I can only actually remember owning one comic book as a child. It was an Incredible Hulk number. I don't remember much about it. Bruce Banner was being strafed by a WWII-era fighter plane for some reason, and he thought to himself that if just one of those .50-caliber bullets hit him, he'd be dead, and that thought upset him so much that he turned into the Hulk. There was also someone in the same volume who'd been shrunk down to much smaller than a bee, and was fleeing from a bee. I don't know whether that was Bruce Banner as well, or if it was a separate story which just happened to be in the same volume.
I was asking myself why I never had any more comics besides that one, and I was thinking it was because I never had any money to buy them, but that's not true: I had a paper route.
What did I do with all the money from the paper route? I don't remember. In any case, it wasn't comics. (I don't know whether the correct term is "comics" or "comic books," and to all those people who feel very strongly that I should use one term or the other, I'd just like to say that I don't care.)
During parts of the 1980's and 90's, I lived in Columbus, Ohio, maybe a mile from a huge comic book store. I went in and browsed a few times, but I felt unwelcome, somehow. By contrast, there were several used-book stores in town where I felt very welcome, spent a lot of time, talked to the people running the stores, etc.
Why did I feel unwelcome in the comic-book store? Well, I suppose one possibility is that I wasn't unwelcome, and the guys who worked there were thinking, "How come that guy always walks past the store, hardly ever comes in, and when he does he seems so unfriendly?"
Another possibility that occurs to me is that they were physically afraid of me. I'm a big guy, more Hulk than Banner. Maybe I reminded them of people who'd bullied them in school or whatnot.
Or maybe they were just jerks and I'm better off, I don't know.
Recently, on TV, I saw parts of the movie Unbreakable with Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson. Only parts of it, because it didn't hold my attention enough to make me want to sit through the whole thing. Anyway, Jackson's character made some very bold statements about the cultural significance of comic books, and I wondered how seriously I should take those comments, and SPOILER ALERT then it turned out that Jackson's character was the bad guy, and that made me wonder whether his statements were to be taken less seriously. But like I say, I've never even seen the whole movie, so --
Just today, reading along in a Facebook conversation between some friends of mine about comic books, I was about to chime in that I've been somewhat interested in 21st-century movies made from comic books, and ask whether or not that counted and meant that now, at last, I too had become a true comic nerd.
But then, trying to be really honest about it, I had to admit that my interest in those movies is almost entirely about Scarlett Johansson.
I just think she's really, really cool, and I'd gladly watch any movie she's in, and, to be honest, other than the character she's played in a lot of the comic-book movies, Natasha Romanoff, I haven't been paying very close attention to all of those movies. Could I describe the plot of a single one of them? Hmmm... not very well.
And so I remain a comic-book outsider, but since I have some friends now who are fans, I'm starting to listen to conversations about them, and hearing things which seem to make perfectly good sense, such as that comics in general, and individual artists such as Stan Lee in particular, have always been very progressive politically.
Which would mean, for example, that fanboys who are complaining about what they call political correctness in comics, with characters like Rey in the Star Wars movies, and the new female Captain Marvel (hmm, not so new, apparently, seems the female Captain Marvel was in comic books as long ago as the 1980's), are missing the boat.
Anyway, I'm listening, and I'm not claiming that I'm keeping up, but... I'm listening.
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