For a long time, I used the justification of the artist’s morgue. I had read that comic book artists kept files full of reference material of any physical objects that could work their way into stories they might have to draw. As a teenage aspirant of that vocation, I followed suit and compiled marker-labeled manila envelopes of clipped pictures of guns and cars and airplanes and animals and buildings and uniforms. I also had files designated, “Male Poses,” “Male Clothing,” “Female Poses” and “Female Clothing” (those last two being by FAR the most overstuffed envelopes).
Back in the days when I still lived with my parents, my files were primarily fed by what was known as “the Paper Shack.” The Paper Shack was a shed that sat on the property of the church that abutted my suburban cul-de-sac. It was the provenance of the Boy Scouts of America, a receptacle for paper recyclables that churchgoers and other local folk would drop off to be collected once a month and taken to the recycling center. This, of course, was in the pre-pick-up 1970s and early ‘80s, when recycling was a nutty novelty.
To me, The Paper Shack was a glorious treasure trove of free pulp, ripe for the pickin’ (it was also a place that I would go to make out with my 5th grade girlfriend, but that’s another, frankly secondary story).
The Paper Shack was about a hundred square foot, prefab corrugated white metal shed with a door that latched with a simple hook-and-eye lock. There was no floor, it sat on a bed of pebbles at the edge of the parking lot, within eyeshot of the rear entrance of the church. There was no lighting aside from what leaked in through the spaces in the metal and from the door, and after a good rain, whatever papers were on the ground were surely soaked. In the summer, it was stifling hot inside, with a musty odor that wasn’t altogether unpleasing. It was also a haven for bees, and more than once I walked out with a red bee-sting bump in addition to whatever magazines I happened to score that day.
The Paper Shack housed mostly newspapers, usually just the local rags, The Lancaster New Era (to which my parents subscribed) and the Intelligencer Journal. Papers from neighboring Harrisburg and Reading sometimes mixed in, as well as the odd Philadelphia Inquirer and every once in a while, a New York paper or two. The gold mine (as far as newspapers were concerned) was The Sunday New York Times. To me, living in what I later discovered was a “D market” for motion picture releases, the plethora of huge movie ads in the Times Arts & Leisure section was like a guidebook to a seemingly unattainable world of pop culture. At one time, an entire wall of my bedroom was papered with full-page Times movie ads (most for movies I hadn’t even seen). I think the first time I fantasized about moving to New York City was looking through the Sunday Times right there on a mountain of newspapers in the Paper Shack.
Of course, there was also the rest of the paper. While at the age of 12, I had little interest in New York politics, Travel & Leisure, the stock market or real estate, I did notice (as Woody Allen pointed out in MANHATTAN) that those lingerie ads were really erotic. A semi-obscured bra ad in the Sears Catalogue looked like a postcard picture of a Mennonite woman compared to a full-page ad of an underwear-clad supermodel shilling for Saks in the Times (Which in turn was nothing compared to when the Victoria’s Secret Catalogue made its way to the Paper Shack in the early ‘80s).
But even those newspapers paled next to actual magazines. As I dug through the mountains of paper, uncovering a big bundle of magazines was like hitting the jackpot. Again, usually, the stack would be disappointing, comprised of catalogues and a wad of boring mom-mags like Good Housekeeping or Redbook. Of the news magazines, I’d only take Newsweek, because I had a subscription to Time and the others didn’t have enough pop culture coverage (Sorry, US News and World Report). While People and US always made the cut, more general interest publications like Life and Reader’s Digest or supermarket tabloids like The National Enquirer would only come home with me if the pickings were otherwise slim or something on the cover grabbed me. Sports magazines, however, may as well have been used toilet paper.
The most recurrent worthwhile score was the fashion magazines. I was probably more aware of the differences between Bazaar, Vogue and Cosmopolitan than any other heterosexual twelve year-old boy in the world (or at least south central Pennsylvania). But this is the thing that I never understood about the stigma of being a guy looking at an issue of Elle: Fashion magazines are filled with photographs of beautiful women, often in clothing and poses as provocative as something out of a so-called “men’s magazine” (remember, it was an issue of Glamour that George Costanza’s mother caught him with in SEINFELD’s legendary masturbation episode, “The Contest”).
One of the pitfalls of being pop culture obsessed is that you tend to have an inordinate amount of celebrity crushes. Sure, almost everyone mentally compiles a short list of unobtainable famous folk they’d smooch (etc.) if they had the chance. But few people are so pathetic as to actually clip pictures of them out of magazines. As someone who fell prey to the easy to navigate world of mainstream sex symbols—Diahann Carroll of JULIA was my first crush, according to my mother—I was one of the millions of males in 1976 that owned the iconic Pro-Arts Farrah Fawcett-Majors (as she was known at that time) swimsuit poster. But it didn’t stop there. I plopped down money at Spencer Gifts and through mail order ads in comic books for 2 x 3’ odes to Cheryl Tiegs, Susan Anton, Tanya Roberts and about five more different Farrah posters (my favorite being a 6' behemoth of Charlie’s feathered-tressed Angel straddling a bicycle in front of a sparkly blue background). I owned two, count ‘em, TWO posters of Loni Anderson, the only possible explanation being that it was 1980, my taste in women was still maturing and she had inordinately large breasts.
