RIP Alvin Schwartz - writer, comic book creator, philosopher, mystic.

A writer during DC Comics "Golden Age" but I became aware of him more from his latter books, which I really loved - An Unlikely Prophet and the follow up A Gathering of Selves - which explored the intersections of philosophy, Tibetan Buddhism, magic, the power of fiction... and comic books, of course.

In some ways you could say he was Grant Morrison before there was a Grant Morrison, minus the Katmandu hyperdimensional alien abduction experience, maybe.  [Like Morrison he 'kind of-for real-but seriously' talked of a physical encounter with the Man of Steel himself.]

Sequential | Canadian Comics News & Culture:

"In the nearly 20 years he worked in comics he wrote countless Batman and Superman stories (in comic books and in newspaper strips), came up with the idea (and title) for World’s Finest comics, and was behind the remarkably durable villain Bizarro...

Schwartz returned to the world of superheroes in his 80s when he published An Unlikely Prophet; a meta-autobiography that imagined Superman as a tulpa, a mind-created reality or “thoughtform,” a concept adopted from Tibetan Buddhism. The highlight of the book is Schwartz’s claim that he physically encountered Superman in a taxi in New York City.

In 2006, he published a follow-up of sorts titled A Gathering of Selves in which the Superman tulpa character helps Schwartz transcend the realms of personal identity and travel to a realm inhabited by “a multitude of selves, including the dark figure of Batman” to quote the book jacket..."