While I haven't seen the new Captain America movie yet (probably in a week or two), I did manage to get a little star-spangled action yesterday, thanks to Syfy (or as we sometimes call it since the name-change, "Siffy"). For you young'uns out there who may not know, this weekend's flick is the fourth time Captain America has gone in front of the lens. The first two were made-for-TV movies back in 1979, around the time Bill Bixby was turning into Lou Ferrigno every week. Not sure if Syfy ran the first movie, but I did try and watch the imaginatively-named Captain America 2...and I do mean "try". The story moved at a snail's-pace, plus it seemed like it took forever for our hero to suit up, so I ended up flipping between this and...well, just about anything else on TV. Not that I was really looking forward to seeing that particular version of the suit, mind you, but dangit, if I'm going to keep watching this junk when there's higher-quality junk elsewhere, then I want to see the friggin' suit!
And then I finally saw the suit. And the clear plastic shield. And this particular fight.
Man, I felt bad for Cap's reputation after he got his butt whipped by the dogs. On the plus side, the motorcycle is kinda cool, and they had Christopher Lee as the main baddie. Cap versus Dracula! The good captain should've done to him what he did to Baron Blood way back when. That would've made this a much better movie.
After this travesty, we finally hit the main attraction: the 1990 Captain America movie. Last time I saw this was roughly 16 years ago on cable, and call me crazy, but this direct-to-video flick isn't as horrible as its reputation might have you believe. It does manage to deliver a few good scenes (one of the best being after Cap wakes up and a reporter tries to fill him in on everything he's missed, but all Cap sees is the guy's Volkswagen car and "made in Japan" tape recorder, so Cap figures the guy's a spy and bolts), and Matt Salinger (son of J.D. Salinger) cuts a good form in Cap's red-white-and-blue duds (which are quite accurate to the comic). The problem is they try to cram a miniseries' worth of info into a 2-hour movie. The characters (Cap included) are mere sketches of people, so much so that, when people start dying, you really don't care. Oh yeah, and the Red Skull's Italian for some reason (I don't think you can discuss this movie without mentioning that). Sorry, guys, Nazis are much scarier than plain ol' fascists, so you lose a lotta points there. Seriously, though, if you get a chance, sit down and watch this one, and think of it as the Cliff's Notes version for a Cap TV series that never got made.
When I finally get my butt out to the theatre, I'll report back on what I thought of "Cap Part 4". All I can say right now is that things can only improve from here.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Speaking of zombies...
Just wanted to do a quick post about a pair of zombie flicks that have popped up on my radar over the last couple of days. First up is Doghouse, starring former Doctor Who companion Noel Clarke. Jamin stumbled across this on IFC, and while we missed the first half-hour or so, what we did catch was impressive. It starts with one of the more popular premises for zombie outbreaks -- a government experiment goes awry and infects a small town -- but gives it a twist I've never seen: the zombie virus only affects women. The result is a "battle of the sexes" to the death! Clarke and his buddies have to fend off the cannibalistic advances of all sorts of female furies, the result landing somewhere between the social commentary of Romero's "Dead" films and the borderline parody of Return of the Living Dead (or to compare it to other Brit zombie flicks, somewhere between 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead). This came out in 2009, so I'll have to keep an eye out to see if there's a Region 1 DVD release
The second movie I've only seen in trailer form so far, but it's the country of origin that caught my attention. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Cuba's Juan of the Dead:
Any chance we can lift the trade embargo long enough to import this sucker?
The second movie I've only seen in trailer form so far, but it's the country of origin that caught my attention. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Cuba's Juan of the Dead:
Any chance we can lift the trade embargo long enough to import this sucker?
Sunday, July 10, 2011
The next thing you know, the dang things will start sparkling.
For those of you that don't know, the Hillwig household is a zombie household. My husband Jamin has been a ginormous fan of the original "Night of the Living Dead" ever since he was a kid, and we've met nearly every surviving member of the main cast (we almost met George Romero too, but he had to bow out of a con at the last minute, so he's still on the "wanted" list). We also tend check out anything and everything zombie-related, usually finding some new treasure along the way (World War Z, The Walking Dead, Shaun of the Dead, etc.). Heck, as I type this, Jamin's playing "Left 4 Dead" on XBox360 and giggling like crazy as he blows the crap outta corpses. Suffice it to say, we both know the genre pretty darn good and have a healthy respect for it...which might be why this struck me as so weird.
