Hibou

Two months ago. Two months since my last post on this timeline. My wife and I had just picked up my daughter from New Jersey (from Japan) and two months from when I (on this whim) decided to go on this history bending tour though Pennsylvania.. my home away from home for so many years! After the last tour of Centalia, PA. and after the tour of the remnants of the great St. Nicholas Breaker in Mahanoy, PA., I decided at the last minute to seek out the ghost of the great Huber Breaker in Ashley, PA. - which was just outside of Wilkes Barre, PA. Why this final destination? Well, this was the home of the historic BlueCoal and home of the sponsor that would lead to the success of The Shadow in the late 1930's and this picture was the first of the gateway to that region...

Maybe I shouldn't have cloaked this from the TVA after-all...

My timeline has been destroyed. I'm not sure where to restart this story... I thought going back to Pittsburgh, PA. would be the point but then I felt that I have to go back to where I last left my life at the last entry. The story surrounding my journey through Pennsylvania's coal cracking region in the north east. I can't believe I'm at a loss here. If there was ever a need for outside influence, it's here and now. Damn. This is about the point that I would involve the mechanism of 'Technical Difficulties'. RIP Robbie Robertson... a long time favorite of mine and I certainly didn't see this coming as well.

I picked up the pen like Hamilton... I wish. Rather, I'd like to make a deal with God at this point in my life. (Probably the best cover I've heard in a long time!)

Now this was weird (or was it?!) but this decision of mine to replace my son's NM98 happened to coincide with the opening week of PulpFest in Pittsburgh, PA. And this is where I need to deviate from the 'sacred timeline' in order to fully and accurately tell this story. Bear with me... Please.

So yes, if he had still been in possession of that X-Men #4 during that time, that would've been stolen as well. It was this year in late July that I had decided to repurchase yet another copy of New Mutants #98 featuring the first appearance of Deadpool as that's my son's favorite Marvel character... I decided upon that especially after hearing of the Deadpool 3 news and the feature of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine as I had mentioned here before! He had to have this book back again and we were both highly anticipating this movie. I kept him up-to-date- on all of the rumors and news regarding this movie that was shaping to be absolutely epic!

In order to do this correctly, I'm going to have to rewind the dreaded hands of time a bit further back than I had originally planned. I have to go back to the post where I talked about my son's copy of New Mutants #98 that I purchased for him, to replace the one that was stolen from him, decided to press it myself... submitted it to CGC and ultimately got a 9.4 on it. At the time, I thought it was a 9.0 book prior to pressing and I was really proud and happy to have been able to do that for him. Now if I remember correctly, that post kind of tied into the post regarding that copy of X-Men #4 and the first appearance of the Scarlet Witch. That story was one of my favorites to re-tell, to be honest. As it turns out, in a bizarre way, I saved that book in a way that I couldn't have imagined a couple of years ago. So last year, my son developed some health issues and was hospitalized for a couple of months. That was a very difficult time for all of us as we had to try to help him retain and maintain his apartment that he shared with his "friend" and roommate who, at the time, was unemployed. My wife and I did all we could to help him during these months and ultimately, my son got better and was able to return home... what we didn't realize at the time, was that for those couple of months that he was in the hospital and going through physical rehabilitation, pretty much everything that was of value to him, had been stolen. And that would include that CGC 9.4 copy of New Mutants 98.

And here we go...

