![]() ![]() ![]() The younger men and women who lived in the commune took him for granted, as anyone should have, so far as I knew. They languished in my room, unread, and were eventually cleaned up-I mean, thrown out-by my mom.įor the next few years, Super Goat Man was less than a minor curiosity to me. I knew only that I disliked the comics, found them embarrassing, for myself, for Super Goat Man, and for my dad. I couldn’t have articulated these judgments then, of course. The drawings were amateurish, cut-rate, antiquated. Super Goat Man’s five issues showed him rescuing old ladies from swerving trucks and kittens from lightning-struck trees, and battling dull villains like Vest Man and False Dave. The stories the comics contained, when we inspected them together, were both ludicrous and boring. I didn’t know how to explain to my father that Electric wasn’t one of the major comics publishers. My father seemed satisfied with what he’d found. There were just five issues because after five the title had been forever cancelled. These were the only comics in which Super Goat Man had appeared. He helped my father to find what he sought, deep in the alphabetical archive: a five-issue run of The Remarkable Super Goat Man, from Electric Comics. The shop was presided over by a nervous young pedant with long hair and a beard, a collector type himself, an old man in spirit who distrusted children in his store, as he ought to have. The boxes contained ancient runs of back issues of titles I’d heard of, as well as thousands of other comics featuring characters I’d never encountered. ![]() This was a tiny storefront filled with long white boxes packed with carefully archived comics, protected by plastic bags and cardboard backing. One day toward the end of that summer, he and I walked to Montague Street to visit the comics shop there. My father in particular seemed fascinated with Super Goat Man, though he disguised this interest by acting as though it was on my behalf. They were unmistakably drawn to the strange figure who’d moved to our block, as though for them he represented some lost possibility in their own lives. We had eyes only for Spider-Man and Batman in those days, superheroes in two dimensions, with lunchboxes and television shows and theme songs. We weren’t struck by his fall from grace, out of the world of comic-book heroes, among which he had been at best a minor star, to land here in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, in a single room in what was basically a dorm for college dropouts, a hippie group shelter, any more than we were by the tufts of extra hair at his throat and behind his ears. The two little fleshy horns on his forehead didn’t make him especially interesting. For us, as we ran and screamed and played our secret games on the sidewalk, Super Goat Man was only another of the guys who sat on stoops in sleeveless undershirts on hot summer days, watching the slow progress of life on the block. His presence didn’t mean much to me or to the other kids in the neighborhood. Though I liked superheroes, I wasn’t familiar with Super Goat Man. ![]() When Super Goat Man moved into the commune on our street, I was ten years old. ![]()
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