REVOLUTION: 1993

Before getting to our niece Josceline's early birthday party (held two months before her actual tenth birthday because that will be in July, when most of her school chums will likely be out of town), soon after Martha got home from her day shift at McDonald's Saturday, I went out to Grand Slam Comics and found two comics I haven't read in decades along with the connecting issue. It was also Free Comic Book Day, so I thought it'd be good to stop in. Reading that again – if you see my cover photo, that's the second and third issues (the whole tale spans Marvel Comics' Captain America # 286 through 289, cover dates October' 83 to January '84) of the Deathlok Saga – was an interesting throwback for me. Deathlok's a cyborg soldier sent back in time from HIS 1993, ten years after super heroes were wiped out by shifting them to another dimension, only this time a clone of his human self was sent back and happens to run into Captain America.

Captain America: But that's insane! Impossible! This is 1983!

Deathlok: Then I'd suggest you start watching your back, Captain.

Reading this after a hiatus that included my moving from Florida, leaving my parents for good, marriage, and two children, what caught my attention was 1) the story's immunity to the “sliding timescale” Marvel and DC so often employ, so the origins of their main characters are always a decade ago or so, but several times you hear characters refer to the year and 2) the interior monologues throughout the stories, each dealing with the main characters' adapting to a new world. “Super-Soldier of the 40s Vs. Super-Soldier of the 90s!” This matchup had that title in its previews, Captain America being created in the 1940s and Deathlok being the product of then-imagined future tech of the late 1980s and early 1990s. And both Steve Rogers and Luther Manning, perhaps more than any other heroes, find themselves products of their times and often doubting whether their real-life counterparts can have a life they're confident in as … themselves.

SO Josceline and her friends were swimming for a few hours along with Sarah and Jeffrey and a few classmates of hers. Then they and Donovan, Mary, Robert, Sharon, Martha, and I came in for hot dogs and a birthday cake made of cupcakes – supposedly what we'll be doing for Jeffrey's birthday party for his friends this coming Saturday too, but no sleepover – and it was all great. Martha's hours got cut at McDonald's so she was free Friday to sit back with us after work to make a Papa Murphy's pizza (you buy the pizza there and you bake it at home) and settle in with various movie snacks – got to eat less chocolate than I have been – and watch Turbo, the DreamWorks movie about the super-fast snail. (“Come for the racing snails, stay for the chimichangas!”) Sunday was the day after church where our kids helped pack relief kits and I read that we checked the Elantra AGAIN, and we're tracing the problem to needing a new starter relay. Please let that be it!

I like when my rides remember me, David