There is a nice potted history of comics at http://www.tfaoi.com/cm/5cm/5cm11.pdf
Have a quick read at the sections referring to the seventies and eighties. The comics I read then were intelligent, well-written, the heroes didn’t always save the day and even when they did they didn’t go home to a nice hot bath and a martini feeling good about themselves. Have a look at the tortured characters in Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ if you want a great example of a comic book punching well above its weight.

Or were you simply being facetious?

jb says: There might have been some facetiousness in there, Jim. I couldn’t swear there wasn’t. But my main problem was the usual one, spouting off about something of which I know little. I’ll go visit the website you mention; see if I can drag myself up to speed.

I don’t have any heroes myself but–and this probably says more about me than I’d care to share–the only living celebrity that I would be excited to meet would be William Shatner, maybe because he takes himself about as seriously as everyone else does.

jb says: Hi Shawn. Danny Kaye and Jesus have both checked out, I heard. But William Shatner, now, there’s a name to conjure with. Was he the one who played Captain Kirk’s voice and once (or perhaps more than once) figured in an episode of Columbo?

If so, this is for you:

jb says: Hi Jim, Good to see you here. I thought they were all the same guy, superheroes. Sometimes he’s blue and sometimes he’s red (or black, or name your own colour); but he’s there as an assurance of protection and redemption for the little people of the world and he (or she) appears in different colours and different guises to fill a kind of fashionable gap of the time. Before we got the comics and a parody of literacy he would turn up as Jesus or the Bhudda or the Prophet, wearing, in each case, different attire, but always bearing the same message.