Steve Englehart’s work is special to me.  I discovered him (indirectly) at the tender age of nine at the school book fair.  I went to a small private school with about a dozen other kids in my fourth grade class.  You’d think our book fairs would have been less spectacular than the ones in public school, but they were a hundred times more magical.  Perhaps it was the library, a parlor in an Eighteenth Century mansion and one of my favorite places on earth when I was little.  (I visited recently and saw that it had been gutted and turned into another classroom.  How traumatic to see your childhood refuge come to such a fate!)  Perhaps it was the lack of hovering adults, which my public school book fairs had possessed in abundance, telling me the books I wanted were too old for me, too focused on the sciences, too whatever. Whatever it was, the small, private school book fair was an event to me, and it was there, in 1974, that I found a Marvel Comics calendar featuring pictures of most of their now-iconic characters.  I had just started reading comic books, and I knew none of these colorful personages save Spider-Man, who after all had his own cartoon still running on weekday mornings.   Continue reading →