Marvel movies? He read the books

The seemingly endless stream of movies from the comic book universe made my eyes glaze over a long time ago.

The first Spiderman was OK. The first X-Men was good. But I lost track of the zillions of Marvel superheroes soon after that.

And I couldn’t begin to tell you how many Batman movies there have been. Some memorable and some forgettable.

Marvel’s stable of superheroes didn’t pop up on my radar until I was in junior high school and my older sister turned me on to the early, quirky creations of Stan Lee.

Before that, it was DC, originally Detective Comics, for superheroes: Superman, Batman and Robin, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash and others.

The rest of the comic book cavalcade was “the funnies,” and I use that term loosely.

Those ranged from the Disney stable — Donald Duck, Mickey and the rest — to the one-joke creations of Harvey Comics.

Harvey Comics, whose success was tied to an effort to sanitize comics in 1954, were consistently lame: Richie Rich was a rich kid, Casper was a friendly ghost, Baby Huey was an incredibly strong duckling. Each issue seemed to have only a slight variation of the one before it.

The good thing was, I didn’t have to spend my allowance on comics if I didn’t want to. Our neighborhood had what was essentially a comic book library.

My great friend Dan Cox was the son of a grocer, and every few weeks his father Glen would bring home copies of each of the latest issues that had been dropped off at the store by the distributor.

At any given moment in my childhood, there was a stack of comics at the Cox household ready to be perused.

Faced with a rainy afternoon, Dan, my buddy Don Starr and I could be counted on to while away the hours reading comic book after comic book. And on a really crumby afternoon, we’d read really crumby ones.

I shudder at the memory of “Little Lulu,” and I was stunned when someone launched a reboot of “Nancy.” They were usually at the bottom of the stack. When it came to lighter fare, I was more inclined to read about Scrooge McDuck, Donald’s incredibly wealthy uncle, though I never figured out how he managed to dive into those piles of coin without hurting himself.

For the most part, I stuck with DC. But somewhere along the line in elementary school, I noticed that the DC folks were running out of plots.

After all, how many ways can Superman be tricked into exposing himself to Kryptonite?

Batman, meanwhile, kept getting into fights at Gotham City museums that featured giant models of typewriters and tape dispensers. Even I could figure out that the writer or artist’s inspiration came from things around the office.

Inevitably, Superman jumped the shark. (If you’re not familiar with that phrase, Google it.)

Bizzaro World and Bizzaro Superman showed up with old plot lines dressed up in Bizzaro trimmings.

And there was an imp (or something) from another dimension (or planet) who created all sorts of mischief for Superman. His name was a long string of consonants, which had to be pronounced backwards to send him back to his own world. That grew old quickly.

It was about that time that Marvel’s more complex and conflicted superheroes arrived and took over center stage. Peter Parker was Spiderman, but he also had the usual teenage insecurities and worries. The Thing might be the strongest member of the Fantastic Four, but he was a sensitive soul. And the X-Men saga stretched the narrative to include questions of acceptance and tolerance.

Undoubtedly that’s why they’ve caught the fancy of Hollywood.

Just the same, if someone asks me whether I’ve seen the latest movie, I’m content to say, “I read the book.”