I had just turned 17. A precocious teenager, I loved comic books very much and wanted to defend them as popular culture and literature in my English 102 class. This was the same year that Star Wars came out. Popular culture, science fiction and fantasy, etc, was still a fringe interest. I spent a lot of time and money at Golden Age Collectibles in the Pike Place Market, where my mother sold her jewelry and I help with the business after school.
Here is a copy of my paper “Superman and Spiderman: Two Superheros. I want to note that this was typed on a Royal Typewriter that was a serious antique in even 1977. I remember the frustration if I had to completely restart a page if I had too many typos. (And if you look at the linked PDF, I had a lot of typos in the final version!) I think I was fairly talented at hand editing with White Out and a Rapidograph pen. I had to look up all my references in annual catalogs of journal publications and card catlogs. It took forever to have copies sent to our college library (yes, I started college at sixteen…)
Enjoy!