THE SENSATIONAL CHARACTER FIND OF 1989

This is the cover of Detective comics 38 which sold for ten cents in 1940.
Bob Kane created both of these characters. Robin the boy wonder was an aerial circus acrobat. His parents were killed by gangsters, and the Batman helped Robin track down the killers, and bring them to justice. Robin, unlike Batman, did not get consumed by this tragedy. Yes he grieved and mourned over the murder of his parents, but that is not the reason he became a superhero. Robin was in it for the thrill of the adventure. This book in mint condition is easily worth 100,000 dollars. These books are so rare that they are essentially priceless.

This is the story of the person I consider to be "my older brother." His story begins with me on a winter day around 1981. A bunch of us were playing paint ball, without the paint, at an old abandoned army base called Dinosaur Park. Most of us were having the time of our lives as we often did, every day. But my so called older brother, who I will now refer to as Lou, was not having such a good time. He wasn't dressed properly and wound up getting wet in the snow. So he started to complain and cry and act like a little bitch. In my infinite 12 year old wisdom, instead of telling him to go home, I built a fire to warm him up. That didn't work for Lou. So he got up and said something like, "I'm going home and don't care what you say or what you call me." And so I replied "See you in eight years dude".

Eight years had passed and now its the fall of 1989. We were standing outside of the local high school, a place that I had graduated from the spring before, and Lou came up to me, with a bunch of other friends, and this is the first thing I said to him, "what you finally dried off"? And then he promptly jumped in the passenger seat of my car and that was the beginning of our friendship. You could say at that point he earned a best friend berth. We had many adventures together. Some of the highlights include watching life go by in New York, with rose colored chemicals pumping through our veins, this was before Rudi cleaned up the former garbage dump. We did things like purchase fake ID's, to be used down the Jersey shore. We also lived in malls, and we passed the time sitting on rooftops drinking beer and watching snow fall. Good stuff. One of the last adventures for Lou, the boy wonder, took place in the Ghetto. A place that Naughty by Nature gave us an explicit warning not to go. But we didn't listen. So anyway, something something whatever something. We were sitting in a mutual friend's living room, in the hood, and after a couple of drinks, that mutual friend's sister pulled out a 357 magnum to show us. Pointing it at us and everything. Now I could blame those same rose colored chemicals for my indifference to the situation, but the shit didn't phase me. It phased the boy wonder I think... That's when he decided to put back his teasing combs and go back to high school.

Aquaman is a superhero who can breath under water, swim at 1oo miles an hour or so, has great strength and whose body is super dense, as to withstand the pressures of the ocean's greatest depths. He can also communicate with all forms of sea life. This is who Lou decided he was going to be when he grew up.

In an effort to break his parent's bank account, Lou went to school in Florida to become a bar hopping, concert arranging fish. I mean a marine biologist. He had many adventures with the many schools of fish he met there.
One summer when he came back from the pond, as he did every summer, Me and him and two other Phish spent a weekend at the Jersey shore. Do I need to explain to you why four guys decide to spend their weekend at the shore? Usually the other two mackerel wound up with the girl at the end of the night. Corky was hit or miss. And Lou usually got the ever fucking annoying comment that no 2o year old males psyche can handle, "oh Lou, you're just like a brother to me", but not this night! We all struck out except Lou, well that's not completely true, I think I got a kiss along with a life story. But Lou wound up with the girl this night. When I woke up the next morning I went outside to watch the sunrise. Actually the sun woke me up, because the room that we were staying in had really shitty blinds. So as I watched the sunrise up above the Atlantic ocean, I saw a sight to behold. I noticed a school of dolphins swimming in the horizon. This shit was to good too be true. So I made sure to wake everybody up, because this was just to perfect of an ending to the night where Lou was the Mackerel.

After college Lou got a very promising career feeding fish at Seaworld. After about five minutes of that, he became a high school teacher for a private institution where he taught science to a bunch of boy wonders. After a couple years of scrapping by on the sardines the school was paying Lou to teach, he was pretty much fed up. One night he was watching a Jacque Custo documentary and a commercial came on that said something along the lines of this: "Tired of scrapping all that chum out of the bucket? Come to our school for six months and learn how to turn on a computer. We guarantee that you will triple your income." So Lou packed up his empty liquor bottle collection and moved back to Jersey.

This is when he decided to become the bionic Lou. He rebuilt himself; made himself stronger, faster and thinner. The reason I consider Lou to be my older brother is because he is the friend I go to to help me solve problems. When Lou gets a gun pointed in his face he doesn't need for it to happen five more times before he realizes that maybe he should not put himself into those kinds of situations, unlike Corky, who needs his head banged against a wall three or four times before he gets the message. I am not dismissing the fact that Lou has feelings or pain. I'm just saying that he has a healthy way of dealing with situations ranging from an Uzi being pulled on him to buying real estate. Not to mention he has always been by my side since that initial ride home in the fall of 89. Now I could end this character profile with a cliche comic book ending, something like, "just the beginning." But I would rather say, the reason I started with Lou is because A is for Aquaman.