The Wall Street Journal documents the astonishing sales that follow every appearance of comics’ foremost new hero:  Barack Obama. (Thanks to Doug Hackney for apprising me of this.)

No, I don’t like this sort of hero worship. To quote another hero, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Without oversight and skepticism, that great power is too often used irresponsibly. And yes, there is enormous opportunism going on here (it would be hard to believe that other publishers didn’t take notice when Marvel grossed more than a million bucks on Obama’s appearance in “Spider-Man.”).

But there are two other factors going on as well:  1) Obama benefits by comparison with the quote-unquote president he succeeded; and 2) Obama is a self-confessed comics fan, especially of Spider-Man. (Which helps explain how he got so many votes. Just counting everyone at Comic Con, that’s more votes than several key Western states combined.)

I just came back from two weeks in my original stomping grounds:  southern New Jersey, the area east of Philadelphia stretching down to become a peninsular shadow of Delaware. It’s an area of rivers, beaches, swamps, rednecks, amusement parks, many many trees, and high weirdness. (Like the famously supernatural Indian Cabin Road, which you can read about here and here — newly haunted by an endearingly odd friend of mine who moved there.)  It’s where I spent my salad days.

Much remains as it was when I left 21 years ago. I went fishing (to no avail) on the Great Bay, shooting out in the woods (four pistols:  a 357, a 45, a 9mm and a 22, as well as my late father’s double-ought thirty side-by-side shotgun), canoeing, riding rides on the boardwalk and jumping waves in Ocean City, and of course spent lots and lots of time eating clams. (Just to pass this along:  The perfect nutritionally balanced meal is four dozen clams and a beer. You heard it here first.)

But of course much has changed since I left 21 years ago, and since my boyhood. Rich Roesberg, a friend and reader of this blog, sent some photos of lost landmarks of the area that I thought I’d share.

This photo shows the infamous Garden State Park fire of 1977. As you can imagine, this was huge news at the time. (I was 15.)  Garden State Park was a horse-racing track. The success of this attraction pretty much created the boom in surrounding Cherry Hill, giving birth to the Cherry Hill Mall, the Latin Casino (which booked A-level stars like Sinatra and Liberace), and numerous other developments. When I was a kid, Cherry Hill Mall was like Xanadu. I hate malls (now), but at the time I couldn’t wait to see what wonders awaited me at Cherry Hill Mall. It’s about 45 minutes from the house I grew up in, but it may as well have been halfway across the globe. The fire above polished off the Garden State Park; it was competition from casinos that pretty much ended race time at the Atlantic City Race Course.

This is Olga’s Diner, which was on the Marlton Circle, one of those nexus points between Philadelphia and South Jersey. I just learned that it closed in 2008. When I was a young man, I had business that often brought me to this area (either selling comic books in Philadelphia, or delivering auto parts in the area later on). I can’t tell you how many times I ate at this diner. Last month when I was driving my wife and kids down from JFK for our vacation, I looked everywhere for a family-style diner like this at which to eat. I couldn’t find one. Finally we settled on an Applebee’s, one of the ubiquitous casual-dining chains that advertise constantly on TV. I’m still scrubbing the sodium from my teeth.

Yes, this is one of the famed Steel Pier diving horses shown in action. I got to see this act when I was a kid. The horse was trained to dive 60 feet through the air, a beautiful young woman on its back, landing in 10 feet of water. Cruel? Yes. (There were accusations that the horse didn’t “dive,” but fell when a trapdoor was sprung.) But it was an amazing thing to see, back when we were less enlightened about animal welfare. (I remember liking the young woman, too.) The act ended for good when Resorts International casino bought the pier.

This is Zipperhead, on South Street in Philadelphia. Not sure why this was included as a lost treasure in Rich’s email; last I checked — Rich in tow, last summer — Zipperhead was still there. And Lord knows I hope it is indeed still there. Zipperhead is where my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I would get some of our punk and new-wave accoutrements.  (She was punk; I was new wave. I don’t think there’s anything remotely punk about her any more, and given that my music of choice now serves as easy listening at airport terminals, I am feeling very old wave. When I went to see the Psychedelic Furs last month, I found myself wondering “What are all these fat old guys doing here?” Then I realized.) If Zipperhead is now a Polo store, someone must mount a charge.