... ... The last post of my life was made on this day at 2:40am on August 7th. I don't know what to write about anymore. (But I'll try) I could tell you every single little detail of every single little day from the point of this last journal entry to now, but what good would it do me? I've played around with timelines, I've revisited the past on numerous occasions... I've humored myself with this apparent "cat and mouse" game with the timekeepers I call the TVA... but then there's real life and the hell that it can bring to oneself. No. "Hell" is too convenient of a term to use here but unfortunately, it's the only word that comes to mind. What do I do now? Where do I go... what have I become? I'm not in a good place - that is about the only thing I'm sure of these days. I'm far from the same person I once was... trust me, there have been numerous times over the course of the past 2 months that I so wish I could actually be The Shadow from the Lamont Cranston Radio Days... able to appear anywhere, at anytime, undetected, in order to attempt to solve the latest and greatest mystery facing our hero and heroine, the lovely Margo Lane. As it is... that's all fun fiction though, that which has passed across the highways of time. From their ears to yours and to mine. Thankfully, I have a wonderful family and I actually do have a true to life Supergirl by my side even if she is currently 70 miles away to the west. And this Supergirl is my amazing daughter who conquered her studies in Japan just so she could join us for our darkest moment in time as a family. One month ago, my wife and I moved our daughter into her dorm for her final year at college... it was this moment here, when I told her that I couldn't have survived without her help and without her steel resolve... She's amazing. So, what is this about? What am I doing? I have an amazing family and my dearest friend Rob, I will have to lean on you for a while. I'm sorry... Sadly, you know all too well what this is about. I'm currently in the middle of a Hurricane. What the hell do I do?! I know I've come here before in order to save my life and is that where we're heading once again?! In the middle of a hurricane - what do you do?! Well... Sure, I guess that's a start, but for those that know me best... writing isn't going to end this. The only way to truly find closure with a matter such as this is to declare war and that's precisely what I've done... God help me. Beyond comics and beyond fundamental speculation - this is where I'm at. Yes, I've bought comics within these past couple of months and yes, I'm prepared to accelerate my interests! So, I'll start from where I left off on the early Monday morning from August of 2023, but do keep in mind... I'm ending this soon enough.

If I had only known.

To be continued….

Maybe I do.

I have no idea how to start this….

As I type this, it's 20 minutes before the day that is known as 9-11. The day when so many families suffered through so much devastating emotional loss... "a date which will live in infamy". I'm not suggesting that 9-11 has supplanted the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, rather I'm joining the two episodes. You see, my mind has been forever transformed over this past month. Tragedy is tragedy and who are any of us to dictate which experiences we should prioritize over any other. In the end, we all suffer... we all carry with us, huge emotional losses... and yet we desperately try to carry on. By any means necessary.

This was my first PulpFest and I can't believe it was only week ago. After we got back our family suffered an incredibly emotional loss. I can't write more but here are the pictures I took at what was a great experience for me. My first trip to Pittsburgh and I loved the city. DoubleTree at Cranberry, PA The Show Purchases Mars, PA

Last night I couldn't stop writing. I'm going to have to take a break for a while though while I work through some personal family matters.

The last stop I wanted to make, actually the last stop that I HAD to make, was a stop in Ashley, Pennsylvania... just outside of Wilkes-Barre. I think it was right about here that I was no longer driving. Rather, The Shadow was guiding me!

When we got to the center of Mahanoy City, PA... I found the dedication and told my wife and my daughter that I had to get a picture of this. My daughter responded with what will now forever be a humorous comment. She said, "What are we doing? We just spent 2 hours in Santa Claus Coal Town." I will always laugh at this... So, to be fair - she was intrigued and very interested in Centralia but she missed the transition where Centralia became Mahanoy City. It's easy to miss if you're half asleep, which she kind of was. And so I took a bunch of pictures here but later my wife had to make this comment to me... she said that she had never taken a more bizarre picture of me before, as I was standing there smiling next to a someone who was hung! I'm sorry - I can't explain it either! I think I was just overwhelmed with this historical trail that I had just spontaneously set up for myself. The Molly Maguires have a rich history and I would encourage everyone to look it up. It's basically the beginning of the labor movement in the US. There's much to cover here if you ever decide to come to this historical part of Pennsylvania! https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/feature-articles/legend-molly-maguires

Something happened to me here. I parked the car and told my wife and daughter that I just wanted to get out for a second to walk down this road that you couldn't really access with a regular car... an SUV, yes, but I didn't want to subject my family to any further insanity than I already had by coming up here. So, I got out of the Jeep and started walking down this road... it was so quiet. So peaceful. And then in the distance, I heard it. The far, lonely cry of trains... I took a video of the short walk with the ghostly wail in the distance. It was perfect... Synchronicity. The ghosts shot through me. Or was it The Shadow... Walter B. Gibson? At this moment, with my tired and under the weather daughter in the car, along with my wife who all just wanted to get home... I felt a fantastic pull. A new mission... no, rather a quest with an insane amount of XP points at the tail end! I needed to feel the ghosts of the old St. Nicholas Coal Breaker and the gem of gems, in my mind... The old Huber (Maxwell) Breaker. I found my way back to the car while picking up some sample souvenirs of these Black Diamonds. I apologized for being so long but told them that we were back on our way up north - as were were. We took the small roads through this area and then there it was, what was left of the area that used to be the home of the massive St. Nicholas Coal Breaker. What's left now is what Blaschak purchased off of this site and still operates to this day. I'll certainly have more to add to this later... I took a lot of pictures around this area but it was time to hit the next destination that I felt I needed to see on this 'possessed' day and it was just a short drive ahead in Mahanoy City, PA. That could only be the Molly Maguires!

