Story by Van Jensen
Photos by Josh Meister

Dean Gary May’s Tech Tower office betrays no sign of his lifelong hobby, at least until you peek behind his door. There, hanging beside an extra suit and a pressed shirt, is a bright red Superman cape — a handmade recreation given to May as a gift from staff members at the College of Engineering.

May collects comic books — superhero comics specifically. He started reading them when he was 4 or 5, growing up in St. Louis, and he has continued ever since, from his days as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech to his postgraduate studies in California to his return to Tech as a faculty member and administrator. At last estimate he had about 13,000 issues, which he reads and re-reads in a quiet room in his Atlanta home.

“It started when my dad would take me to Bob’s Barbershop,” May says. “Bob had comics and magazines for people to read when they came in. I just started looking at the pictures and putting the story together. Then I started to read the words. It really supplemented what I was learning in school.”

Soon, May started to buy his own, often taking advantage of the six-for-a-dollar deal offered at the local Zayre discount store. “I’d go and get 12 or 18 and read them all day,” he says.

He particularly liked books featuring teams of superheroes, like ‘Justice League’ and ‘Avengers,’ in which the characters would have to combine their strengths to defeat villains. “We’d go out and play ‘Super Friends,’” May says. “I was always Superman. I felt like I needed to be the leader, even then. I asked my mom for more siblings so we could fill out the whole team.”

Comic books offered more than just entertainment; they also guided May into his future career. The first comic he ever owned was an issue of ‘Avengers’ shortly after the introduction of Vision, an android hero. When May went into engineering, he ultimately chose to do research related to artificial intelligence.

“The roots of that traces back to seeing robots in comics,” May says. “The reason I’m an engineer is because of ‘Star Trek’ and comics. Sometimes they inspire me. As a researcher, you have to be creative. You have to imagine things that people don’t think are possible. Comics are a very unconstrained medium.”

Once May became a teenager, he says his father kept predicting that he’d lose interest in comics. May insisted that he wouldn’t — and so far, he’s held true.

Once he moved to Atlanta and enrolled at Georgia Tech, May discovered Oxford Comics, a well-stocked shop that became his new place to stop on Wednesdays, when new issues are released. He didn’t find much of a comics-reading community at Tech, but most of his fellow students were caught up with course work. And because his dorm room was so small, May would take all of his comics back to St. Louis on breaks from school. Only fairly recently did he combine his collection, picking up the old issues from his parents’ home and bringing them to Atlanta.

“I have this room, and the comics stay in that room,” May says. His wife, LeShelle, a fellow Tech alum, “thinks it’s goofy in a kind of loveable way.” She’ll call him Sheldon, after the character from the TV show ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ who has a penchant for superhero T-shirts.

At the couple’s home, May’s comics collection resides on a handful of bookcases. The issues are vertically aligned, stacked so thickly on shelves that they hold in place. Whereas most comics collectors slip each issue into protective sleeves and hide them away in boxes, May wants his comics accessible.

“I like to read them and re-read them,” he says. “I’m probably hurting myself financially. But I’ve never tried to pick what I think will be valuable.”

It’s the stories that draw him in, stories of heroes battling villains, of good versus evil. And that, ultimately, is the lesson of superhero comic books — that there can be justice, and that it is worth fighting for.

“It’s why I work on issues like inequities and underrepresentation,” May says. “The best way to fight crime, after all, is through education.”

This story appears in the second issue of Georgia Tech Engineers, the magazine from the College of Engineering. To request a copy, please email the editor at editor@coe.gatech.edu.