The Sweetwater Casino was a somewhat-upscale (for the area) restaurant deep in the heart of the Pine Barrens where I grew up. It hugged the Mullica River that I grew up canoeing. I remember never wanting to go there as a kid because I didn’t want to eat anything on the menu. (My tastes have changed.) My parents would order something called “Clams Casino,” which I recall seeming especially repellent. The restaurant burned down in 2008, but the owners just re-opened the deck, and plans are underway to rebuild the restaurant. When my wife and I were first dating, my future mother-in-law insisted that we go to the Sweetwater Casino. I have no idea why. (At the time I thought she just wanted to see me spend some money on her daughter. In retrospect, I was pretty cheap.) She said that all we had to do was mention her father’s name (my kids’ now-great-grandfather) and we would get superior service. He was a local bank executive and a founder of another well-known local business and evidently a great patron of the Sweetwater Casino. So we went to the Sweetwater Casino and mentioned that name and got… blank stares. And then when we got inside I had to deal with the menu prices.

No, this isn’t rural Arkansas today. This is Pennsauken Mart, in Pennsauken, New Jersey. (The similarity in terrain and culture between Arkansas and where I grew up is striking. Except Bill Clinton would not have been corrupt enough for the Atlantic City area.) Yes, Pennsauken Mart was a grimy indoor flea market, but to a kid on the outlook for cheap back-issue comics, this was a mecca. (Berlin Farmers Market was even better.) The Mart was razed in January 2006 to give way to a redevelopment project including condominiums, shopping and, I’ll bet, paved parking.

Not everything that is gone should be viewed with regret. And so, finally, we have Ideal. Ideal was a woman’s clothier located in Hammonton, NJ for more than 50 years in the markedly unstylish quonset hut shown. I remember my mother and sister going there and my insisting on waiting (endlessly) in the car, comic books at the ready. (Whenever my 6-year-old boy doesn’t want to go to this sort of place, I do understand, believe me.)  So what hold could a woman’s clothing store possibly have on my memories?  It wasn’t the fashion, it wasn’t the location, it wasn’t the store, it wasn’t anything that ever happened to me there. It was their jingle. Anyone who ever heard it never forgot it — and I’m convinced it was the secret to their 50 years’ success in business. The song was everywhere, all the time, on television and radio. Take whatever pop song you think was overplayed, and then multiply by the nth degree, and you have the play record of the Ideal jingle. Which I can quote from memory:

“If you’ve got a passion for fashion

And you’ve got a craving for savings

Take the wheel

Of your automobile

And swing on down to… IDEAL!”

Thank God this place finally closed in 2008. Now women in the area are safe to be more fashionable (truly fashionable), and everyone is safe from this disturbing brain-infesting jingle. Some time hence, when the last song of my life goes through my brain as it shuts down, that song won’t be  “Hey Jude,” even with its million la-la-la’s, or “The Star Spangled Banner,” or even “Happy Birthday.” No, I’ll be mentally humming “If you’ve got a passion for fashion….” And I’ll smile knowing it’s no longer there, and no little boy is waiting impatiently in the car outside.

A little tip that I thought I’d share with other parents of small children. Sometimes the best response to a child’s complaint is this:  “Knock it off.” I have found this to be useful. (Even today.)

The classic musical, updated for now.

(Thanks to Mark Chaet for making me aware of this.)

Two stories about how to tarnish your image:

#1.

