So, if you were going to turn some Steuben County resident into a comic book hero, my votes would go for Glenn Curtiss and Charles Williamson, mostly because both of them in a lot of ways were bigger than life, and splashy along with it.

“Charles the Magnificent” has yet to make it into the primary-colored world of comic books, but Glenn Curtiss has. I collect comics, and a year or so back, hoping to find Mr. Curtiss, I took a chance on “The Illustrated Story of Flight,” published by Classics Illustrated in 1959. I was right, too. Glenn had been gone for 29 years by then, and he was far from forgotten.

The hero of Hammondsport gets half of a two-page story entitled “Pioneer Pilots.” Rather delightfully, the artist introduces Curtiss slouched way down in his easy chair, reading the paper. Here he learns of a $10,000 prize for a flight from Albany to New York (actually, you could go in either direction). That slouch or lounge, with shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, wordlessly captures the down-home, off-the-cuff Curtiss.

Introduced as the man who built Charles Willard’s long-distance airplane, shown in three panels on the previous page (twelve miles! nineteen minutes!), Curtiss takes off from Albany on May 29, 1910, and soon runs into rough weather – depicted as a very impressive rain storm through which he forges ahead. Curtiss certainly had some trouble with turbulence, but not the storm shown here. In fact, he wouldn’t have dreamed of tackling it – he was a bear for safety.

The artist (possibly Ernie Hart) does a darned good, highly accurate job with Curtiss’s airplane. He obviously had some photo resources to work with. The panels describing Curtiss’s stop for service, and his successful landing, show Glenn in his “super hero” costume – suit, tie, high collar, and flat cap – a tiny circle even represents the cap badge that Curtiss always wore. In the final panel a smiling Curtiss sits in the pilot’s seat while the narration box enthuses, “Curtiss reached New York in only three hours!”, and a spectator shouts, “He did it!”

He did indeed. Glenn Curtiss was a huge hero in his day, the pre-World War I avatar of Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager, Neal Armstrong, and Burt Rutan. His career might have been made for comic books, which didn’t exist yet, but he WAS a primary inspiration for the original Tom Swift books, largely written by a man from Binghamton.

So Curtiss gets a full page in “The Illustrated Story of Flight,” plus the not-quite half-page in which Willard flies a Curtiss airplane. The large final panel of Samuel P. Langley’s story notes that his aerodrome “was rebuilt and flown” many years later, with no mention of Curtiss, or the fact that that body of water in the picture is Keuka Lake. Two panels of “Between the Wars” show the NC-4 “first across” transatlantic flight in 1919, again without mentioning Glenn as the builder. All told, two pages of Curtiss stuff, out of 80. (The Wright brothers get eight, plus a few odd panels showing one of their airplanes.)

The Grand Comics Database (www.comics.org), which recently marked 222,222 issues documented from across the globe, lists Glenn Curtiss as a character in five fillers or text articles, all published (one of them in Sweden) between 1946 and 1969, plus this comic story, and a 1909 book of caricatures, both of which I documented myself for the database. So there’s plenty more room for a Glenn Curtiss comic – not to mention Charles Williamson. As Stan Lee would say, excelsior!