If you were to come by my place for one of my fabulous dinner parties, you would be disappointed. My kitchen table is covered with file folders and copies of every bill I paid in 2012. Yes, it’s tax season! Every person has a different set of issues with the IRS, and mine this year are especially weird. Is an ambulance deductible?

Naturally, in an attempt to avoid this tiresome chore, I’m wondering what super-heroes who find themselves in this situation do.

I mean, I’d assume that the fabulously wealthy, the Bruce Waynes, the Tony Starks, the Oliver Queens, have accountants who can write off their gear as R & D expenses at a corporate level.

And Aquaman, Wonder Woman and Doctor Doom are heads of state of sovereign nations. Whatever they might owe their respective governments, they aren’t writing checks to the IRS.

But what about the average working schmoe? Just because you can bend steel with your bare hands doesn’t mean you can deduct your spandex pants. That’s only possible if being a hero is your business, and you need your costume as a business expense. Hooters waitresses can claim their t-shirts, Grant Morrison’s Superman can’t.

It is, I think, a major problem of our tax code that this is true. Why should Anne Romney’s horse be legally deductible as business expense when Comet is a taxable money-pit.

The reason that Rafalca is a legitimate business expense is that raising her is a business, with profit and loss. Similarly, if the Romney’s chose to donate the horse (or, more likely, a piece of artwork or simply cash) to charity, they would be legally entitled to a deduction for the value of their gift.

This is a good thing. I’m in favor of philanthropy. I’m in favor of tax laws that encourage charitable giving. I might quibble with an individual’s choice of charity, but then, I quibble with my own choices, and that’s what makes a democracy.

This should also apply to heroics. If Peter Parker is saving New York from the Green Goblin, he should be allowed to deduct his web fluid. That matters more to the city’s quality of life than a dozen socialites giving their used wardrobe to the Metropolitan Museum.

And Peter needs the deduction more. He’s a working stiff.

Similarly, there are all kinds of people who do good without any fancy outfits. Working people who use their own metro-cards to help tutor at-risk kids, or work at a soup kitchen, or a thrift store. They don’t have money, so they donate their time. It would be great if we lived in a world where these problems were taken care of at a macro level by the government. Until that happens, it would be nice if our tax laws encouraged its citizens to pick up the slack.

We can use the extra heroes.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman and Something About The New 52

Great Caesar’s bust is on the shelf

And I don’t feel so well myself.

– Arthur Guiterman

I guess they’re not kidding about this “dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return” business. After 1,699 issues and 42 years of publication, what began as the brainchild of 17-year-old Alan Light and, after a few earlier names was finally and best known as The Comics Buyer’s Guide – CBG for short – has reached its end.

I don’t think I ever paid for an issue of the paper but, thanks to the generosity of its publishers, I read a lot of them. When I was sitting behind various editorial desks CBG would appear in the mail once a week and when I had some spare time I’d page through it, reading this and that. It wasn’t a big part of my professional life, but it was nice.

Eventually, I did a short article for it. My idea was to make CBG’s readership aware of Harvey Pekar and his self-published and strange and unique comic book, American Splendor. Since Harvey didn’t truck in the usual comic book stuff, I thought that maybe CBG’s readers might be missing something that was unlike anything else on the market, something they’d like. I now wish I had a do-over. Though my intentions were pure, the piece I produced, I think, was patronizing, maybe because I didn’t, and don’t, know how to describe Harvey’s episodic autobiographies. He was an American original and his work doesn’t classify easily.

That regrettable bit of quasi-journalism printed and, one hopes, quickly forgotten, I no doubt thought I was done with CBG except for my weekly reading of it. But the best was yet to come. CBG played a small, but crucial, part in events that shaped the rest of my life. Cue organ chord.

Getting married is generally considered to be a life-shaper, no? And getting married to a teenage sweetheart you haven’t seen in 30 years, well…

To be brief: Marifran Reuter, nee McFarland, was teaching a parish school of religion in a St. Louis suburb. Talking to a student’s mom, she mentioned that she once dated a guy whose brother had the same name as the student’s father. Mom and teacher compared facts and, yes, the student’s dad was, indeed,the brother of the guy teacher had dated, long since moved to New York and working as a writer. Teach wrote writer a letter and, on the writer’s next midwestern visit, they met and talked until three in the morning. A bit later, during a phone conversation, Marifran told the writer that she’d be selling text books in Omaha during summer vacation. Uh-huh! So the writer, me, looked into CBG and found the name of a comic shop in Omaha. I called the shop and persuaded the proprietor to invite me for an autographing session on the June day that Marifran was hawking textbooks in the area. Then I called her and said that she wouldn’t believe what just happened – I had a gig in Omaha on the same day and why don’t we meet in Missouri and go together…

Would it have happened without CBG? I don’t know. But happen it did, and on a warm Nebraska night, we sat on a hillside and spoke the truth as we knew it and created the rest of our lives.

THURSDAY: Martha Thomases’ Extra Heroes

Press Release:

graphic novel cover

Writer Ron Fortier and Artist Rob Davis will be guests at this year’s Oklahoma Writer’s Federation Conference to be held in Norman, Oklahoma May 2-4.  Further details can be found at the organizations website.