after the bull trying to hump the cow. For the third image, I decided on the owl. I originally picked it because my plan was to make it the third image in the row so that two figures—a naked man and a bird—would “frame” the closet. Only later did I come up with a better use and reason for that owl. I did a very rough sketch of how I saw the panels:

The drawings are intentionally primitive; my purpose here was simply to get a very rough sense of what’s going to be on the page.

Now I had to decide on text and put the words into boxes and balloons. By visualizing the “containers” for the text, I’d get a better sense of how much space I had to work with and how to compose the panels. By sharpening the text into the exact language, I’d get a better sense of what exactly to draw. At this stage, I started to think more about that owl and what I was trying to do with the story as a whole. I said earlier that I didn’t want to fold my time at Springview Farm into a prose chapter and I wasn’t sure why. In actively mapping out the story, though, it came to me that it was about finding a substitute family on the road. In fact, “Welcome to Springview Farm” is split into two parts, and they bookend the very central chapter of That Hidden Road, when I drive to Chicago to see my real family. Thus, “Springview Farm” serves as a kind of counterpoint to that experience.

Anyway, back to that owl. The very end of the story is the day I leave the farm. It was raining when I left, and I wound up spending that night in a tiny Missouri town named Houston. I called Jan and Bill to let them know I made it to my next stop in one piece, and Jan confessed to me that they followed me for a few miles in their truck, just to make sure I was okay. As I was writing this part of the script, I wanted to convey that feeling of being watched over, and I remembered the owl, stuffed and staring at me in my room at the farm. Now, the thing about Jan is that she names everything, but I couldn’t remember if the owl had a name. Indulging a little bit in the “creative” part of “creative nonfiction,” I decided to name it “Mama Owl” and attribute it to Jan. I mention Mama Owl again on the last page of the story. At this point, I knew that I had to move Mama Owl to the middle of the page, which is the most important space in a comic. The panel breakdown with text inserted looked like this:

It’s worth noting here that once I typed the text on the page, more revision was needed. I had to shorten some lines, move some of the dialogue around, and play around with font sizes. The point here—and one that I stress to my writing students—is that revision is ongoing and the writing process is recursive; you take two steps forward and one step back almost constantly.

Once I was happy with the page, I printed it up, taped it to my drawing board with artist’s tape and the help of my t-square, boxed and ballooned all the text, and got ready to sketch my pencils. To help with this, I had two main tools at my disposal. First were the many, many photos I took at the farm. Here are some of the ones I used:

    

The second tool was my sketchbook. I’ve found that it’s been indispensible in testing out different visual ideas and to practice drawing different things. Here are a few of the sketches I made while penciling this particular page:

  

In the original sketch, I had Bill standing there, too, but the panel was getting a little crowded. Plus, the dialogue focused more on a back-and-forth between me and Jan, so I cut Bill out. But not to worry; Bill is very present in the rest of the story. And he knows I love him.

The next stage was actually biting the bullet and getting the pencils in the panels. I decided that I wanted to have some fun with the style, so I made the top panel more cartoony and the bottom six panels more realistic. I wanted to give those six panels more of a documentary feel to them—like a camera’s eye roving around the farm—so it made a certain sense to me that the art should reflect that. After the better part of a day filled with plenty of erasures, here’s what the page looked like with the text, boxes & balloons, and pencils:

The final stage was the inking. This is where pencil lines get sharpened and more depth is added through line weight and shading. I’m not yet completely confident with this very difficult skill, so I turned over inking duties to my talented buddy John. He threw my pencils on his lightbox, inked it up (without the text), and scanned it for me. I then opened it in Photoshop, retyped the text (and, yes, revised it some more), and performed some minor tweaks to the images. Here, then, is the final product:

All told, there are over thirty pages of comics in the manuscript of That Hidden Road, and I’ve developed a newfound respect for the work that comic book artists do. I knew intellectually that it was difficult work, but until I tried it myself, I had no idea how difficult.

But it’s also incredibly rewarding, like any kind of creative activity that allows you to “disappear” inside of the work. Entire afternoons would evaporate as I’d get my drawing supplies out, set my iTunes to “shuffle,” and get busy turning my life into story.

Well, if you've made it this far, I thank you. I'd love any feedback on what I have here or on your own process of writing, drawing, or both.

"Man of Steel"? I'll Take "Hulk Smash!"

In a week’s time, another comic-book-turned-movie will hit screens and create a storm of midnight showings, long lines, and box office tallies that—whether they come in above or below expectations—will still drop faster than a speeding bullet over the ensuing weekends.

I’m talking, of course, about Man of Steel, the latest reboot of the quintessential comic book character and the one that most people see as the face of the entire medium.

I have to admit that I was never much of a Superman fan. In most writers’ hands, he’s uninteresting, a little too straight-laced and perfect. Yes, there’s Kryptonite, but that’s a plot device, and not a very artful one at that. It has nothing to do with human flaws or frailty—the kinds of things that make superheroes recognizable to their audience. For my money, the best Superman stories have tried to complicate him and get under his impregnable exterior. Stories by Alan Moore (“For the Man Who Has Everything” and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow), Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale (A Superman for All Seasons), and Grant Morrison (All Star Superman and his run on JLA) are like gold nuggets. And they’re just as rare.