My daughter's flight wasn't scheduled to arrive until Sunday evening at 7pm, so my wife and I left here just before noon to take the trip down to New Jersey. It was a nice ride down and we got to the airport without any issues. There had been some bad rainstorms that had come through down there but those were ahead of us. The only issue we had was trying to find appropriate parking for the gate we had to be at. When we dropped off my daughter at this same airport back in March, it was much easier because we got there at 3am... this was now 5pm and it was a completely different story down here! It was a little frustrating but we eventually figured it out and then proceeded to wait for our daughter to walk through the doors into the waiting area. That felt like an eternity as my eyes were fixated on those doors like an owl looking into some brush. When I finally caught site of her, I don't think I could run up there any faster... ... it was fantastic! We got out of that airport as quick as we could and packed up her suitcases and left the airport. My daughter was absolutely exhausted after landing from this 13 hour flight. I had originally planned to drive back up into Pennsylvania to rest for the night but we were a little behind schedule now and I thought it would be best just to find a place to stay in Jersey, get something for dinner and park it for the night. That all worked out well and so we all got some early rest... well, sort of. You see, to celebrate this evening, I had found an interesting bottle of Japanese Scotch to go along with what was originally going to be my farewell cigar. I saved it for this moment and this was now my Welcome Home cigar! The next morning my wife and I were rested but my daughter was feeling a little under the weather and still exhausted. We left the hotel around 9am and started our way up to Pennsylvania. As we're driving and my daughter is dozing off from time to time, I started to think that maybe this would be a good time for her to see Centralia which is what I mentioned here on another earlier post. I figured it wasn't anything that she would have to get out of the car to see as the experience of it is simply driving through and viewing on the GPS where the streets... ok, fine. She indicated to us that her mission for the day was to not get out of the car until we got back home to Central NY. Well... unfortunately, she has a crazy father. I got us up to Centralia and showed her 'the town'... the Ghost Town. Like I've stated before, the streets are there, but they no longer have names. You can still make out where houses might've stood some 60 years ago. Where a mailbox might've been. Fire hydrants and steps... ghosts of the past. Ghosts still visible in this lost mining town.

Those four months seemed to just crawl along here back home but for her, she was having an amazing experience continuing her studies while working one day a week at another school where she was teaching English to Japanese children from the ages of 4-8. Some of her interests, outside of her academics, are religion, animals, anime and yes, K-Pop. She visited many temples and did a lot of outdoor activities surrounded by, what I can only describe as, magical gardens! She went to Tokyo with a group as well as a trip to Okinawa. She even won tickets to a K-Pop concert in Tokyo that she went to on her own! It's funny as I told my wife, along with friends and family... I felt more comfortable with her there than I would've if she was here at home and had to walk home from her job at the grocery store at 11pm. I just felt like she was safe there. She explained that the country of Japan seems more serious and structured than here and everyone abides by a common set of rules. I think she liked that even though it was a bit of a departure from what she was used to here. Of course there are more nuances to that but that was just my abbreviated summary. As her time over there was winding down, I was starting to make plans for when we would have to drive back down to Newark, NJ to pick her up as she would be returning in the middle of July. It was here when I decided to trade in our old vehicle and upgrade a bit, seeing how I was planning a couple of trips for us. I scheduled my two vacation weeks to coincide with her flying into NJ... that would use up one week and then I scheduled my second vacation week to coincide with PulpFest which was two weeks after that. My requests for those two weeks were approved, I upgraded to the Shadow-Mobile and started to count down the weeks for when she would return home. Everything was lining up nicely but there would be a slight kink in the plans. At work, our Union contract would expire on July 31st and up to this point, there had been constructive and positive talks. However, two weeks before I was to take my first week off to go down to NJ, negotiations and talks fell apart and there was talk that a strike was now imminent. With this news, I realized that my second vacation week, the trip to PulpFest might have to be shelved. I knew I could only deal with things as they came so I didn't make any plans or reservations for PulpFest, I was just excited to take this week off in the middle of July to pick up my daughter!

