My Geek Life

The New Batman: Brave and the Bold cartoon series is rocking my world (I’ve been watching it off iTunes). It’s way more of a kid’s show partaking of the 1950s Batman than the old WB Batman animated series (and way more retro and “classic” than the newer The Batman series). It has just the right mix of four-color zany, classic animation style (ala Bill Finger’s Batman), and DC Comics geekery. Plus Batman’s “thought balloon” voice-over narration is awesome. If you’re a comics geek, you should totally see it.

(Borrowed from gmskarka)

Entertainment Weekly has a feature where comics pros talk about the first comic book that hooked them.

Mine were actually two: an issue of Action Comics and one of Fantastic Four that I bought at a 7-Eleven in Las Vegas one summer. My family had moved there and, while my parents were house hunting, we lived in the Ponderosa Motel on the edge of the city. Not much for a bored ten year-old to do except watch TV... and read comic books.

I don’t recall the issue numbers offhand, and a quick Google image search didn’t turn up the covers, but I still remember them well. The Action Comics story was about Vandal Savage changing history so he ruled the world and Superman worked for him (surprisingly similar in concept to the “Savage Time” story for the Justice League animated series). The Fantastic Four story was intended to wrap-up the Shogun Warriors series, with the FF fighting “the Samurai Destroyer,” a big Japanese robot, in Tokyo.

Those two were the start of my perusing convenience store shelves for months to come, eventually discovering things like comic specialty stores existed and doing extra chores to earn money so my Dad would drive me down to one to buy my semi-weekly comics. I’ve still got those original two, along with the probably thousands of others in the boxes in my basement.

Christopher and I saw Spider-Man 3 last night.

( review behind the cut )