The Sullivans Find America, Miles 1-661

Plainfield, IN

After a rollicking eleven days on the east coast visiting family and friends in PA and DC and seeing a little late-night Satanic blues rock showdown play that I wrote (and which you can totally still catch, DC friends!), I'm returning to LA. But I'm not going alone!

My Dad, Jim Sullivan, has joined me in loading up our 2009 Toyota Prius with comics and artwork and driving it across these United States, which is something I have wanted to do ever since I read Denny O'Neill and Neal Adams' comics about Green Arrow and Green Lantern doing basically the same thing in the 1970s.

This may happen.

Today we drove west for some ten hours down route 70, from Glenside to Indianapolis. Highlights from the road include:

-a speeding ticket
-a sign advertising the Creation Museum
-a dead deer
-a weirdly defensive billboard advertising coal: "Wind dies. Sun sets. Nuclear?"
-the Rushing Wind Biker Church
-an Indiana marching band practicing in what the Prius identified as 102 degree heat
-trucks carrying weird crap from recycled kitchen grease to airplane wings

Airplane wing!

Before storming our hotel and demanding beer, we visited the Indiana World War Memorial Plaza, which includes a breathtaking shrine and a museum with an assortment of uniforms and weapons dating back to the American Revolution, plus enough period reprints of propaganda posters to wallpaper Captain America's two-bedroom hi-rise.

Jim Sullivan, dwarfed, as all men are, by the War Memorial.

Also impressive: the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.

Tomorrow: Harry Truman's house and Kansas City!