This afternoon I took my three kids down to South Coast Plaza for an event marking the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. The newspaper promised “a Lunar Rover and Apollo 10 space suit along with a Sojourner Mars Rover will be on exhibit.” Well… maybe. Neither the suit nor the Mars Rover looked like they had ever seen action, and they were conspicuously unguarded on a raised platform behind velvet ropes. (As we approached, one man had already stepped over the stanchion to have his picture taken with the items. I doubt Smithsonian-level relics would be left so untended.) And the Lunar Rover looked like a replica — big plastic tires with no wear on them, and the body of the vehicle emblazoned ever in an odious manner with the logo of Omega, the sponsor. Quelle dommage. This was our only scheduling opportunity to note a signal anniversary, a giant step that makind made and should have kept making further and further out, and this is how we spent it:  at a mall, looking at ads for a watch slapped all over a fake lunar vehicle. It was a sad reminder of how far we’ve gone in 40 years — in reverse. I now think less of Omega, less of South Coast Plaza for false advertisement, and certainly less for the nation as a whole for letting our space program sink into the tarn.

#2.

While there, I decided to visit the Montblanc store. I was out of ink cartridges for my fountain pens, and when my younger son and I visited the Montblanc store in Glendale on Friday we discovered that it had closed, in what I thought was another sign of the economic recession. The four of us located the Montblanc store in South Coast Plaza. I told the sales clerk, a man probably in his late 20’s, that I needed some ink cartridges for my fountain pens, and bought a box (ten packs of six). I took the opportunity to bring up the closure of the Montblanc store at the Glendale Glendale Galleria.

Clerk:  “That store was actually doing well. The company closed it because they didn’t want to serve a lower class of customer.”

Me:  “I bought three fountain pens there, an injector, two ink wells, and lots of cartridges. I’m sorry people like me weren’t classy enough.”

Now, mind you, that’s about $1500 in pens and supplies. The clerk did his best at backpedaling, blaming the closure now on the mysterious ways of corporate owners in Germany unmotivated by strong sales to obviously valued clients like me. But by then I was looking to go some place where the lower class are more welcome.

And by the way, what precisely would be wrong with looking at an attractive young woman? (Other than getting yourself compared to more foolish members of your profession.)

Given what’s been going on with the tail end of this political season — with Nevada’s Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford admitting to chasing tail — I understand the eagerness of people like Matt Drudge to find and transmit what appears to be an image of President Obama admiring a 17-year-old’s back side. Like so:

But now watch the full video — in, not out, of context — and you’ll see that Obama was helping a woman on the steps. Helping, not having. Will there be a retraction coming from Drudge or the New York Post? No. Will this ridiculous image show up in some campaign, or provide lore for the right-wing fringe? (“Sure, the mainstream media come down on the GOP for sexual impropriety, but they didn’t do anything when it was their president.”) You bet.

So here’s DC Comics’ bold new idea:  a return to Sunday newspaper-style comics.

It’s called “Wednesday Comics,” and the uncleverness of that title presages the bad idea behind all this:  recapturing an era that reached its peak 50 years ago or more. Yes, every Wednesday for 12 weeks, DC is putting out a folded newspaper-print section of comics.  Note to DC:  There have been a few developments in the years since newspaper adventure strips were big. We call them television, and video games, and the internet. While you may find some geezer somewhere willing to wait an entire week to get one more page of story, you won’t find a large clan of people clamoring for a return to slow. My kids sneered at your first Wednesday Comics release today — “Why would anybody want that?” asked my 11-year-old daughter the avid comic-book reader — and I pointedly did not plunk down $3.99 for a series of one-page stories that will conclude months from now as we enter the holiday season. I can barely stay off my iPhone for 15 minutes and you think I’m going to spend 12 weeks crawling through a comic book one page at a time?

Meanwhile, I got my weekly email newsletter from your rivals at Marvel today. They always focus on comics that you can now read online for a small subscription fee (a model that works well; I have friends who are subscribers and who love it). You do that with that internet thing you may have heard of. Do you have anyone under the age of Methusaleh working for you? If you do, I have to think they’ve been huffing too much funnybook ink, because the idea of launching weekly one-page comics strips at the precise moment when comics strips and their host newspapers are dying is, well, dopey.

