4 - Wednesday, February 19, 1992 — North Shore News Marvelous time: on the air and into the future I WAS sitting next to my 13-year-old son, Will, seven miles up, drifting magically across the late afternoon sky somewhere over the American Midwest, when it occurred to me that for every previous generation except the last two, this experience of travelling in a jetliner would have seemed jike something that could only happen to gods. Even after more flights than I can rergember, I still get a buzz of excitement about being up there. But then I’m pretty primitive, be- ing able to remember the skies be- fore they were scratched by jet- trails. My kid appreciates things, don’t get me wrong. But he is so laid. back about this particular experi- ence (he has been up ia jets at least once for every year of his life) that he spends most of his time with the window shutter down, making calculations on scraps of paper concerning the current value of his awesome comic book collection. He has a price guide in one hand, a pocket calculator in the other. He’s wearing his headphones, tuned to a music channel, while occasionally flicking over to the sound track for the movie which he is monitoring with one eye in case anything interesting happens. lam éxceedingly proud of him. His collection is up to some- thing like 1,500 volumes. He’s thinking of buying stocks in Marvel Comics, the New York- based publishing colossus that made its original fortune on Cap- tain America, Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, Thor, Dr. Strange, Iron Man and Sergeant Fury, the superheroes of my gen- eration. Back then, these were marginal characters, compared with the mainstream biggies like Superman and Batman. Today? X-Men No. 1, published in August last year, sold seven mil- lion copies. My son, the budding comic publishing baron, has col- lected 19 of them, almost all i in mint condition. The Marvel comics of today have evolved far beyond where they were when I was a young man. The new characters are mostly mutants. And what an ar- ray of them! They include Cyclops, Beast, Rogue, Psylocke, Gambit, Storm, Bishop, Nightcrawler, Archangel, Iceman, and, of course, the great Professor Xavier. My favorite has to be Wolverine, the Canadian berserker with Adamantium claws and bones and the all-important Heal- ing Factor that makes him nearly indestructible. They come, these mutants, not just from Canada, America, Bri- tain, Russia and Australia, but from alternative futures and alternative dimensions, including Mojo’s World where Longshot and Dazzler fight with the mutant rebels against one of the most nightmarish interdimensional cyborg maniacs ever spawned. Superhero teams like Guardians of the Galaxy do battle in the 31st century, against such horrific an- tagonists as Rancor, the fifth- generation descendant of Wolverine himself. Just to keep track of all the plot lines and characters, my son the budding publisher/trader makes good use of his word processor at home, the one with the memory. It corrects itself so that his hard copy is always perfect. (Mine still isn’t.) Late at night sometimes I'll hear his machine start up, clicking out page after page of stuff while the kid retires to his water bed, snapping on his Walkman to listen Bob Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL to the latest U2 tape while pon- dering whether to start collecting DC Comics as well, now that the Batman series has suddenly gotten so good. If he does that, he'll have to earn more money. What with his room and board being subsidized by his parents, medical costs covered hy the government, video and movie entertainment costs also subsidized by his parents (come to think of it), he can dispose of all his income in comic book shops. Genius, I’ve read, is a matter of starting early. My son is position- ing himself to survive in the world of the futuré. He is learning about markets. He is ready to move into stocks. His arithmetic is very good. At his age I was just barely thinking about writing science fiction, Jet alone being up for asking how amortization works. To this day, I remain a hopeless romantic. As we recline in our plush chairs in the jetliner roaring smoothly across the entire North American continent in just under five hours, 1 marvel at the fact that I have travelled through time — 50 years of it! — to reach what I used to dream about as the future. My son has travelled through only 13 years of it, yet he is so well adapted to it that he takes his astonishing surroundings absolute- ly for granted. I try to impress him by pointing out that this is really a sub-orbital spacecraft. He nods thoughtfully. “I wonder if you’d get jet-lag going through hyperspace or worm holes, eh Dad? The guys on Star Trek never seem to.”’ “Good question,’ I agree. **There’s bound to be some kind of side-effect. Maybe you go cross-eyed or get dandruff.’’ I contemplate telling him one more time how I can remember when Man Landed On The Moon. He’s very kind. He doesn’t roll his eyes unless I start talking about all this ancient stuff in front of his friends. So where we are, in sub-orbit, he perfectly at home, mildly bored, I still basically flub-a- dubbing my lower lip with a finger as I look around, amazed by the strangeness of it all. Seven miles up, eh? Holy mackerel! He gives me cne of those looks that is like a pat on the head and goes back to his calculations. The thing I never expected about the friture was that when I got there I'd meet people who were from it. SZUR TAL ESTOS EROS SAY I 2 : # Capriano Mall .° : COQUITLAM: | UN T FEATURES: e 3" Chimney ® Automatic fan © Designed for installation in pre-fabricated wood burning fireplaces © Thermostatically controlied © 3 colors for trim Can be seen on display and burning at your local fireplace store, or at the B.C. 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