We love these editorials by old codgers who are stunned to hear that, say, Captain America has died and Horatio Alger is no longer a best-selling author. This one is from Foy Evans in the Houston Home Journal:

I was with a group in my age bracket and we indulged ourselves in nostalgia. We had just learned that Captain America, who has saved this country many times in comic books, is being killed.

It is difficult to imagine them killing off the man who saved us from the Nazis in World War II and in the intervening years has been a stalwart in the defense of our country.

But it is happening.

Reading about Captain America reminded of the exploits of Jack Dawson, Dave Lowell and The Hardy Boys.

This is the kind of high adventure my generation grew up on … plus, of course, those wonderful pulp magazines The Shadow, Wild West Weekly and Street & Smith’s Sports Magazine.

I spent many an afternoon and evening reading about the adventures of these bigger than life mythical heroes, as well as Tom Sawyer and Frank Merriwell and Horatio Alger.

The heroes were all good and the villains were all bad. And you knew when you picked up a book or magazine that between the opening sentence and the last word would be excitement galore and that everything would come out all right in the end.


Blah blah blah. Did you hear they closed a great old man bar? Rassem frassem…

1 COMMENT

  1. Yeah, and a while back DC killed off Superman; they also crippled Batman and replaced him with some punk. Yada, yada, yada.

    Marvel just managed to kill two birds with one stone. Same old, Same old.

  2. (in my Tom Servo voice): Go to bed, old man!

    Ahem. To be fair, how is that any worse than us sitting around on the internet complaining that things aren’t like the days of the sixties and seventies when Marvel Comics were fresh and exciting? These young Cap-killing whippersnappers today! You kids stay off my lawn!

  3. Wow, haven’t read something so mean-spirited for a while! I’m not sure if you’re that far off from “old codger-dom” yourself. One way or another, I could have SWORN I’d seen you express similar sentiments about things that are *ahem* much more hip, of course.

    Take it easy!