A few weeks ago, I'm bringing in the mail, and as I pass Jamin on the couch, he points at a flier on the bottom of the pile and says, "What the heck is that?" I turn it over to see this:
A few weeks ago, I'm bringing in the mail, and as I pass Jamin on the couch, he points at a flier on the bottom of the pile and says, "What the heck is that?" I turn it over to see this:
It's a furniture ad. Featuring a zombie. In mid-June. Now, this isn't the first time I've seen a zombie in a non-Halloween ad (there's one for Starburst as well as that new Honda Civic campaign), but in those ads, the companies in question are trying to be hip or edgy so they can appeal to the younger consumers with disposable income, therefore it makes sense for them to use such imagery, while the use of zombies here just comes off as kinda pathetic. It's freakin' Gardner-White Furniture! What's hip or edgy about a mattress sale? Are there scads of males in the 18-34 range out there going, "Hmm, I really need a Serta Perfect Sleeper, but who should I buy it from? Hey, these guys put zombies in their ad! They're the store for me!"
Zombies are the "in" thing right now, I get it. But we're getting so over-saturated that, last month, I watched a National Geographic special that focused on Romero-style zombies and how they could (hypothetically) happen in real life. It was a good program, but seriously...NatGeo's cashing in on this? I feel like the zombie phenomenon is approaching the point that Dracula and Frankenstein and all the other Universal monsters hit in the 1940s when they became fodder for Abbott & Costello movies:
Familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes. Or maybe it just breeds slapstick comedy. Take your pick.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
52 Pick-Up
Okay, at the end of my last ramble, I said I would give you a rundown of what DC Comics titles I'm buying come September. I've been doing a lot of looking around since then, reading creator interviews and Newsarama/CBR articles and scrutinizing all the solicits, and I've realized that there's a lot more books I'm interested in than I thought.
First up is the sure thing, the one that I'd buy no matter what, even if they passed some sort of comics law that said "Only one title per person": All-Star Western.
When I became a regular comics-buyer, Jonah Hex didn't have a title anymore. He was a member of the original stack, though, and thanks to a nascent interest in westerns, I sought him out in the back-issue boxes. I got hooked really quick, but aside from the three Vertigo minis in the 1990s (which aren't the best representation of him), I never got to experience the thrill of getting a brand-new Jonah Hex comic every month until 2005. I've been VERY happy with what Palmiotti & Gray have brought to the character (and have told them so many times), so while I am upset that Jonah's losing his self-titled book, I am glad that he's not losing J&J. Plus we'll be getting back-up stories with all the other DC Western folk, so more bang for the buck. Only shaky step for me is Jonah staying in 1880s Gotham long-term: He's not comfortable in cities, so this is going to be a little odd...but on the other hand, it'll make him even more ornery than usual, and that's always fun.
Coming in second place is DC Universe Presents. I'm a sucker for anthology titles, and I've always had a fondness for Deadman (the original stack contained reprints of his Neal Adams-drawn debut) that's only grown since Brightest Day. I'll give it a flip first, but most likely. this is a buy.
Everything after this is one "maybe" after another. I'll give them all a good hard look on release, but I don't know how many will become monthly pulls. In no particular order:
Green Lantern: I've been a regular buyer of GL since Rebirth, but I'm starting to feel burned out. The Emerald Knight has been going on one Crusade after another for...what, two years? Three? Not to say I haven't enjoyed the stories, but when was the last time this space cop busted somebody? Yeah, I don't remember, either. I also might take a peek at the Red Lanterns title, simply because I like Dex-Starr...if the rage kitty is the headliner, I'll buy it!
Birds of Prey: I've been buying BoP since it was just a special starring Oracle and Black Canary, but this...I'm not sure if this is even the same dang book. They're really got to wow me with their #1 or I'm done.
Batgirl: On the good side, it's Gail Simone writing, and I've had this on-again/off-again interest in various Batgirls over the years, Babs included. On the bad side, I REALLY want an explanation as to how the heck she's getting out of the wheelchair.
Swamp Thing: My taste in the big green guy leans more towards Alan Moore and Rick Vetich, but I'm curious. I suppose that's what this whole gig is about, right? Hooking those who are curious about one title or another and giving them jumping-on point. Problem here is, aside from the aforementioned writers, most everyone else who's written Swampy does it quite badly, so I might run the other way screaming.
