The Weird, Wacky and Wild Ride of Captain Cartoon, Father of Bat Boy

The incredibly colorful true life story of Dick Kulpa, a nerdy small-town kid who loved cartoons so much that he became one.

Images courtesy of Dick Kulpa’s family| Edited by Brendan Spiegel

The origin stories of many superheroes involve something like a bath in toxic waste or being born on another planet, but the origin story of Alder-Man, champion of local politics and civic duty, was a little less flashy. One day in the late 1970s, a young man named Dick Kulpa bounded into city hall in Loves Park, Illinois, wearing a red, white and blue costume with a big letter “A” on the chest. Kulpa was well-known to local civic leaders. He was an alderman in the city, as well as a political cartoonist for a local weekly, who used his impressive artistic abilities to take other local politicians to task for their questionable decisions. But he’d just come from his other gig: teaching kids to draw. He had donned the costume to engage the students while giving a figure-drawing lesson. The “A” on Kulpa’s chest stood for “artist,” and he was the kind of guy who wouldn’t think it necessary to change out of his makeshift sup…