Comic heroes continue to live on

Superheroes are among us.

They knocked on our doors last night and said, “Trick or treat.”

They’re on our movie screens, and they pop up on television with regularity.

But I hate to break it to you: It was not always this way.

I met my first superhero at my friend Dan Cox’s house.

Dan’s father owned a grocery store in Gas City in those days. His earlier grocery in Portland was among the buildings destroyed in the Home Café explosion back in — I believe — 1950.

But by the time I was moving around the neighborhood — runny nose, dirty face and, in the summertime, bare feet — Cox’s Grocery in Portland was consigned to history, and Dan’s dad drove daily to Gas City to tend to his remaining store.

The commute couldn’t have been easy, but for Dan there were benefits to having a dad who owned a grocery store.

The dividends: Comic books.

Whenever the racks of comics were restocked, Dan’s dad took it upon himself to take a sample of each edition. And he brought them back to his son.

And to the entire neighborhood.

The Cox household in those days boasted a stack of comic books ranging from nine inches to 12 inches high. And because Dan’s dad took one of each, the collection was as eclectic as possible.

There were plenty of Disney comics, of course. But you could also find odd ball items like Baby Huey and Little Audrey and Little Lulu as well as things like Archie that were designed to satisfy what was known as the Comics Code.

Hard as it may be to believe, comic books — now the fodder for about 80 percent of the movies coming out of Hollywood — were under fire. A bunch of “horror comics” had rattled post-World War II parents, and in those days of Joe McCarthy such things were viewed as subversive.

No horror comics came back from Gas City with Dan’s dad.

But he brought the next best thing: Detective Comics. And those DC editions brought with them the first flood of superheroes: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Lantern, Flash and more.

For the neighborhood kids, this amounted to the richest library imaginable, for the thing about comics is that you don’t just read them once. You read them over and over again, until the pages are curled and smeared with the grease of whatever snack food you shouldn’t have been eating because it would spoil your dinner.

A rainy weekend or summer afternoon would turn the Cox family living room into a comic equivalent of the Library of Congress. That was especially true when there was a new delivery and fresh, crisp, copies smelling of cheap newsprint and ink arrived to be devoured.

It never seemed to matter that the stories weren’t very good or that the artwork could be pretty mediocre. As kids, we were enthralled.

Everyone had his or her favorites. I found Superman kind of boring, but Batman was cool. The Flash and Green Lantern were curiosities but enjoyable.

And then Marvel arrived on the scene.

For me, those comics first showed up at Hanlin’s Drugstore in downtown Portland. They weren’t part of Dan’s father’s inventory. And they were different from DC Comics.

They were quirky. They embedded jokes in the dialogue. They didn’t take themselves too seriously. And instead of superhuman, they seemed a little more human.

Peter Parker was Spiderman, but he was still a teenager full of self-doubt and self-consciousness. The Hulk could move mountains, but he was a Jekyll-Hyde sort of guy. The Thing, a member of the Fantastic Four, looked like a pile of boulders but always managed to get off witty one-liners in the little speech balloon above his head.

And the remarkable thing is that most of those characters came to our door last night, saying, “Trick or treat.”

Spiderman was there; he’s always there. And Batman and the Hulk and Wonder Woman and most of the rest.

Maybe, in the end, what made them super is that we can’t let those childhood stories go. There was something about them that made them worth hanging onto.