I have a question for you comic book experts out there. I did my time in the world of comics fandom, but that was back in the days when I could buy a boxful of new comics for about twenty bucks. No that was NOT in the days when they were a dime. I’m not quite that….
Anyway, what I wanted to ask is “Are there any cases of a superhero who acquired those special powers after the age of, oh, sixty or so?” I assume there may have been occasional gimmicks and gags where an innocent bystander with white hair temporarily achieved the power of invisibility or flight. But is there any chance of suddenly becoming a cover feature on a comic book after a certain…. Asking for a friend.
I don’t need any further powers myself, you understand. I am a blogger. I became a blogger during my years working with books, a period when I exposed my super powers moving boxes of books while successfully concealing my secret identity as a librarian with a genuine Master’s degree in the subject. This entitles me to hang out at eh bar after hours with Batman or the Hulk, discussing that time I carried a box of foreign editions of Playboy which weighed too much to be mailed or shipped. (For repacking, the man in charge of the scales took out half the magazines and after THAT, the box weighed 120 pounds.) I believe Batgirl started her days in the comics as a demure librarian (glasses and all), but did SHE ever have to cross a large room in three seconds flat to catch a bookcase someone had modified so they could get two more books on each shelf? I perfected a talent for leaping stacks of LPs in a single bound. As I was saying to Captain America over Shirley Temples at the….
What’s that, mortal? Did I ever rescue a damsel in distress? I shall ignore your attempts at bygone sexist stereotypes and answer, with a dignity becoming to those of us who change our clothes in telephone booths, “Why, yes. Yes, I did.”
No railroad tracks were involved. (Good thing, too: I never was good at knots.) I was dealing with a donation where someone had put an entire set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in one box when the phone rang. It was a call from my colleagues in the public part of the building. “Can you come to the bookstore and help us with something?”
Anything was better than dealing with one more Britannica (some of my most unbelievable exploits involved actually occasionally selling one of these, but no one ever believes THOSE stories.) So I trotted up to the A.C. McClurg Bookstore, where the ladies were unboxing a shipment of new books. THEY never dealt in 1945 editions of World Book, so I wondered what the problem was.
“Could you open this book?”
The manager handed me a nice shiny book, complete with crisp dust jacket. Then she and the assistant manager backed off five steps. “It’s probably nothing,” said the manager. “But if you….”
I had not seen it at first, but I sure did now. Extending from the spine was a long gray tapered object. Imagine a rat’s tail. Because that’s what the three of us were imagining.
“It HAS to be glue from the binding,” the assistant manager said. “Just extra glue that got stretched out and wasn’t cut off.”
“You’re right,” I said. But I didn’t open the book. Any one of the three of us could have taken hold of the tail, of course. I have no REAL data on the question, but a length of dried glue should NOT feel like an animal’s tail. I cleared my throat, shook my shoulders, and flexed my fingers over the cover.
“Just a minute,” I was told. “Could you open it over THERE?”
Of course a superhero must face the big villains alone. Book, and inhabitant, in hand, I retired to a neutral corner. Come on, I told myself. No way could a rat be pressed flat enough to….
I have no data on that, either. It turned out to be a thick strand of glue from the binding, just as we had all assumed. We laughed, and then I turned over the book and went back to my encyclopedias, secure in the knowledge that the hero had saved the day. (AND without having to face down an actual rat, which might have resulted in a completely different ending.)
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