Tom Sawyer. Huck Finn. Oliver Twist. The Artful Dodger. Tarzan. Rhett Butler. Scarlett O’Hara. Peter Pan. Alice in Wonderland. To some of us, characters like these, and their many, many young siblings, are more real than the people we work with, go to school with or meet on the street. Their images are indelibly stamped on our hearts, so well did their creators fashion them. They are alive for us.
All of these characters have been revisited, again and again, by authors not their creators. That’s because they are so powerful. Because we want more adventures with them. Because they fire the imaginations of even the most imaginative people… and, yes, sometimes the imaginations of the dullest of people as well.
I daresay Captain America is such a character now, for millions of Americans. Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in the pages of Timely Comics (now Marvel Entertainment, thank you very much!) during the early days of World War II, Cap was re-engineered by Kirby and Stan Lee beginning in 1963. Starting as just another patriotic-themed Nazi-buster, in the 1960s, Steve Rogers became a stranger in a strange land, Rip Van Winkle, Buck Rogers, a man who goes to sleep and wakes up in a time not his own. Of course, in 1963 he’d been asleep for only 18 years. Now, since World War II can’t move in time, the movie version of Cap awakes over 65 years in the future, still young, still ready for battle.
I guess the only thing cooler than being interviewed in the pages of one of your favorite magazines is being interviewed in one of your favorite magazines and having the cover art turn out to be this amazing image of Dr. Strange and Clea by Arthur Adams. My friend and sometimes-editor 
This week, some practical information, as opposed to my lofty, philosophical flights into the realms of high lit’rit’cher. (Which means I’m too tired to think, and am thus beginning to just dump the contents of my brain all over the place. I think it may be a sign of premature senility…)
I probably discovered Winter’s Tale in college. It was published my freshman year, and I spent at least an hour a day in the campus bookstore, which, back then, was a respectable establishment. Not only could customers browse the stacks of textbooks themselves, rather than waiting for the staff to fetch them (which meant you had your pick of the lowest-priced used copy), but it was also a well-stocked retail bookstore as well. About the size of my local BooksAMillion, and with about the same ratio of swag to books. No music, though. For music, you had to walk down the Student Union hallway to the Record Coop. (That’s two syllables, if you were wondering. And yes, we all pronounced it as though it held chickens instead of records.)