Naturally, there was a Lynda Carter Wonder Woman poster, which served as a crossover for my adulation of both sexy ladies and superheroes. And I even scored a huge poster of Blondie’s Debbie Harry in white go-go boots and shorts, clutching her naked breasts (not sure whatever happened to that one, it’s probably worth a fortune today).
My files of magazine-clipped pictures of women fell into two primary categories whose distinction is only pertinent to pop culture nerds: Famous and Not Famous. And while there were certainly images of unknown models that tweaked my hormones, they rarely delivered the impact of women from TV or the movies. In addition to the usual suspects, there were those sadly neglected actresses who were never immortalized by poster companies: Jan Smithers (Bailey from WKRP in CINCINNATI, the MaryAnn to Loni Anderson’s Ginger); MORK & MINDY’s Pam Dawber; Valerie Bertinelli, before she was sullied by Eddie Van Halen; Joanna Cameron (Ohhh Mighty ISIS) and the list goes on…
This is not to say that I had no interest in naked ladies. I certainly did. But in all the years of Paper Shack rummaging, there were only a handful of strikes that yielded that particular vein of gold known as the “dirty magazine.” When it DID happen, it was like stumbling across a Brinks truck with the door hanging open.
The women in those more genial publications were presented more along the lines of art to appreciate rather than pieces of meat to fuck. And they didn’t show the vag.’
So to my still forming tweenage id, sex was more mystical than dirty. Penthouse was the first time I’d ever gotten a bird’s eye (so to speak) view of the vagina. Hell, even in close-up! And then there was Penthouse Forum and Xaviera “The Happy Hooker” Hollander’s “advice” column, in which “readers” wrote in to share their erotic adventures, providing me with some serious “reading” material for frequent treks to the bathroom. But even Penthouse didn’t prepare me for the one time I came across a bag containing some even more hardcore stuff, ala Hustler, Club or Gallery. For the first time, I saw what anti-pornography feminists meant when they called such material violence against women. Aside from shots of genitalia so close up as to seem like gynecological textbook illustrations, the overall tone belied a sense of resentment towards women that I just didn’t like.
But whether I was foraging a Penthouse or a Newsweek, the omnipresent danger of being caught was the same. The optimum time to hit the Paper Shack was a weekday afternoon around dinnertime, when the church was usually completely vacant. The pastor, his staff and the groundskeeper had left for the day, so the coast was usually clear—but not always. As I’d dig through the paper bags and twined bundles, there was nothing worse than the crunching sound of a car pulling into the gravelly church lot. I would quickly grab my ill-gotten gains, stash the pile somewhere in the back for later retrieval and nonchalantly exit the shed as if I were simply dropping off something myself. The fact that I was usually covered in sweat and newsprint may have tipped off some of the more astute recyclers, but in retrospect, they probably didn’t care that some teenage dork was stealing newspapers from the recycling.
Still, the fear was strong, and so I decided I needed a lookout...
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Excerpted from the forthcoming book
COLLECTOR'S EDITION: CONFESSIONS OF A POP CULTURE OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE
by and © Karl Heitmueller, Jr.
, you don’t start with “You're going to need a bigger boat,” you use something like “I don’t need this working class hero crap,” then build with ”Okay, so we drink to our legs!” followed by “For that, you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing” and “Smile, you son of a bitch!” The point is to say a line that’s somewhat vague, that sparks recognition, but not immediate identification and go from there. If a line mentions a character that will give the film away, it’s at the Actor’s discretion whether or not to say the name.
, here’s some 
Bronze Beauties, including a few that tie into the television series.
of a young Clark Kent donning the red, blue and yellow costume to help his Smallville classmates get out of jams such as rigged soapbox derbies and poorly-attended birthday parties. The character moved to ADVENTURE COMICS in 1946, eventually earning his own titular title in 1949. Over the years, Superboy aged into a teenager and his stories got bigger and more cosmic, no more so than when he met the 
from the 30th Century (in ADVENTURE #247 in 1958).
reboot eliminated Superboy from the mythos (having Clark first put on the costume as an adult), new 
s have been introduced into the DC Universe.
(the latest “definitive” origin of the Last Son of Krypton) was the original Superboy reintroduced into the canon. In a respectful nod to other media’s influence on the character, Johns incorporated elements from 
as well as 
into his version of the story, affording the decade-running TV show a level of respect not shared by most fanboys (due to its many liberties taken with the legend).
” version of the story in which Superman took longer than every other member of the JLA to appear (rather than inspiring them in the first place). And while I certainly have my beefs with the show, its portrayal of Clark Kent / the Blur / Superman (as of tonight, anyway) is not one of them. The writers stayed true to the spirit of the character, solidly embodied by Tom Welling. For that, I thank them.
of the late 1960s) and grabbed a comic book for me as an impulse on the way home from work one day in 1970.
#83 in 1962, created by Stan Lee with Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby as a mixture of Norse mythology and Superman (in the early years, 
to build one of comics’ most expansive (and at times befuddling) milieux.
(Nov. 1970)
by John Buscema & Joe Sinnott)
