So my hair's starting to both creep backward and to thin out a bit. In an effort not to be some loser with long, thinning hair I've shaved it down to 1/4 inch. I'm told that it doesn't look bad, which is fine, but the really good thing about this new hairstyle is the fact that if you rub my head it feels like you're petting a cat.
JOHN APPROVED
I'm back home now. My superpowers have been fully re-charged from Florida's warm sun and I'm ready to blog like no blogger has ever blogged before. Blog!
I will miss the warm weather, but I'm pleased to have escaped America and it's deadly "orange" terror alert level (running joke: it was only yellow before I got there). Here the terror alert holds steady at...well, nothing. Because we don't colour code our abstract national sentiments here. If I had to guess, I'd say the terror alert is at level "meh" here.
So, Marvel Island. I have actually been there before. Four times before, actually. And EVERY TIME the damn Spider-Man ride BREAKS! You have to fix that shit, Universal Studios! Seriously! Good ride, though. Excellent waiting area, too.
Dr Doom's Fear Fall was one of the few rides I hadn't been on before. Something about that Spider-Man ride breaking repeatedly kinda makes you lose confidence in strapping yourself into a death drop machine. It's fun that a theme park would assume that people would be into a ride that has the supposed purpose of harnessing enough "fear fuel" to destroy the Fantastic Four. I gotta say, Doom, the ride was a little weak. Looked great, kinda scary. Don't know if you got enough fear out of me to destroy your enemies. If you were harnessing confusion, maybe...
The whole island looks great. Lots of fun stuff to look at. I dream of a DC-themed park that puts this amount of effort in. Cause Six Flags ain't cuttin' it.
Hee! Namor: King of the Restrooms!
Oh, and check this out:
Ha! Marvel heroes ride ATVs! I'd like to see Superman ride one of those. Except I WON'T because he would NEVER do that. The saddest thing was when some dude blew an airhorn and all the heroes had to come running and jump on these little vehicles and ride back into their...cage...I presume.
Here's my buddy Steph and her bespectacled pal, Cyclops:
This was kinda puzzling:
The good news is that I did get to meet Captain America. It was magical.
As I've already shared, I am on a quest to discover why I have been unable to embrace Marvel, despite a crazy love for little colourful pictures of people in costumes emitting bubbles of text. I feel that documenting my thoughts as I explore the Marvel universe is a good way to get to the root of the problem.
So here's my Marvel thoughts for the day:
How many Marvel heroes are unfortunate vicitims? And what I mean, is, how many of them are more cursed than gifted, and would much prefer being normal? By my count, it's quite a few. The Hulk would be the most obvious. Also, The Thing, Ghost Rider and a whole lot of mutants. I know that the whole point of Marvel is to offer superhero stories that are gritty and real and full of inner conflict...but jeez! Marvel makes it hard for comic readers to do what we like best: fantasize about being superheroes. Every damn character is miserable.
I think I have a crush on Captain America. I look forward to meeting him on the Mythical Marvel Island at Universal Studios on Sunday. I will be getting my nails done first.
Oddly, I might also have a crush on Iron Man. So it makes it hard to "choose sides," as it were. (Actually, Iron Man is clearly the douche in Civil War. It's like choosing between ice cream and cancer).
It's also clear that Captain America and Iron Man have crushes on each other, but that kinda goes without saying. I mean, are we supposed to not think they are in love?
Namor is kinda awesome.
Nicolas Cage seemed to be having a lot of fun playing Ghost Rider. I seriously kinda liked that movie. I mean to me, Ghost Rider looks cool, and that's all he really means to me. So as long as he looked cool in the movie (he did) that's all I care about. Also, I always think that I hate Nicolas Cage, but every time I watch one of his movies I kinda love him. He's so crazy. Was all the stuff in the movie about jelly beans and the Carpenters made up, or was that canon? Delightful!
Have you seen the ads for that singing, dancing Spider-Man doll for toddlers? It's creepy.
