Back when Ted and I first met we had one basic thing in common: love of comic books. Ted was much more serious about it than I was and he introduced me to several stories and books that I then grew to love and treasure, he also taught me about preserving the comics (bags and boards). I was pretty clueless and most of my comic books were just kind of lying around my room crumpled up or torn in various places.

But Ted, he had boxes of well preserved special issues, entire story lines of the golden age of X-Men (OK, it wasn’t the golden age of comics… I don’t think, but it was those issues of X-Men that brought the rest of the world into their universe and shone the spotlight on them for quite a while), first editions, and even *gasp* independent publisher comics.

One of his independent comics, Nexus, gave me the tool I needed to get rid of the military recruiters that were waking me at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings – “Communism is glorious, just glorious.” stated the character. Just saying that phrase to one recruiter fellow (Navy I believe) brought their attempts to bring me into the armed services to an abrupt halt – it was the cold war after all (1988).

Anyway, the point of this post; is that while Ted and I were in school together, 9 – 12th grades, we had started to write our own comic book: Cygnus and Pegasus II. Now this comic was based on our make believe times out by an old pile of rusted metal somethings next to the railroad tracks near where my grandma lived on Camp Street in Whitehall. Those rusted out pieces of debris were our spaceship, our mountain, our alien planet and we could do anything there… after all both Cygnus and Pegasus II were descendants of the ancient Greek Gods of Mount Olympus and their power was near infinite.

Of course we did have our share of problems back then, and each one of them somehow ended up in our story: girlfriends, teachers, friends, family… everyone had a part in our story. And we were plagiarists too, we would steal from anybody: Legion of Superheroes, X-Men, Spiderman, it didn’t matter if it was something that we read regularly we would find a way to put parts of it into the story. Some of the first paragraphs that I wrote had characters with the same first names as the founding members of the Legion of Superheroes, but I didn’t know it was wrong, I just was too stoned to be original more than likely.

But here I was looking through my old papers this evening trying to find one of the stories that involved not just Ted and I, but Rosy and Eric as well. I was going to type it up and cringe at all the spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and just plain stupidity to make sure that it got posted somewhere that would possibly be safe for me to laugh at in a decade or so… but I can’t seem to find it. Perhaps this weekend I’ll have some time to be able to go out and find this piece of horrid literature and post some of it on here for you all to laugh at, just trying to do my part to keep you entertained.