Hawk and Dove: I've kinda gotten hooked on Dove thanks to her appearances in Brightest Day and Birds of Prey, but I don't like Hawk at all, so this one's really dicey for me. On the plus side, they mention in the solicit that Deadman is Dove's boyfriend, and I'm curious to see how this works now he's...well...dead again.
Blackhawks: Number-one reason to crack this one open on release day? To see if Zinda Blake is in it. I've loved Lady Blackhawk ever since her first appearance in Birds of Prey, and since it looks like she won't be there anymore, I reckon this is the most likely place for her to turn up (the book's called "Blackhawks", fer cryin' out loud! Why wouldn't she be in it?). Or she might no longer exist. In which case I'll raise a beer in her honor and then cry in it. Even if Zinda's not here, though, I might pick it up, for the same reasons I'm considering Men of War when it hits: I've been known to read war books here and there. However, being modern warfare instead of the WWII icons they take their names from, it's iffy that I'll stay with it.
So, that's the rundown. When we get to September, I'll give you an update of what I decided to take the plunge on and what I passed over.
First up is the sure thing, the one that I'd buy no matter what, even if they passed some sort of comics law that said "Only one title per person": All-Star Western.
Coming in second place is DC Universe Presents. I'm a sucker for anthology titles, and I've always had a fondness for Deadman (the original stack contained reprints of his Neal Adams-drawn debut) that's only grown since Brightest Day. I'll give it a flip first, but most likely. this is a buy.
Everything after this is one "maybe" after another. I'll give them all a good hard look on release, but I don't know how many will become monthly pulls. In no particular order:
Green Lantern: I've been a regular buyer of GL since Rebirth, but I'm starting to feel burned out. The Emerald Knight has been going on one Crusade after another for...what, two years? Three? Not to say I haven't enjoyed the stories, but when was the last time this space cop busted somebody? Yeah, I don't remember, either. I also might take a peek at the Red Lanterns title, simply because I like Dex-Starr...if the rage kitty is the headliner, I'll buy it!
Birds of Prey: I've been buying BoP since it was just a special starring Oracle and Black Canary, but this...I'm not sure if this is even the same dang book. They're really got to wow me with their #1 or I'm done.
Batgirl: On the good side, it's Gail Simone writing, and I've had this on-again/off-again interest in various Batgirls over the years, Babs included. On the bad side, I REALLY want an explanation as to how the heck she's getting out of the wheelchair.
Hawk and Dove: I've kinda gotten hooked on Dove thanks to her appearances in Brightest Day and Birds of Prey, but I don't like Hawk at all, so this one's really dicey for me. On the plus side, they mention in the solicit that Deadman is Dove's boyfriend, and I'm curious to see how this works now he's...well...dead again.
So, that's the rundown. When we get to September, I'll give you an update of what I decided to take the plunge on and what I passed over.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
I haven't dreaded September this much since I graduated high school.
Okay, time to post about the subject that finally convinced me to start a blog: DC's decision to reboot all their titles back to #1. I'm not one of those folks on the DCMB that's screaming "I'm gonna quit, you guys suck!" or whatever, but I am a little taken aback that they're smacking the reset button with very little preamble. Yeah, I know, it's just a "soft reboot", they're not erasing everything. I'll believe that when the new stuff hits in September. Right now, I feel like I'm sneaking alongside a wall, and around the corner there's all this clamor going on that I can't quite make out and I'm not sure if I want to. Yep, this fangirl is beginning to wonder if she should cut her losses and run the other way.
I should be used to these sort of shakeups, since they've been going on literally as long as I've been reading comics. Like I said before, I got my first taste in 1984, which is when Crisis On Infinite Earths hit. For a full year, DC slowly tore down then rebuilt their whole universe. Funny thing is, out of that entire stack of comics my dad gave me, very few contained references to Crisis (I somehow managed to acquire no issues of that historic 12-part miniseries), so all I knew was that, somewhere off-panel, something very big was happening. It wasn't until 5 years later, when I became a regular reader, that I learned what "pre-Crisis" meant, and that most of my grounding in comics came from there. I had to re-learn some things (Supergirl and Superboy never existed?), and a few post-Crisis changes were a bit too drastic for me (What the heck happened to the Legion of Super-Heroes?!? Timber Wolf's a big furry monster!), but for the most part, I managed well enough. Batman was still Batman, Jason Todd was still a jerk (I didn't get to vote for his death, but I didn't exactly cry over it either), and Swamp Thing was still pretty darn cool for a guy made out of algae.
