There is no dramatic departure for The Panther here – just a “hey, see you later, dude” sort of thing going on – but that’s just to get him out of the way for the big soap opera of Mr. America being faced with everyone who ever left him – whether by death or whim. If The Panther knew that his taking off for a few minutes – probably to get a soda and pack of smokes, maybe some potato chips or a snack pie – would cause such a mental breakdown for Mr. America, would he have done it? Would he instead have just ordered out?

I mean, just last issue, he saw his old partner The Eagle for no reason I understand, surely that was an indicator that Mr. America was plummeting down the abyss …

Given the sense of abandonment and danger in this issue, it shouldn’t seem too surprising that my parents were going through a separation at the time, but I actually don’t think that had much to do with the storytelling here. I think I just loved over-the-top drama and the kind of histrionic over-reacting that comics – most particularly Marvel Comics – dealt in. Superheroes really are little more than soap opera for boys and that’s what I was latching onto here, and in other places. I was a little kid, though, so I didn’t really understand the intricacies of what leads to such emotional turmoil, even though some of them were very obviously going on in front of my eyes.

Boys love gossip, overwrought emotion, love and loss as much as any girl – they just prefer it with monsters and fights and things like that. Hence, superhero comics. If the dawn of the Marvel Age of comics meant anything – and by Marvel Age I mean “The Stan Lee Age” not “The Jack Kirby Age” – it was that the qualities of girlie comics were melded onto boys’ interests completely. At first, this might seem like an action to bring in the girls to the market, but it really wasn’t – it was to keep the boys fraught with interest. Stan Lee knew something about what keeps a man’s attention after boyhood is long gone – drama, just like the girls. Superheroes had already come to pass once, and it was an age without any significant depth to the action behind the crime stopping. Lee changed all that.

Hence, Mr. America #11.

Nothing much happens here physically of any importance – what’s at the center of the conflict is the guilt Mr. America seems to feel, the level to which he misses his friend and old partner, the bad father/son relationship between The Panther and The Skull … this is the glue that holds together the heists, the explosions, the battles. Even my 8-year-old developing creative brain got that – so much so that I could craft a half issue psychodrama and call it complete.

Let’s be blunt here – no one really loved Star Wars until their was a real love triangle and Darth Vader was Luke’s father. Until, that is, it became a soap opera with technical window dressing. People can obsess about light sabers all they want, but it’s the weepy stuff that keeps them paying attention. And so it became with superheroes. Even mine.