In the World of No Return - an Early Justice League Adventure - I learned of LA BREA TAR PITS and I've always wanted to see it in Los Angeles so one vacation in LA we managed to see it and I learned it thru reading comic books and my Mom and Dad wanted to something educational that trip and we spent an afternoon there.





This is one of many great examples of the early days of the Justice League Comics that teaches kids about the world around us.

While I can't point to a specific comic that taught me a specific lesson, I do know that I had an advanced vocabulary as a child because I read comics. Also Stan Lee taught me that "All life, even [bad guys], is precious," that "Only one deserves to be called 'all-powerful'... and His only message is love," and, of course, that "With great power, there must also come great responsibility."

Cei-U!
I summon the words to geek by!

I shared this at the old site a long time ago. It's a piece I wrote for my old blog back when people had those things maybe a decade ago, and it concerns Dick Grayson teaching me one of the most important life lessons I ever learned:



For almost as long as I can remember, Batman and Robin have been the most important cultural icons / myths in the world to me. Yet, strangely enough, I actually can remember the very moment that they took on this larger than life significance in my young mind.

I couldn’t have been older than three on the fateful afternoon that my mother and I spent the afternoon coloring in my room. It was a beautiful day, with the sun pouring in through the windows, and my mother had put the entire afternoon aside just to spend time with me. She had bought me a new Batman and Robin coloring book, and I clearly remember that we were coloring in a picture of the two of them swinging in to a circus tent, triumphant and glorious, a happy, unified team of man and boy.

Perhaps most children would have simply cherished the time spent with their mother, and I did, but somewhere in my rich emotional identity, a seed was planted. I remember the feeling like it was yesterday, though I’ve only been able to understand it in more recent years, looking back. Somewhere inside my head, I was looking at the happy man and boy, wondering where the man belonging to my boyhood had gone.

My father did live with us and, though it’s taken a long time for me to fully understand this, he loved me very much. He was also largely absent in my childhood, working long hours for his business, coming home right before my bed time on most nights, and leaving before I awoke in the morning. At the time, I was too young to intellectually associate the caped hero of my youth with my absent father, but emotionally, that was exactly what I wanted from Batman. If he could be good to his Robin, then I could somehow, in some way, believe that I was loved by my father too.



I didn’t want to be Batman. Most children spend long childhood hours thrusting their arms forward and pretending to fly like Superman, or swing over large buildings like Batman. My mother had even bought me the elaborate, caped pajamas for both heroes (and I wore them proudly), but no, I didn’t want to be them. I wanted to be loved by them. I wanted to be Robin. In a way, I always have.

As I got older, and began to actually read and understand the comics from which these modern day mythological Gods were derived, I became even more fascinated by The Bat. He ceased to be nothing more than an idyllic fantasy. In addition to being the loving mentor that took in a young boy and kept him closer to himself than anyone else, the Batman was complex, flawed, and deeply mysterious. He was moody, elusive, and obsessed with his work, committing every ounce of his life energy to an oath he once made to his parents.





In my own life, I lived in the shadow of a man who could occasionally take a deep interest in me and let me in to his life more than anyone else, but he was also complex, flawed, and deeply mysterious. He was moody, elusive, and obsessed with his work, committing every ounce of his life energy to the career his parents had expected him to take. Most of my childhood memories of him were of waiting for him to emerge from our underground garage late at night, and of hearing him come in to my room to shave and watch over me early in the morning, but leaving before I could open my eyes and catch a glance of him. He was almost as unreal as the Batman in my early life: just as elusive, just as mysterious.


It was only when I got older, and got to see more of him (he started spending Sundays with me after my parents divorced), that I began to take a serious interest in Robin again. To Robin, Batman became the one opportunity for a role model and for parental approval in his life. I had the advantage over Robin in possessing a mother but, in many ways, I was far more confused and fascinated by the man that took me out on Sundays; the man that I might one day grow up to be.



Surely, as I spent more time with my father, and got to see how much he disapproved of my flaws and shortcomings, I began to see the same struggle in Robin. The natural assumption to most had always been that Robin would one day take Batman’s place. One day, an aging Batman would proudly hand the cape and cowl over to his young ward, saying “I trust you to take over my life’s work; my dream and very identity.” But Robin never did. As he aged, Robin grew his own mind. He and Batman began to see things very differently. Eventually, Robin found himself working solo or with others more often than he was working with Batman. Finally and inevitably, Robin carved out his own identity. He became a hero called Nightwing; never as driven or as respected as Batman, but every bit his own man. I could never forgive Robin for this change. How could he break up my childhood ideal? How could he pull out on my dream?

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Ten years later, my father is gone. His business is sold because I wasn’t willing to take it over. My father died wondering if I’d ever get it together the way he’d hoped. I have my own life now, my own identity. I’m married, I’m working toward a career, and I’m neither as successful nor as sure of my place in the world as he was. I look around and wonder what I’m doing with my life. Many people who know me wonder the same thing. I have become Nightwing; my own identity, for better or worse. Some days I wonder if I’m nothing more than an entity apart from the shadow of my father, defined only by my unwillingness to become him. There’s a hero in me somewhere. There must be. Yet, so like Nightwing, all I can see is myself in relation to the shadow of The Batman.



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A lot has changed in the ten years since I wrote that. I'm much more sure of myself and my identity than I was back then, and while I have not lived up to my father's example in some respects, I've surpassed it in other ways that I felt (and feel) are more important. I'm more content than he was, and more convinced I'm making a positive change in the world.

But Nightwing's example really helped me to work through that and arrive at such a place, helping me to understand that it was okay to carve out my own identity.

Only now, as I write this, am I beginning to realize just how weird it is to now be older than Dick Grayson and further along on my life than the example I looked up to.

At the moment, I can't think of a specific example, but in the early 60s DC comics had true facts in their stories. Especially Flash, Green Lantern and Batman. I think John Broome and Gardner Fox were known for putting these into their stories. I think this was true of the Adam Strange stories also.

There is a Zeta Beam, right?

Thanks to Action Comics, I knew this line before we read Julius Caesar in high school...