As years went on, I dug into quarter boxes and got all 12 parts of COIE (yep, quarter boxes...seeing as how there was no trade edition back then, I got real lucky), as well as all the issues of Who's Who, including the updates and the looseleaf version. I absorbed the stuff real easy, learning the differences between pre- and post-Crisis so I could flip between eras without getting lost. I still use those books as reference when certain things come up, like what were the circumstances behind Barry Allen killing Reverse-Flash (yes, I actually looked that item up last week). By the time Zero Hour rolled around in '94, I knew what to expect: things are going to change, be ready for it. I agreed with many of the tweaks, especially since it gave me a version of the LSH that I quickly grew to love, but like Crisis, we all knew it was coming, it was right there in the storylines. Even with Infinite Crisis ten years later, we had warning, and we got to watch it unfold. Didn't think that all of DC's decisions this time around were the proper ones, but they carried it off decently enough.
Unfortunately, this is also when I began to lose faith in the DCU in general. Just before the "One Year Later" jump, I found myself enjoying my regular titles less and less. Green Lantern came through it fine, Jonah Hex was completely unaffected (one of the perks of living in the past!), but Batman and all the other Gothamites? It became of downward spiral of storylines that I just didn't give a darn about. Nightwing became the first casualty for me, and I dropped his title with little hesitation. Then they announced that Bruce Wayne was going to die, and that both the Robin and Birds of Prey titles were getting cancelled, and I didn't flinch. "Thanks for making the decision for me," I said. "I just needed a good excuse to let them go." You know how strange it was to go into the shop those first couple of months and not have a Bat-title waiting in the pull box for me? I'd been living in Gotham City for twenty years, so you'd think it'd be a hard adjustment, but it wasn't. I will admit, I bought the first dozen issues or so of Batgirl when they re-launched it with Stephanie Brown under the cowl, but it never caught on with me, and I just recently took those issues out of the longbox and tossed them into the sell bag for the next con, along with all the OYL Nightwing issues. God, I used to be hardcore for the Bat, and now I look at the newer stuff and just shrug.
I got a bolster of hope after Blackest Night/Brightest Day came out. I was enjoying the new BoP title, thanks to Gail Simone writing them again (my disappointment with the previous version didn't begin until after she left), Green Lantern was still moving along at a good pace, and Jonah Hex had just passed fifty issues (Fifty! We were all afraid it wouldn't last twelve!). Then the bombshell comes: "Hey, you know that Flashpoint miniseries you've been ignoring? Well, guess what? We using it as an excuse to reboot! All those titles we just started up after Brightest Day...GONE! All the anticipation over Batman and Superman closing in on the 1,000-issue mark...GONE! No time to adjust, no time to wrap up storylines, we're just gonna throw all the readers into the deep end of the pool, and if you can't swim...oh well, we wanted to bring in new readers anyways!"
So here I am, sneaking alongside a wall, and around the corner there's all this clamor going on that I can't quite make out and I'm not sure if I want to. Do I stay or do I go? All I know is that my husband keeps whispering "Excelsior!" whenever I talk with him about this. I'm not ready to fully expatriate, though (I have been buying Captain America for a few years and enjoying the heck out of it, but that's as far into Marvel territory as I've gone with my own pulls recently). I want to stay in the DCU to some degree, I'm just not sure which section of it I'll be living in.
That's the subject of my next post: The lay of the land in DCNu as can be seen in the solicits, and what corners of it look inviting. It'll also be my first attempt at putting up pictures on this blog-thingy. Fingers crossed!
I should be used to these sort of shakeups, since they've been going on literally as long as I've been reading comics. Like I said before, I got my first taste in 1984, which is when Crisis On Infinite Earths hit. For a full year, DC slowly tore down then rebuilt their whole universe. Funny thing is, out of that entire stack of comics my dad gave me, very few contained references to Crisis (I somehow managed to acquire no issues of that historic 12-part miniseries), so all I knew was that, somewhere off-panel, something very big was happening. It wasn't until 5 years later, when I became a regular reader, that I learned what "pre-Crisis" meant, and that most of my grounding in comics came from there. I had to re-learn some things (Supergirl and Superboy never existed?), and a few post-Crisis changes were a bit too drastic for me (What the heck happened to the Legion of Super-Heroes?!? Timber Wolf's a big furry monster!), but for the most part, I managed well enough. Batman was still Batman, Jason Todd was still a jerk (I didn't get to vote for his death, but I didn't exactly cry over it either), and Swamp Thing was still pretty darn cool for a guy made out of algae.
