PSA Monday: Adventures in Reading starring the Amazing Spider-Man

April 3rd, 2006

Filed under: General

cover, Adventures in Reading Adventures in Reading, starring the Amazing Spider-Man. Spidey Travels Through Time and Space in the battle against Illiteracy!Story by Louise Simonson, Pencils by Jon Bogdanove. Marvel Comics, 1990

Cara, Mike, and Dwane are bored inner-city kids who are lamenting the fact that they have nothing to do. As luck would have it, at just that moment Spider-Man swings by chasing a villain called the Troglodyte who has stolen a prototype weapon known as the Transporter. The Troglodyte shoots the bazooka-sized ray gun at Spider-Man and the kids, and they all find themselves in The Lost World. They help Professor Challenger and his crew fight off some pterodactyls, but then the Troglodyte hits them with the ray gun again and they find themselves in Victorian England during the Martian Invasion from The War of the Worlds. Next they find themselves in The Jungle Book, then That was Then, This is Now, and finally in Ivanhoe before they manage to subdue the Troglodyte and return to our world.

Spider-Man, a brilliant scientist and a college graduate, falls prey to the ONISGS (Oh No, I Suddenly Got Stupid) Syndrome commonly seen in PSA comic books: it took him until That was Then, This is Now to figure out they were being transported into the storylines of famous books. Seriously, if he didn’t recognize Professor Challenger or H.G. Well’s Martians, then a talking bear named Baloo should have given it away.

When it comes down to it, this book really has othing to do with fighting illiteracy. Instead, it’s geared toward encouraging children who already know how to read. Not to mention that there’s something fundamentally wrong about a comic book — with a narrative relying almost entirely on the written word — combating illiteracy.

As usual for a PSA comic, this book features several pages of “fun and games” such as word searches and anagrams in the back. One feature in particular caught my eye. How many of you fanboys (and -girls) can identify the source of this “code”?

Name the code

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12 Responses to “ PSA Monday: Adventures in Reading starring the Amazing Spider-Man ”

  1. Joe Gualtieri
    April 4th, 2006 at 2:54 am

    … isn’t that Interlac?

  2. Dwight Williams
    April 4th, 2006 at 3:42 am

    Thought so.

  3. Gordon
    April 4th, 2006 at 5:34 am

    And Keith Giffen, Paul Levitz, et al didn’t sue because…?

  4. Michael G
    April 4th, 2006 at 7:04 am

    Because they probably got it from the public domain fan-created font Interlac (I’ve got a copy available at http://lsh.0catch.com/lsh/lsh.htm) as opposed to DC’s version. The word “interlac” isn’t even trademarked as far as I know, and I don’t think you can copyright a font.

  5. Chuck T.
    April 4th, 2006 at 7:32 am

    Ah, I thought it was from the Micronauts. I forget what the language there was. Microversese? No?
    The worst part is, I know I’ve taken foreign language classes, yet this is what sticks…

  6. gorjus
    April 4th, 2006 at 9:11 am

    While one may not technically hold a copyright on fonts, that does not mean that they are not necessarily protected under intellecutal property laws. There’s several websites that address the particularly quirky legal ins-and-outs of the issue, especially due to the “fontsplosion” (my ridiculous, made up word) of the past ten years. In terms of Interlac, I’d argue (were I a person accusing of intellectual property theft) that it was nearly always a fan-based Easter egg that was used extensively (and without legal repercussion) in the fan press.

    I totally recognized Interlac, and Michael, thanks for providing the file!

  7. Scott
    April 4th, 2006 at 9:31 am
    Official Comment

    Chuck, check out this older post which refers to the Interlac, Kryptonian, and Microverse alphabets.

  8. Dwight Williams
    April 4th, 2006 at 5:50 pm

    What amuses me is that this Latin-mapped quasi-Kryptonian’s taken as The Standard these days!

    Now, Pre-Crisis Kryptonian? THERE is a real fictional alphabet.

  9. Comics Worth Reading
    April 4th, 2006 at 6:54 pm

    [...] ’s a really weird bit of trivia to end on: an example of the made-up Legion language Interlac used in a Spider-Man comic. No comments so far [...]

  10. Michael G
    April 4th, 2006 at 9:17 pm

    I had forgotten about it when I made my comment this morning, but Kashif “Blue Panther” Husain – the guy who created the Interlac fonts, whos also happens to be a former letterhack – is online and his site not only has the hollow and solid fonts, it’s also got a little history of its creation. His sites are here and here. In fact, all of this was a good excuse to gather up all my Interlac-related links into this post on my Legion blog.

  11. Andrew Burton
    May 3rd, 2006 at 10:08 am

    Shouldn’t capital letters in Interlac have a leading bar to the left? I think that’s all lowercase Interlac used for uppercase English.

  12. grkbeckham13@aol.com
    November 7th, 2006 at 9:44 am

    Hey how much would Adventures in readin Starring : the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #1 .. SPIDEY TRAVELS THROUGH TIME AND SPACE… be worth right now? in mint coniditon. if you have an idea how much I could probably get for this contact me @ grkbeckham13@aol.com or instant message me grkbeckham13 if you use aol or aim instante messanger thanks.

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