Generic Respect, by Dennis O’Neil
Don’t bother putting on airs, Messrs. Man (Super and Bat); you’re nothing special, not any more. These days, you’re just two more members of a rather large club that includes cowboys, cops, private eyes, combat soldiers and guys who fly space ships to other planets and solar systems and galaxies. Serial killers who slice and dice sexy teenagers are in the club, too. And critters that are normally harmless but mutate into gigantic sociopaths.
While you weren’t looking, you’ve become a genre.
Of course, if we want to get sniffy about definitions, you always were, in comic books. Almost from the beginning, here were cowboy comics and detective (or Detective) comics, and monsters and spaceship jockeys were early joiners, too. And you guys, the superheroes. You were the most popular and emblematic, of the comic book good guys, but you had peers.
Movies were another matter. Oh, you guys showed up on what was called The Silver Screen pretty early in the form of serials or, if we want to get fancy, chapter plays intended for the Saturday matinees, which were populated by kids who, in my memory, made a hell of a lot of racket. Even there, you were a bit of an aberration, outnumbered by the gumshoes and gunfighters, and not deserving, apparently, of cinematic and dramatic niceties. And, while there were cowboys and sleuths aplenty in the movies made for after-dark showings to the kids’ moms and dads, no superheroes ever made the leap to, ahem, serious entertainments.
Comic book artist Rick Burchett was born in 1952. He originally worked in advertising in St. Louis, Missouri but was always a comic book fan. In the early 1980s he switched to comics professionally and worked for several smaller comic book publishers before joining DC. 
Book of the Week: The All-New Atom #21 — Anyone wondering whether this title would keep being a must-read after Gail Simone stepped aside as writer and Rick Remender took the reins can go ahead and relax. The All-New Atom is better than ever in this issue, which takes the classic archetypal conflict of man vs. himself and gives it one heck of a twist.
— Brian K. Vaughan and Eduardo Risso taking on the most famous mutant is pretty well guaranteed to be a quality read. And while this issue is far from mind-blowing, it’s a far superior story of Wolverine getting his memory back than anything we’ve seen in 
In days of yore – my yore anyway – I briefly wondered if my particular literary backwater, the writing of comic books, would be properly remembered. It seemed to me that young snots such as myself were getting attention – interviews and the like – and the guys who were around at the beginning, the guys who virtually created the form, were pretty much ignored, although many of them were still alive and frisky.
When we last looked in on our intrepid, tv-watching old guy – that’d be me – he was waiting to treat himself to the premiere of Knight Rider, a remake of an old series.
Once again, the other day, I found myself wishing I’d spent less of my youth with, as folks might have said back then, my nose buried in some silly book and more time in the company of hammers, saws, wrenches. You know. Manly stuff. Tools. The reason was, something in the bathtub wasn’t working and we had to call the plumber, who is one of the nicest guys I know and might be the best plumber in Rockland County New York, and we had a chat while the water was running to accomplish something arcane and, well, plumberish. If I hadn’t wasted my youth, maybe I could tell you what.
As we 