As years went on, I dug into quarter boxes and got all 12 parts of COIE (yep, quarter boxes...seeing as how there was no trade edition back then, I got real lucky), as well as all the issues of Who's Who, including the updates and the looseleaf version. I absorbed the stuff real easy, learning the differences between pre- and post-Crisis so I could flip between eras without getting lost. I still use those books as reference when certain things come up, like what were the circumstances behind Barry Allen killing Reverse-Flash (yes, I actually looked that item up last week). By the time Zero Hour rolled around in '94, I knew what to expect: things are going to change, be ready for it. I agreed with many of the tweaks, especially since it gave me a version of the LSH that I quickly grew to love, but like Crisis, we all knew it was coming, it was right there in the storylines. Even with Infinite Crisis ten years later, we had warning, and we got to watch it unfold. Didn't think that all of DC's decisions this time around were the proper ones, but they carried it off decently enough.
Unfortunately, this is also when I began to lose faith in the DCU in general. Just before the "One Year Later" jump, I found myself enjoying my regular titles less and less. Green Lantern came through it fine, Jonah Hex was completely unaffected (one of the perks of living in the past!), but Batman and all the other Gothamites? It became of downward spiral of storylines that I just didn't give a darn about. Nightwing became the first casualty for me, and I dropped his title with little hesitation. Then they announced that Bruce Wayne was going to die, and that both the Robin and Birds of Prey titles were getting cancelled, and I didn't flinch. "Thanks for making the decision for me," I said. "I just needed a good excuse to let them go." You know how strange it was to go into the shop those first couple of months and not have a Bat-title waiting in the pull box for me? I'd been living in Gotham City for twenty years, so you'd think it'd be a hard adjustment, but it wasn't. I will admit, I bought the first dozen issues or so of Batgirl when they re-launched it with Stephanie Brown under the cowl, but it never caught on with me, and I just recently took those issues out of the longbox and tossed them into the sell bag for the next con, along with all the OYL Nightwing issues. God, I used to be hardcore for the Bat, and now I look at the newer stuff and just shrug.
I got a bolster of hope after Blackest Night/Brightest Day came out. I was enjoying the new BoP title, thanks to Gail Simone writing them again (my disappointment with the previous version didn't begin until after she left), Green Lantern was still moving along at a good pace, and Jonah Hex had just passed fifty issues (Fifty! We were all afraid it wouldn't last twelve!). Then the bombshell comes: "Hey, you know that Flashpoint miniseries you've been ignoring? Well, guess what? We using it as an excuse to reboot! All those titles we just started up after Brightest Day...GONE! All the anticipation over Batman and Superman closing in on the 1,000-issue mark...GONE! No time to adjust, no time to wrap up storylines, we're just gonna throw all the readers into the deep end of the pool, and if you can't swim...oh well, we wanted to bring in new readers anyways!"
So here I am, sneaking alongside a wall, and around the corner there's all this clamor going on that I can't quite make out and I'm not sure if I want to. Do I stay or do I go? All I know is that my husband keeps whispering "Excelsior!" whenever I talk with him about this. I'm not ready to fully expatriate, though (I have been buying Captain America for a few years and enjoying the heck out of it, but that's as far into Marvel territory as I've gone with my own pulls recently). I want to stay in the DCU to some degree, I'm just not sure which section of it I'll be living in.
That's the subject of my next post: The lay of the land in DCNu as can be seen in the solicits, and what corners of it look inviting. It'll also be my first attempt at putting up pictures on this blog-thingy. Fingers crossed!
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
I betcha Hal Jordon and Hank Hall got tons of this in their medicine cabinets.
From One Minute Galactica, maker of Nerdy Instructional Films and other fine products.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Secret Origin Time!
Okay, not really all that secret. Lots of people know this stuff, I just needed a dang title.
