Going through some boxes of old papers and other junk, I found a battered but still intact stenographer pad. I recognized it immediately. My mother gave it to me ages ago, not because she or I knew shorthand or had ever been a stenographer, but because it was a good way for a busy mom to keep her nine year old son occupied.
The steno pad contained not writing, but drawings. On each sheet was a different character I had created; robots, cyborgs, aliens, mutants, crime-fighters and evil overlords.
My mother had always encouraged my artistic efforts. More than that, she encouraged me to create characters of my own. I’m sure she would have been fine with a picture of Spider-Man or the Hulk and heaped praise upon it, but from early on I remember she had always pushed for me to come up with my own ideas.
She would bring home a steno pad or a ream of the old, accordion-style printer paper and turn me loose. Soon after that I would begin populating the steno pads with character designs and the printer paper with battles and adventures. Looking back now, I realize those long connected sheets of printer paper wound up looking something like a medieval tapestry, a string of heroes, monsters, castles and (space)ships connected into a primitive record of my private fictional worlds.
Like many historical tapestries, my printer paper codices are long gone, frayed and torn and worn away by the passage of time. Most of the steno pads are gone too, whole stacks of them, lost in my family’s many moves from place to place and state to state.
Not this one though. Somehow this one survived and stayed with me, rediscovered among the many papers from yesteryear a pack rat like myself hangs on to.
My best guess is this was the second pad she gave me. One of the pages contained Totem Patrol II, a team of robot animals and warriors which stacked up like a totem pole when not fighting evil. I included a version of the Totem Patrol in each notebook until I got tired of drawing them and left them out of later volumes, so this was the second notebook.
Going through it now, I am sometimes proud, often amused and also ema little barrassed by my youthful output.
There’s White Ratt, Cave Crawler, Dr. Cyberg, Scope, Admiral Freeman, Bolt, Ultra-Boxer, Laz-R and many more. These weren’t just superheroes, these were my heroes.
But the real hero was my mom. She didn’t want me telling the stories of well known characters owned by some big company. She wanted me to tell my own stories in my own way.