One of my resolutions for 2007 was to gain an appreciation for Marvel. I am trying to discover why I hold undying love for the DC universe, yet am pretty much apathetic toward the Marvel cast of characters.
I am trying to take note of specific things about Marvel that bother me. Here are three I have decided on so far:
1. Marvel takes place in real cities in real America. Really there's nothing wrong with that, but it still bores me for some reason. Maybe I don't want my superheroes referring to 9/11. It's also too restrictive. Fictional cities means endless possibilities, and imaginative architectural artwork. It's also impressive the way that DC has done such a good job creating fictional American cities, that fans can actually be offended if a cityscape doesn't "look like Gotham."
2. Marvel is unbearable quippy and cute. It's not like I mind witty banter between my superheroes. I am a big Keith Giffen fan, for example. But what Marvel is often lacking are clever jokes. A lot of the recent comics that I have read have sounded like bad sitcoms.
3. I think I might hate Spider-Man. He. Won't. Shut. Up. I get that he's supposed to be full of bad jokes and kind of lovably annoying, but I seriously could not be in the same room as that guy for more than a minute. And I, of course, am talking about current Spider-Man. He used to be much cooler.
My journey to discover Marvel has involved the following so far this year:
- Reading Civil War (and all related tie-ins)
- Reading New Avengers in order
- Watching the Fantastic Four movie
- Watching Ghost Rider (seriously...not as bad as I thought it would be)
- Reading the rest of the Grant Morrison run on X-Men (I'd only read the first 10-12 issues or so)
- Reading the Frank Miller run on Daredevil
- Reading any Marvel that anyone lends to me or recommends
And so my quest has lead me here to Florida, where I will head to Marvel Island at Universal Studios in a few short days. I will interact with Marvel characters in their natural habitat and, apparantly, "ride them." I look forward to it, and will be documenting with pictures.
America, by the way, is amazing. They have fake diners instead of real ones.
So two of my friends just became roommates, and upon examining their collective possessions they discovered that they had over twenty different types of tea. Two facts occur: 1) these guys like to drink tea and 2) there will be a lot of peeing in this house. My friends, being who they are, hit upon a third fact: If 20 teas are good and will generate a lot of urine, they said, then over one hundred teas would be awesome - and the collective fluid waste would reach staggering levels. Plumbers might be needed. Being who they are, my friends set out to gather a diverse selection of teas.
Further, it was determined that this tea collection would be even more wondrous if they could somehow share their impressions of the various teas (bagged and loose [like John Peter]) that they ingested. Standards were quickly set: they would report upon the tea's flavour, they would judge its overall quality by stating what they would trade for one kilo of said tea and they would answer the all-important ever-present question: sure it's a good (or a bad) tea, but would you dip your balls in it? The debate still rages on the issue of female reviewers and how they will address this important question.
So it's a blog, there's talk of tea, there's talk of testicles, it's
JOHN APPROVED
Here's a fun and widely-known fact: Superman and Batman don't kill, because Batman saw his parents horribly murdered in front of his eyes and Superman's a good guy about stuff like that. That's why the Joker and Lex Luthor are still running around: Superman and Batman just do not kill.
Oops. Except vampires, apparently. And intelligent machine entities. And monsters, space-dwelling sentient clouds and the occasional alien. Superman and Batman don't kill humans. Which is bullshit. It's the same sort of logic that shows up in fantasy novels all the time, where the hero spends most of the narrative carving up hopelessly outclassed members of supposedly 'evil' races like goblins only to get all moral and hesitant when his (or her, but usually his) opponent is another human, no matter how demonstrably evil. To me it smacks of crypto-racism - I'm sure that if I were still in university I'd be gearing up for an essay that mentions the Other a lot (with maybe a hint of the ol' Male Gaze, just for variety). I mean, *why* do we not kill other people, when you get right down to it? Because they're self-aware entities, just like we are, and if that's enough to save the Joker from your Bat-Wrath then you shouldn't be so damn casual about ripping off those vampire heads, Bruce. And Clark.
NOT APPROVED
Living Between Wednesdays is a place for people who love comic books and superheroes.
