March 1985. I put my birthday money into two purchases: a paperback copy of The Hobbit (so I could stop taking the one from the school library over and over) and TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game. The original yellow-box edition. I had only really gotten into comic books in any meaningful way the year before, as Star Wars faded from view after the third movie (with no eminent prospect of more), and I was already well-versed in Dungeons & Dragons and Star Frontiers, so to have a full-on role-playing game for Marvel stuff? Count me in.
The really attractive thing about it was that it offered a much more flexible mechanic than the other RPGs. You could actually run a more D&D-style setting, or a more Star Frontiers-type setting, because it’s comic books – so you have to have all the elements of fantasy and sci-fi and magic and all sorts of stuff. It was more than a game, it was an organizational framework for my own creative impulses. And it let me create my own characters – naturally, the most horrifyingly awful Mary Sue creations imaginable, as befits a frustrated 13 year old gifted kid – and actually write about them. Badly, and usually more a matter of assembling things cribbed wholesale from that month’s comics or TV reruns or what have you, but you have to start somewhere.
Thing is, though, I became trapped by the system. I had to make things work in the framework of the rules, or find some loophole that would let me bend the rules, because I couldn’t just go off and make up whatever I wanted. It had to make sense, it had to fit the system, and I think buried deep in there is the fullest expression of my Enneagram 6-ness, because I had a lot more flexibility of imagination when I wanted the game and was privy to some of how it worked but hadn’t actually purchased it yet.
In retrospect, I think that may be how I gravitated to sports so readily after high school. Sports have rules, and while their interpretation may be cause to cast aspersion on a ref’s visual acuity and carnal knowledge of sheep, they are pretty reliable – a touchdown is always six points, a free throw is always one, and a ball that goes over the fence on the fly is always a home run. You have statistics and can pretty reliably gauge one player against another, one team against another. And while I rarely if ever actually played any of these RPGs with anyone else – I can’t think of a single gaming session with MSH that ever occurred with more than two people involved – sports were something that allowed, nay demanded a communal experience. Thus my enthusiasm for going off to college, where everyone would be attending football (except there wasn’t any) or basketball (except few people actually showed up) or baseball (except even fewer people showed up).
But back to MSH. At one point, there was a canonical reference book, the Ultimate Powers Book, which contained every single documented super-power in the Marvel Universe and how it worked in the game. And I. Wanted. It. But with no dedicated gaming store anywhere in the Birmingham area, it was impossible to find at a time when I actually had cash money in my pocket. My parents certainly weren’t going to buy it for me, not in a world where the Baptists had thrown Dungeons & Dragons into the same Satanic pig-pile as heavy metal and horror movies and feminists and all the other stuff that suddenly becameHorriBadAwful after 1980.
And the thing is, for twenty years that book haunted my dreams. One of my most common recurring dreams was that I found it somewhere and was unable to buy it, or lost it again, or couldn’t read what was in it, or some such – probably because at some unconscious level, I was thinking that somewhere there must be rules for this life that I could use to crack it if I could only get a chance to read and learn them. And that dream kept after me for literally two decades…until one day at Apple, in an idle moment surfing around in my office, I stumbled across the whole entire book online as a PDF. Which I downloaded and backed up in about six places, because it’s a rare thing that something comes back from the black hole. And then, the next year, they released an actual live-action Iron Man movie…and you know the rest.
I don’t know what the point of all this is, aside from maybe “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood”, but thirty-three years on, it’s nice to remember that liminal moment before I cracked the box, before the rules and processes were laid down, when everything was still protean potential. As spring returns in force, it’s good to believe that sort of thing is still possible.