Speaking of gold, there’s plenty to be mined in this new version of Superman. In the last several weeks he’s been everywhere, providing more power than a speeding locomotive to marketing campaigns for the Army, for Dodge Ram trucks, and for Carl’s Jr. cheeseburgers, to name a few. This is Superman as brand, not character, and everyone is trying to cash in; Man of Steel has reached new heights (or lows, depending on yourpoint of view) in product placement spots.

But I’m not here to criticize the moneymaking practices of Hollywood. The Superman juggernaut, coupled with the fact that I’m now off for the summer, has made me nostalgic. So I headed to the long boxes in my spare room’s closet. That’s where I keep the majority of my comics collection. The word “collection” implies value, and there’s plenty of that, but not in monetary terms. It’s more about memories. And by this measure, the value of one title exceeds all others.

The Incredible Hulk.

I loved monsters at the time, and part of my fascination with the Hulk was that it wasn’t really clear whether he was a monster or a hero. A little of both, really. What was more clear was that he was misunderstood and nobody would leave him alone. I’d read these comics and find myself feeling sorry for him the same way I felt sorry for some other monsters I’d seen on television in movies like Bride of Frankenstein and Creature from the Black Lagoon.

I liked that the Hulk’s enemies were monsters, too. No other superhero had as grotesque a rogues’ gallery; notable members included the Leader, the Gremlin, the Abomination, and—my personal favorites—the Toad Men. I may have liked these guys best because there was a big field behind our townhouse, and I was always catching the toads that fell into our window wells.

What I understood viscerally as a kid and more intellectually now is the power of visual narrative. I’d devour these comics without paying much attention to the writers or artists, but now I know that a big part of the Hulk’s spell over me was due to talented pencillers like Sal Buscema and the great Herb Trimpe.

Some of their images are indelibly printed on my brain. The original Hulk comics I owned as a kid are long gone, thrown out by my mom one day when I was at school. In recent years, though, I’ve replaced some of these with help from online dealers like Mile High Comics and MyComicShop.com, from the back issues sections of nearly every comic book store I’ve been in, and from the myriad booths at Comic-Con every year. Whenever I find one, its cover or some drawing inside appears to me like a vision from a dream that I woke from hours earlier. There’s a flash of recognition, of remembering something vivid, and my waking life pauses. For me, it’s not just the image that stops me, but all of those memories that the image comes wrapped in.

Here are a few that stand out:

One look at this panel takes me back to a motel room in Clarion, Pennsylvania, where we’d stay every summer on our way to New York. My dad and brother were watching a baseball game on TV, and I was pouring over The Incredible Hulk #202, which I’d stashed in my suitcase for the trip. After Hulk smashes the giant—who turns out to be a giant robot—he’s blasted in the chest with a laser wielded by a one-eyed insect man named Psyklop. To be continued next issue. The problem was, I didn’t have the next issue. I would be well into my thirties by the time I finally tracked that down #203 to find out what happened. (Spoiler alert: Hulk smashes Psyklop and his minions, too).

This one is from The Incredible Hulk #171, “The Hulk at Bay.” In the 70s, Marvel released some comic book and record combinations, and I had this one. My brother and I had a little portable record player, and I remember listening and reading along as I waited the whole time for this full page spread, which terrified me as a kid. Two monsters—the Abomination and the Rhino—aiming the full force of their fabulous fury (how’s that for alliteration, Smilin’ Stan Lee?) right at me.

This sequence is from another Abomination issue, “Warfare in Wonderland.” In it, Hulk crosses paths with a young runaway named Ricky and thinks that at last he’s found a friend he can trust. And he has, except that asshat Abomination tricks him. My friend Tony Cruz, who lived two doors down from me, was the one who first showed me this comic, and I traded him a big rubber snake and a cap gun for it.

This panel takes me back to New Jersey, where we were visiting my Aunt Ann and Uncle Barry. My uncle listened patiently while I showed him just why the picture was so cool—the bad guy chained up the Hulk, see, but after the Hulk calmed down and turned back into Bruce Banner, he was small enough to climb out. I remember my uncle nodding and smiling, probably not following my breathless explanation or really caring, but definitely happy to spend time with his nephew and Godson. That’s how I like to remember my uncle—looking at a Hulk comic with me, instead of his slow, awful descent into Alzheimer’s.

This last sequence is from my favorite issue of all, “Triumph of the Toad.” It’s basically one long fight between Hulk and the Toad Men, led by their king, Torkon. Virtually every panel of this particular comic is etched in my memory; I remember reading and rereading it until it fell apart, replaced years and years later with a little help from a vendor at Comic-Con 2002. These four panels show the genius of Herb Trimpe’s visual storytelling with their varied yet fluid perspectives and angles, and they also embody the essence of the Hulk’s narrative—he’s chased, captured, abused in some way, and then escapes (usually into another crappy situation). I couldn’t get enough of this as a kid.

Or as an adult. Don’t get me wrong; I’ll definitely see Man of Steel, but it will be with the detachment that I bring to most of these comic book movies today. It’s a detachment based on the understanding that these versions of my comic book heroes are spectacles, lighter than the air under a bird or a plane, and not the stuff that childhoods are made of.