Alright so first thing’s first. Comics are awesome.
Comic books are worlds where anything can happen no matter how bizarre. There’s super soldiers, super-humans, intergalactic wars, subatomic adventures, and time-traveling escapades. This is a world where right always win, characters never seem to age, and our favorite heroes never stop adventuring. It’s a wonderland where imagination and creativity are not only allowed; they are expected. They are lauded and celebrated.
We geeks have been privy to this information for years. For decades, we have found shelter in these funny books and the wonderful world they present to us. We’ve built a community of fellow nerds bound together by our mutual love, or sometimes hatred, for these characters. We have been grown and raised in the strangeness of this culture, and, as such, we don’t even bat an eye when the absurd becomes reality. It’s just another Wednesday.
Somewhere along the way though, the rest of the world got in on our little secret. Comic books went from the little hole-in-the-wall shops to the biggest of movie screens and red carpets. Studios and companies discovered something. These stories that had captivated the minds and imaginations of individuals for half a century could, when done right, make them a whole lot of money. For goodness sake, the Avengers is the third-highest grossing movie of all time. So with the backing of these organizations, the heroes and adventures that previously only came to life in our minds were now splashed across our screens in all their fantastic glory.
Sounds great right? The age of the geek is here, and everyone is happy. Yeah, not quite. The thing is that all of these wonderful reasons we love comics – the intricate storylines, the crossovers, the bending of the rules of nature, and the massive shared universes – are not always as easily accepted by the general public. The prospects of a whole cinematic world just as interconnected as our comics has us practically frothing at the mouth and as giddy as schoolgirls, but for the uninitiated those very things can be quite intimidating.
That’s where this blog comes in. My goal here is to bridge that gap a bit. This is a blog for people who aren’t like me. This is a blog for people who may have never picked up a comic in their life, but they want to see what all the fuss is about in this new age we live in. I can’t expect you to know what I or any veteran geek knows right off the bat, nor do I really want you to. I’ve spent way too much of my time and money on this stuff, but there’s no reason you should have to do the same. The comic community has a tendency to be viewed as, shall we say, unwelcoming to newcomers, but I aim to change that, at least a bit. So come on in, pull up a chair, and if you want, you can listen to me ramble for a bit about something that I love and I hope that you will too.
The Watchtower 