The Voodoo Mad

I remember passing some of the school day secretly writing my own comic book stories. I always preferred the DC superheroes to Marvel’s and would write stories involving Superman, Batman and Robin, and John Jones, AKA the Martian Manhunter and one of the original members of The Justice League of America. Some of my stories were elaborate and ran more than ten handwritten pages. I wish I still had them but like so many childhood artifacts, they’re gone forever.

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One time I became too interested in my Mad paperback and failed to notice that my teacher, a nun tall enough to have played guard for the Warriors, had quietly come up from behind me. We were in religion class and were supposed to be writing questions and answers from the Baltimore Catechism. (We were always supposed to write the question along with the answer.)

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???????????????????????? ???????? Why did God make you?

?God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.

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?When sister saw that I was reading The Voodoo Mad, she almost fainted. Sister stared at me like I was Linda Blair in The Exorcist when her head was spinning around like a basketball on the fingertip of a Harlem Globetrotter.? She confiscated my The Voodoo Mad, called my mother, and told me I needed to be the first in line for confession on Saturday afternoon. That was the extent of my punishment, which surprised me. I had feared that I was going to get a real body slam by sister, like Bruno Sammartino would do to the bad guys on Saturday morning TV wrestling.