The recent PBS documentary Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle showed footage of a young Christopher Reeve talking about Superman’s continued relevance, as part of the 1980 television documentary The Making of Superman: The Movie. “We all know that the Man of Steel could leap over tall buildings, but the question is, could he leap over the generation gaps since the early Jerry Siegel / Joe Schuster days? We wanted to know if the man from the innocent thirties could survive in the post-Watergate seventies.” Then, looking directly into the camera, Reeve told the viewers, “Well, thanks to all of you, he’s doing just fine.”
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Panel Discussions: Men of Yesterday by William Bradley
I didn’t know much about Curt Swan when I met him—only that he’d penciled a lot of Superman and Superman Family comics during the “Silver Age” of comic books—that hazily define time that covers the 1960s and early 1970s. I knew that he was important, that he was someone I ought to know—the way I felt like I probably needed to listen to more John Lennon and read more Ernest Hemingway.
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"I have a feeling if I went online right now and looked at any news or commentary website, I could find something that would stir me to a Hulk-style rage." - William Bradley
Panel Discussions: Just Imagine by William Bradley
Just imagine—there I was, standing in line at the Shop-N-Go convenience store across from the country club where my parents played golf. My dad and I were running some errand that evening. Most likely, we were getting milk. We rarely bought groceries at the Shop-N-Go—they were cheaper at Kroger’s, but Kroger’s was farther away from our house. If I had to guess, I’d say my mother had discovered that we didn’t have enough milk for breakfast, and so my dad was sent on a quick trip to remedy this. I went with him because we had recently spent a long time apart—he had moved to West Virginia ahead of us, several months before the school year ended. I had missed him terribly and took any opportunity to be near him. This was the fall of 1987, and I was eleven years old.
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Dislocated By William Bradley
You know that Nabokov traced the development of his consciousness to one of his earliest memories, the recognition that he and his parents were distinct human beings. And you know that in Speak, Memory, Nabokov often writes of memory as if the recalled events happened to someone else (“. . . I see my diminutive self . . .”) or as if they are occurring on a movie screen, viewed from his “present ridge of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time.” And though, let’s face it, you’re never going to be half the writer Nabokov was, you can appreciate this distinction between past and present, between the boy one was and the man one is.
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