I’m sorry for your lame packaging model, because the contents look great. Paul Pope doing “Adam Strange,” “Hawkman” by Kyle Baker, “Sgt. Rock” illustrated by Joe Kubert, and especially “Metamorpho,” by the inspired pairing of Neil Gaiman with artist Michael Allred. But when I read the list of the artists and writers involved, I just got more annoyed. Why not print these as eight 24-page comics, with two stories in each? I have little doubt that around the end of the year you’ll repackage these comicitos into a hardback or two, and for a price that’s competitive with spending $48 to get all this in a format and timeframe I just don’t want. In the meantime, I would remind the comics shops that get stuck with these that newsprint is recyclable.

I thought we had finally reached the peak of the Michael Jackson hagiography when Motown founder Berry Gordy called Michael Jackson “the greatest entertainer who ever lived.”

But that was too soon. Because later Al Sharpton claimed that Barack Obama (somehow) got elected because of Michael Jackson. Which threw the Jackson legacy into an even greater hyperbolic orbit.

But that was nothing compared to this:  I then heard a man interviewed on the radio who said, “Some day people will look back and wish they could have known what it was like to be alive at the same time as Michael Jackson.” Kind of like… Jesus. Or the Buddha.

This shouldn’t need saying, but here goes:  Michael Jackson was a talented singer, and songwriter, and dancer. That’s it; no more. He was also someone with an unnatural interest in children and a freakish desire for more and more radical plastic surgery designed to erase any trace of his facial heritage. And both elements — the career success, the personal carnival — form the Janus-like face of his celebrity.

Our culture’s current fascination with him is similar to the morbid interest many of us held for Howard Hughes in the 1970’s. After Hughes’ death, I remember reading every article I could find for more information about the reclusive behavior, the unclipped fingernails and toenails, the carefully stored and labeled rows of mason jars of urine. For a big Halloween party of that period, I went as Howard Hughes, taking care to paint broken hypodermic needles onto my arms and to carry a box of Kleenex around so I could dust every surface.

Whatever Michael Jackson’s musical triumphs, he looms large in our collective subconscious because we cannot stop wondering just what is wrong with someone with that much talent and money.

I just got this email from a Friend:

Subject: Hi! Sorry!  I just realized I don't think I sent this to you.  Silliness.

Hi, forgive me; but now I feel I have to better explain. Conor said, the other day,
he wanted a fan page; that'd help him then to update, since fb was working for him.
Then he called himself introverted. (Ha ha, as in as if!) And, I was feeling silly
having sent friends to him because he hadn't said a word there; I'd wanted to send
others; so he could get aquainted w/ my old friends ..., but couldn't since he
hadn't said anything. Then, he finally said: avocado & tomatoes, & Stephanie typed
in something like onions & lemons? And some woman I don't know typed "Cilantro,
llimes, and other secret ingreds..." I didn't talk to him later that night, slept on
my massage table, as I love to; & he was at work when I woke & my heart was
pounding, in something other than happiness, for some reason. I deleted the
suggested friends, knowing the password ~ he asked if I'd update his status for
him... And, I'd only suggested to a few as there's a limit on the suggest thing; he
might relate to ones I'd yet to send even better? Then I thought to set up the fan
page he spoke of; & only in doing that, did it begin to make any sense to me. Yet, I
think he'd like to have stayed friends w/ any of you too. And he's obviously shy in
some way; so do take the initiative if you like. (This woman that typed the
inappropriate, suggestive comment, that he deleted; Conor hasn't ever met. She'd
applied for a job w/ him sometime ago & then found him him on fb.) I just absolutely
did not mean to in any way offend any of you, especially those of you that have met
Conor.! He's happy to have a fan page; but he might enjoy regular fb too still. And
thank you for becoming a fan of his if you did!
And, she's still his friend, the 1 he hasn't ever met, Ann T., that wrote that
comment that struck me strange! It wasn't jealousy either.

I feel bad I disconnected like though.

No, this doesn’t make any sense to me either.

I don’t even recognize this Facebook “Friend.” (But I suspect she was in a play of mine in 1993. Which would mean that 16 years ago was the last time I spoke with her.)

I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about in this email, or why it would matter in any way. But given the way she seems so worked up about something so trivial, I’m content to continue our 16-years-and-counting of non-communication.