Sorry to leave y'all hanging with my last blog, but I really needed Webmaster Chris™ to pitch in last Tuesday. I was in the homestretch of a Hawkman fill-in with Steve Sadowski last Monday, and I commenced collapsing into a heap afterwards. Big time burnout. I needed a day or two to recharge the batteries before diving into my next assignment: Legion of Super-Heroes #10 with Barry Kitson on pencils! Yep, I've joined up with The Legion again and I couldn't be happier.

In my last blog (June 7), I wrote about building forts in the woods with my friends and I've since been gratified by receiving several emails from total strangers, as well as friends of recent years, who shared similar tales of misspent youth!

Rapid recap dept:
Growing up, my friends and I built several forts that usually met a grisly end, demolished by older kids. Undeterred, we'd build new ones, but on the eve of graduating high school, we were going to retire from fort building in style! Rick and Rob added electricity via buried extention cords that led to Rob's parent's house. Everything in the fort was found in dumpsters (several hardware/furniture stores were up the street) or on the street corner during trash pickup day.

I can't lay claim to the following innovations, I just pitched in here and there. Rick and Rob:

Rewired a discarded old '70's stereo (the kind that was a hunk of furniture), so we could have tunes.
Bunk beds were made with large wooden boards that had rubber inner tubes stretched across and nailed down to hold six-inch-thick foam rubber mattresses.
Light bulbs were installed over the headboards on each bunk for night time reading.
The floors were carpeted.
We had a fan to circulate the air in the tight quarters.

The only thing that was an almost purposeful constant was the lack of a proper door. Usually, you'd have to crawl through a small area (with a board that functioned as a door that slid shut). Maybe because a full-size door would be almost as big as the forts themselves. Maybe because people weren't throwing out doors in our neighborhood. Maybe it was an aesthetic. After all, forts were deliberately hidden in the woods, so you kept them small.

I was to sleep on the floor, as there were only two beds, and I contributed the least, so I was content there, reading my comics (my natural state). After playing cards for hours and loading up with junk food, we decided to call it a night. We were basking in our glory. This was a cool hangout! Rick took the bottom bunk, Rob the top. We were still yakkin' up a storm until something very wrong happened.

Once Rob got in his 'bed', his weight (160 lbs. or so) caused the foam mattress to sag substantially. But those inner tube straps held, a testiment to R&R's engineering.

Several minutes later, someone smelled smoke. R&R stayed in their beds, snooping around. I stood up, trying to help find the sourse of the smokey smell. Several MORE minutes later, as we began to quash our concerns, a tiny section underneath Rob's top bunk mattress caught aflame. Just a tiny spot, looking like a zippo lighter flame. We calmly examined it, and concluded that when Rob's weight pushed down his mattress, it had touched the still-hot light bulb on Rick's headboard.

We laughed about our folly, agreeing that we should probably lose the headboard bulbs tomorrow. We laughed ourselves silly over our goofy mistake, one joke told after another. When Rob found out that leaning on the lit area sent a puff of smoke down on Rick, he proceeded to pound on the mattress, creating a bellows effect that created lots of smoke until they had to get out of their bunks. Rick was pissed off, understandably, but within 60 seconds, our mood shifted from hilarity to horseplay to anger to slight alarm. Now there was a soupcan-sized dark hole that had eaten at the burned part of Rob's mattress.

We, fascinated and frozen in place, stared at this round area, discussed calmly how to best take care of the situation without making too big a mess. That matter was soon resolved FOR us! A flaming hoop suddenly dropped out of the hole onto Rick's mattress below! It was one of those Matrix frozen-in-time moments that I remember to this day! Flames quickly rolled across Rick's mattress and we scrambled to get out of our tiny door. I was closest and made it out without incident, grabbing an old Spider-Man trash can on the way out! Rick fell out over the steps outside the door, running from not only the expanding flames, but a racing Rob, who grabbed the flaming mattress from the bottom bunk, in an attempt to toss it out and hopefully contain the fire.

In the moonlight, I used my Spidey garbage can to scoop up water from the shallow creek nearby. When I lifted my head, I saw, well, a fort-sized fireball! I just stood there watching and holding my colorful can full of water, accepting the fact that it probably wasn't going to do jack at this point. I was shocked how frighteningly fast it happened while my back was turned. Rob was howling in pain as Rick raced to his side. It turned out Rob had pieces of burning foam rubber stuck to his legs. The fire department showed up in amazing response time, putting out the blaze, tending to Rob's third degree burns. Within an hour or so, the three of us, having answered the firemen's questions, sat in Rob's parent's basement getting another round of the third degree of a different sort. We sat in silence, eating Golden Grahams in our underwear at 3:00 a.m. while Rob's dad read us the riot act. A most dismal end to what would have been a perfect night.

Within a few hours, Rob & Rick were to go boating and fishing at Erie, PA with Rob's family. Rob had to avoid the water the whole week due to his burns. That was one trip I was glad I missed! I borrowed some of Rob's clothes and shambled home, a muck-encrusted mockery of a man--ooops, I slipped into Len Wein Swamp Thing narration...

As I stated in part one, It's odd, the things you remember from a crisis. Rick remembered that the last song we heard on the stereo before calling it a night was REO Speedwagon's "Keep The Fire Burning".

I, of course, remember the three comics I had purchased that day and waited to read during our inaugural stay at the new fort.

New Teen Titans #25 - Marv Wolfman, George Perez & Romeo Tanghal. The action-packed chapter leading up to New Teen Titans Annual #1! Starfire's sister, Blackfire was causing all kinds of intergalactic trouble. Guest-starring The Omega Men. Robin, then Starfire's lover, was portrayed well, physically numb from non-stop combat and pushing himself and the team forward to victory.

The Fury of Firestorm #5 - Gerry Conway, Pat Broderick & Rodin Rodriguez. The pied piper was the villain. IMHO, this was Broderick at his best. I liked his Micronauts, but he really won me over with the opening sequence of #1, where Firestorm is resting in the clouds. I later dropped the title by #20, despite my apprecitation of replacement artist, Raphael Kayanan, when Conway appeared to be keeping the subplots in a holding pattern.

Avengers #224 - Jim Shooter, Mark Bright & Dan Green. while Yellowjacket's behind bars, his ex-wife, Janet Van Dyne begins a romance with Tony Stark! Like a lot of Avenger fans, I had a love/hate relationship with Shooter's more adult direction of the title. Bright, who's work I'd only seen on fill-ins of Power Man/Iron Fist, told a solid story that covered a lot of ground in 22 pages. It was soap opera all the way, but Stan & Jack did their share of soap too. One thing's for sure: Love it or hate it, it wasn't boring!

What also put the icing on the cake for the dreadful final fort experience is that I had to buy those three comics a second time with money better spent on back issues in my bargain-hunting days! Then again, things could've been MUCH worse. I had enough of real-life adventure for a while!