When I was a wee fangirl growing up in Michigan, my dad worked for a toy company that later became part of Fundimensions, which was an umbrella name for MPC, Lionel Trains, and Craft Master in the mid-80s. So, unlike most kids whose only exposure to the toy industry was TV commercials and the aisles of Toys R Us, I got pretty familiar right off the bat with the concept of licensed products. That's not to say that I wasn't duped into liking dumb things just because a pitchman told me to, but I also knew that, when my dad went to New York not long after my birthday every year, he was going to Toy Fair to check out what was new and hot before it even hit the shelf. I recall begging him to take me a few times, but it never worked, and in my head, New York soon became this mythical land that revolved around FAO Schwartz. However, my dad would sometimes bring his work home with him: I still remember the night we played with a remote control R2-D2 that one of his buddies at Kenner loaned to him. I have an RC Dalek these days that could probably run circles around it, but when I was three, this was the end-all-be-all pinnacle of coolness. I treasured toys of all shapes and sizes, and would love to just look at the darn things in catalogs.
So that's the first link in the fangirl chain. The second goes back to that R2-D2 toy: the mass-merchandise phenomenon that is Star Wars. Again, I was three when this came out, and I shall be perfectly honest when I say that I screamed like the little girl I was when we saw it the theatre. DARTH VADER SCARED ME TO DEATH! Every time I peeked out from behind my fingers, there he was, glaring at me from the screen. I actually refused to see The Empire Strikes Back when it came out because I knew Darth freakin' Vader was waiting to get me. Mind you, this didn't stop me from playing with the action figures or reading the storybooks, but to go sit in that darkened auditorium? No way no how! Thank God I mellowed out by the time I got to elementary school, because some parent had managed to get a hold of the first reel of Star Wars, and that became a special treat over the years: going down to the lunchroom/gym, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and watching Luke and Han and Princess Leia get projected onto the cement wall (note to all you young'uns: this occurred in the days before home video, so this was the ONLY way to see the movie once it was out of the theatre!).
The third link comes from my mom, who taught me how to draw Snoopy when I was little. Like most kids, I gravitated towards cartoons (both animated and in the newspaper), and by the age of 5, I had a goal of becoming a cartoonist (I figured I'd squeeze it in when I wasn't being an astronaut). Because of this, I studied linework and tried to copy my favorites until I got a style down that fit me good (I also made a brief living one summer by selling my drawings to neighborhood kids...the venture collapsed within a week). I've become a pretty fair artist since then, and I really did consider making a career out of it when I entered college, but I couldn't stand being told what to draw day after day by my teachers. I still love looking at vintage newspaper strips and checking out what new 'toons are on TV, though the plotlines of some are just a tad too out there for my tastes.
The fourth and strongest link in my fangirliness is what sent me right over the edge. One of the licenses that my dad's company had the rights to was DC Comics: they'd make models and magic-marker posters and rubber-stamp kits of Superman and Batman and all their Spandex buddies, and due to this, DC would occasionally send the company free comics. These were totally random issues of whatever DC was printing the month they made the package, and one day in 1984, my dad decided to bring one of these comp packages home for us kids. Now, keep in mind that the only comic book I'd seen before this was an Uncle Scrooge that I swiped from a friend of mine. So here I am, a 10-year-old wannabe cartoonist with a love of overblown adventure stories, looking at this foot-high pile of reading material. I don't know how they managed to pry the things outta my hands so I could eat dinner! I READ EVERYTHING. Even the stuff I probably shouldn't have been reading at age 10 like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run and the Mature Readers-labeled Vigilante. I didn't understand half of what was going on, but dangit, I was going to learn!
And learn I did. Any hopes my mom had of getting me to act like a normal little girl were irrevocably shattered (not that things were looking so hot before that: I supposedly announced to her around the age of 6 that I would never put on a dress again or wear my hair in pigtails). My already-healthy reading appetite kicked into high gear when we moved to a town that had both a public library and a comic book store within walking distance...and this was in 1989, the Year of the Batman, so I went absolutely bonkers and never looked back. I still own about 80% of what I've termed "the original stack", and many of my current favorite comics were introduced to me there. I'll give you a breakdown of the particulars in later posts.
So that's my secret origin. A bunch of random events that blended together to create the craziest fangirl known to the Interwebs. Maybe not the most unique origin, but it's the only one I've got.
