Remembering Alvin

R.I.P. Alvin Schwartz. I plan on writing a proper remembrance of writer Alvin Schwartz soon, but in the interim I penned the above obituary for Sequential. As you'll see, Alvin was a creative force who spent his life making things or reading things. I sought him ought a couple of summers back when I read in a local paper that the Golden Age writer who created Bizarro lived an hours' drive from me.

I felt like a 16-year-old again. Bizarro Superman melted my brain when I was a kid, in part because the idea was so great (a mirror-image of old granite-jawed Supes) but also because it made you think. I mean, what was the opposite of Superman? A square planet called Htrae? I guess. But after reading a few stories my brain started to hurt. And I wasn't the only one. Chester Brown once told me that in Grade 8 he lent his buddy a pile of Bizarro comics and after he finished reading the last one he threw up. The mental strain of all that backwardness was just too much for his young mind to handle.

Anyways, I'll leave you with a portrait of Bizarro done by Toronto cartoonist John Martz a couple of years back for the Doug Wright Awards fundraising auction: