Here's a picture of two super-heroes at the 1975 San Diego Comic Convention. The one at right is Stan Lee, and he's quite the super-hero but this posting is not about him. The gent at left is Richard Pesta, who was known to many as Captain Sticky, and I just now found out that he passed away almost a year ago.
Billing himself as the world's only real-life super-hero, Captain Sticky was a fixture of the early San Diego cons. He operated out of that city, driving around in his Stickymobile (a highly-customized Lincoln Continental), functioning as a flamboyant crusader, mostly for consumer rights. For a few years there, he often appeared on the news, battling various injustices that ranged from nursing home abuse to auto mechanic rip-offs. As I understood it, he got results largely by just showing up at the crime scene. He was one of those colorful characters that no reporter could resist. So if he pulled up outside your business, so did the TV cameras…and if you had a lick of sense, you'd just correct whatever he thought needed correction.
That he righted some wrongs is undeniable, but a lot of us were skeptical about this person, who'd named himself based on his love of peanut butter. He sometimes claimed to be independently wealthy and said his heroic exploits were his way of "giving back" to society. Maybe…but he was also constantly trying to get writers and artists to whip up pilot issues of a planned Captain Sticky comic book and blanched at the suggestion that he pony up a bit of cash. Around the time of the above photo, Marvel was interested in publishing his exploits, and a fine writer-artist named Don Rico was engaged to produce the first issue. This lasted until Don discovered that Marvel was expecting the Good Captain to underwrite the costs, while Sticky was expecting Marvel to shower all with currency. Don quit, I turned it down and so did everyone else I knew.
But as I said, the guy did some good…and he had a real flair for self-promotion. The TV series, Real People, briefly made a celebrity of him and he turned up at a lot of public functions all over California in the late seventies and early eighties. I don't recall seeing him anywhere after around 1985. This article fills in the rest of the story and tells us of his death last February.
My thanks to Alan Light for the photo (he took it) and for calling my attention to the obit. Rest in peace, Sticky.