Faster Than a Speeding Adverb

By Ronnie Blair

As a boy in the 1960s, I enjoyed few things better than buying 12-cent comic books and immersing myself in the adventures of Spider-Man, Batman, the Flash and the Avengers. The crimefighting and universe-saving drew me in, but the cheap pulp-paper pages had other enticements as well: advertisements for X-ray glasses, Sea-Monkeys, and the Charles Atlas muscle-building method that would “make you a new man.”

The best feature of all, though, was the letters page, where comi...