When I was a wee fangirl growing up in Michigan, my dad worked for a toy company that later became part of Fundimensions, which was an umbrella name for MPC, Lionel Trains, and Craft Master in the mid-80s. So, unlike most kids whose only exposure to the toy industry was TV commercials and the aisles of Toys R Us, I got pretty familiar right off the bat with the concept of licensed products. That's not to say that I wasn't duped into liking dumb things just because a pitchman told me to, but I also knew that, when my dad went to New York not long after my birthday every year, he was going to Toy Fair to check out what was new and hot before it even hit the shelf. I recall begging him to take me a few times, but it never worked, and in my head, New York soon became this mythical land that revolved around FAO Schwartz. However, my dad would sometimes bring his work home with him: I still remember the night we played with a remote control R2-D2 that one of his buddies at Kenner loaned to him. I have an RC Dalek these days that could probably run circles around it, but when I was three, this was the end-all-be-all pinnacle of coolness. I treasured toys of all shapes and sizes, and would love to just look at the darn things in catalogs.
So that's the first link in the fangirl chain. The second goes back to that R2-D2 toy: the mass-merchandise phenomenon that is Star Wars. Again, I was three when this came out, and I shall be perfectly honest when I say that I screamed like the little girl I was when we saw it the theatre. DARTH VADER SCARED ME TO DEATH! Every time I peeked out from behind my fingers, there he was, glaring at me from the screen. I actually refused to see The Empire Strikes Back when it came out because I knew Darth freakin' Vader was waiting to get me. Mind you, this didn't stop me from playing with the action figures or reading the storybooks, but to go sit in that darkened auditorium? No way no how! Thank God I mellowed out by the time I got to elementary school, because some parent had managed to get a hold of the first reel of Star Wars, and that became a special treat over the years: going down to the lunchroom/gym, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and watching Luke and Han and Princess Leia get projected onto the cement wall (note to all you young'uns: this occurred in the days before home video, so this was the ONLY way to see the movie once it was out of the theatre!).
The third link comes from my mom, who taught me how to draw Snoopy when I was little. Like most kids, I gravitated towards cartoons (both animated and in the newspaper), and by the age of 5, I had a goal of becoming a cartoonist (I figured I'd squeeze it in when I wasn't being an astronaut). Because of this, I studied linework and tried to copy my favorites until I got a style down that fit me good (I also made a brief living one summer by selling my drawings to neighborhood kids...the venture collapsed within a week). I've become a pretty fair artist since then, and I really did consider making a career out of it when I entered college, but I couldn't stand being told what to draw day after day by my teachers. I still love looking at vintage newspaper strips and checking out what new 'toons are on TV, though the plotlines of some are just a tad too out there for my tastes.
The fourth and strongest link in my fangirliness is what sent me right over the edge. One of the licenses that my dad's company had the rights to was DC Comics: they'd make models and magic-marker posters and rubber-stamp kits of Superman and Batman and all their Spandex buddies, and due to this, DC would occasionally send the company free comics. These were totally random issues of whatever DC was printing the month they made the package, and one day in 1984, my dad decided to bring one of these comp packages home for us kids. Now, keep in mind that the only comic book I'd seen before this was an Uncle Scrooge that I swiped from a friend of mine. So here I am, a 10-year-old wannabe cartoonist with a love of overblown adventure stories, looking at this foot-high pile of reading material. I don't know how they managed to pry the things outta my hands so I could eat dinner! I READ EVERYTHING. Even the stuff I probably shouldn't have been reading at age 10 like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run and the Mature Readers-labeled Vigilante. I didn't understand half of what was going on, but dangit, I was going to learn!
And learn I did. Any hopes my mom had of getting me to act like a normal little girl were irrevocably shattered (not that things were looking so hot before that: I supposedly announced to her around the age of 6 that I would never put on a dress again or wear my hair in pigtails). My already-healthy reading appetite kicked into high gear when we moved to a town that had both a public library and a comic book store within walking distance...and this was in 1989, the Year of the Batman, so I went absolutely bonkers and never looked back. I still own about 80% of what I've termed "the original stack", and many of my current favorite comics were introduced to me there. I'll give you a breakdown of the particulars in later posts.
So that's my secret origin. A bunch of random events that blended together to create the craziest fangirl known to the Interwebs. Maybe not the most unique origin, but it's the only one I've got.
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