I have to flashback to March of this year (2023)... my daughter is about to embark on a 4 month journey to Japan as part of her collegiate studies. In March, we drove her down to Newark, NJ for her flight to Japan. On the way down, from Central NY to Newark, NJ, I stopped at a Cigar's International Superstore in Bethlahem, PA. I bought a nice selection of cigars including this Japanese influenced one.. the Kintsugi from Alec & Bradley. https://www.cigarsinternational.com/p/alec-bradley-kintsugi/2036410/ That was going to be my farewell cigar. Now I know that I've written about this before but this was certainly a trying time for me. The night we arrived in NJ, I ordered us a Margarita Pizza for all of us and I proceeded to find some Ginger Ale for my mixer. I debated going outside to have that cigar against pouring a Scotch and Ginger Ale and staying in the room. Well, I decided to stay in the room as my wife and my daughter spent the entire evening going over last minute preparations on one of the beds. I camped out on the couch on the far end of the room and enjoyed my mixer while I reviewed some of my watched items on eBay that night. There were a couple of books that I was targeting and with some of those, the auctions had ended. Well there was this one book that I was paying very close attention to because it was another of my favorites, but the recent prices jumped so much on this issue that it was getting close to becoming out of my league. One of the auctions that had recently ended on this issue was for a purple label, restored copy. It went for a bit more than I would've paid but there was another copy, this one with a green label or 'Qualified' grade that I was kind of interested in as well. I wasn't sure what I was going to do on this particular book as the timer was ticking down to the last 20 minutes or so. I'm sipping my drink and reflecting on the moment, with my daughter just hours away from getting on a plane to travel 6,713 miles... Of course my mind went back to one of my favorite memories with her, as she would often come into my comic room when I had it set up as such. She would sit with me at the desk chair and would look at all the comics I had on the walls. I would have her pick out her favorite comic and then her second and third and so on... she would always pick this one particular book as her favorite and it made sense to me as it featured a family on the cover and she has always been about her family! So as those thoughts drifted through and kind of settled where appropriate, I decided to throw in a bid for this book that was now minutes away from ending even though what I really wanted to do was take her back home like we did when we escaped the dreaded Canadian Maple TVA Terror Drones back in 2006... I put in a bid and was surprised to see that I won the book... I figured it was just meant to be! So this was more of a sentimental purchase than anything even though it is a book I genuinely like as well. I've owned two copies of this one in the past... one that I purchased raw and sent it in to CGC with it coming back as a 4.0 and another that was a CGC 3.5 in an old blue square label. So this copy, graded as a CGC 2.5 (Qualified) fell a little short of the others but it had just enough eye appeal for my liking. This one was a little different than the other green label copies that I had been seeing. Most of these were missing a page or two but this one was complete - just married pages. Fantastic Four #3 The first issue of the FF with their Costumes, Headquaters and Fantasti-Car along with the 1st appearance of the Miracle Man. What was shocking and provided more evidence that this was meant to be, was that this book that I won (CGC 2.5 Qualified) went for $370 less than the other copy I was watching that ended just two days earlier. That issue was a CGC 1.8 (Restored) with tear seals to cover, cover re-attached, with glue, all 3 edges trimmed and the back cover married. So that was certainly a win for me and it felt right to have this book (what was my daughter's favorite all those years ago) back again. The next morning was one of the most difficult mornings for me that I can remember. I gave her a small Bon Voyage bag that had this last little 'school drawing' inside that I had done for her a couple of nights earlier... But it was this picture that was absolutely crushing. Even today...

The image on the left is from a Canadian Edition of the November 1st, 1936 issue... the one on the right is the same issue but the US Edition...