There’s an adage about not meeting your heroes. The gist is, Be careful…they may disappoint. I met two of my childhood heroes this past week, and, contrary to the cliché, it wasn’t disappointing at all. It was, in fact, pretty wonderful.

Last weekend was San Diego’s annual Comic-Con, the amazing and mind-blowing convention celebrating all things related to comics (and movies and TV and games, too, but it was the comics that held my fascination). It was a grab bag of events, and most days were spent running back and forth from one end of the convention center to the other. Carol Fitzgerald who founded GraphicNovelReporter.com was my partner in crime, and I think we both managed to build up some incredible calf muscles on our daily convention runs. Next year she is vowing to bring a pedometer. But I digress.

One of the most important panel discussions for me to attend was an interview with comics legend Paul Levitz, former VP of DC Comics, who spent a good chunk of the ’70s and '80s working on some of the comics that inspired my love for the format, including the Justice Society of America, the Huntress (a character he created), and, of course, the most important of all: The Legion of Super-Heroes. Paul is always humble and gracious seeming, and that was again the case here as he covered the breadth of his comics career, from the obscure to the famous. At one point, he casually mentioned an encounter he had with a fan. The grown fanboy remarked, “Thank you for my childhood.” Paul laughed and wondered if he was worthy, but I can relate. These things --- be they comics or books or shows or movies --- that make an indelible mark on your psyche at a young age stay with you, burned on your brain almost, throughout your life. You will always remember them with waves of nostalgia and maybe even longing, but hopefully also with great joy. That’s how I felt when I heard Paul speak. (He was interviewed in this panel by Geoff Johns, who, after his years of scripting some of the biggest DC books ever printed, will no doubt be thanked for many people’s childhoods too somewhere down the road.)

Another favorite panel was one focused on Berkeley Breathed, the creator of the Bloom County comic strip, which ran throughout the '80s and earned Breathed a Pulitzer Prize. Breathed spoke to a gigantic and packed room and then mentioned that not only was this his first Comic-Con ever, but he had resisted reprinting his strips in book form because he couldn’t imagine he had any fans of the series left. We all had to laugh at that. I especially did because probably my greatest treasure from this year’s Comic-Con was my signed copy of Volume Two of the Complete Bloom County from IDW. The book is filled with Breathed’s recollections of creating these strips --- strips that I can vividly remember reading in the newspaper in the morning before heading off to grade school (and later, high school).