"He eased up out of the chair, and snapped off the set. The knob came off in his hand. He looked at the knob, puzzled. That hadn't happened for years."

Superheroes in non-comic book books are all over the place now, cramming bookstore shelves in addition to the store shelves that have actual comic book collections. That rules. But in 1977, there was no such thing. And in 1977, Robert Mayer's Superfolks deconstructed superheroes years before everyone else did.

I read about it in the comic book magazines of the time, such as Amazing Heroes. In 2002 and 2003 the book was put in print again. One edition has a foreword by Kurt Busiek. The other one has a foreword by Grant Morrison and a cover by Mike Allred. Busiek's fun and extensive foreword notes the influence the story had on comic book writers, including him.

It's about David Brinkley, a superhero who lost his powers, so he quit and moved to the burbs. His powers return, then so do villains and a conspiracy aiming to kill him.

It's a post-hero world, just like Watchmen, where all the heroes are gone. The world is a vegetable-medley of comic books, TV, and cartoons, where Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Lone Ranger, Peter Pan, and Snoopy co-exist. Most of them are dead, in various funny ways.

The story is about some guy, who used to have a neat job and has to get it back, while meeting head-on with lack of confidence, aging, and responsibility.

Comics fans are accustomed to deconstruction now. Many stories, from Miracleman to The Authority, try to make superheroes grittily real, and make comic-book silliness into punch-lines. Most writers of those stories are comic book nerds like us readers.

But Superfolks is refreshing, because the story is not weighed down by geek history, so there is no continuity to wink at or keep straight. Just like good superhero comics, it doesn't try to be realistic, except the parts with Brinkley and his family.

There's graphic sex and cuss words, which I imagine were meant to be shocking in a comic-book story. But they just took my head out of the game.

I never read the story until I bought the book recently, years after I read Watchmen and Miracleman and saw The Incredibles. Now I feel like I've been let in on a big secret. The puzzle pieces fell in place. So many parts of Superfolks appear in those later stories. Alan Moore's ending to his story "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" is almost a shot-for-shot homage to the ending of Superfolks.

Superfolks is a geek artifact. I feel even nerdier now.