Your mama’s apocalypse

… was much worse than yours.

Your mama’s Oh Wow

… was better than yours.

A dangerous vision

September is Cosmic Zap month here at Doctor Xaos Comics Madness. I’m talking now about what was going on in science fiction and fantasy at the time, which is too huge to summarize – it has to be like one of those fragmented memory/epiphany scenes in a movie, with rapid, too-short shots interspersed with someone’s face going “AAAAH!” and maybe cloth-ripping or fake-Latin chanting sound effects.

The beginning

Home neighborhood: Del Monte Park, in the middle of the peninsula, at the north bend in Highway 68, in the top ridges of the next-to-highest mountain range. Not as idyllic as advertised, if you’re not rich.

2010: this genetic monster is 52 in this photo

My next-oldest brother’s name is Danny. He’s an athletic bad-ass; you can see him do crazy-athlons online, and if you’re into MMA, he devised the only sensible scoring system known. But back in 1970, he was a buck-toothed 12-year-old whose big brother called him “Toothpick,” with a hyper-imaginative six-year-old brother reading at his grade level, and one thing he could do to make me less obnoxious was to read comics with me. Later, when he got all jock-ish and grew up and stuff, he left the pile to me.