Fellow Nerds! Hear me! We’re getting too much too fast! Our bespectacled faces are about to melt from the sheer joy of the mainstream’s willingness to pay attention to what is important to us. The Avengers marks the culmination of what I fear may be too much success for a group of people that have been historically disenfranchised.

Long have the Nerds sought for the artistry of comic book heroes to be recognized accurately on the big screen. We are entering into an age where The Lord of the Rings, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight franchise, and Marvel’s new slate of movies are seeing this dream realized. But heed my words of caution!

Part of a Nerd’s charm (not really, we’re quite socially awkward) is their ability to see society from an outsider’s perspective. Not caring for what was deemed socially superior like sports, dances, or not having asthma, a nerd retreated to other like minded people and immersed themselves in comic books and dungeons and dragons, etc. An escape created by those with similar interests and inability to breathe after short workouts.

But beware the tale of Icarus, fellow dweebs! We are headed too close to the sun, the “sun” being “social acceptance.” I fear it won’t be long before the status quo is changed forever and exchanges like this are heard in high schools everywhere:

A boy with a letterman jacket scans the hallway, seeing it’s clear he makes a quick prayer and heads to his football practice. Suddenly a group of Nerds appear out of nowhere.

Nerd 1: Well look what we have here!

Other Nerds chuckle menacingly.

Jock: Uh…Hey, I was just trying to get to practice.

Nerd 2: Football practice I bet!

Other Nerds high-five each other.

Nerd 1: Does your boyfriend know you have football practice?

Jock: Yes, he is also on the team.

(See? Being gay/gay marriage or really, “marriage” is totally cool in the future! See how I cleverly snuck that in there?)

Nerd 1: Oh okay, well I totally support your decision to be who you are but FOOTBALL IS FOR PUSSIES!

Nerd 2: LET’S AVENGE HIS ASS!

The Nerds take turn quoting lines from different superhero movies while giving him a wedgie.

And Scene.

This day is not far off on the pace we’re headed! When the Nerds become drunk with power and we are left with nothing! Nothing but the echoing words from a Nerd who saw it coming from the beginning. Who begged people to support the making of the movie American Pie: New Last Reunion Fun Time, Again! just to cleanse our pallets. Do I have the answer!? No. Honestly I want them to make a billion more Avengers movies.

Yet with my waning wisdom I remind us all, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Do you know where that’s from? Of course you do, you’re a nerd. It’s from the thing you said right before you stuffed the starting quarterback into a locker.

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You are a Joss Whedon fan. You loved Buffy. You sometimes have dirty dreams about Nathan Fillion. You are okay with the fact that Nathan Fillion was played by Jeremy Renner in The Avengers, because you could be convinced to have dirty dreams about him, too. You considered going to see The Avengers at midnight but you went the next day and even blew off some plans to see it in the middle of the day so you could spend the rest of your night talking about how awesome it was, because (like every other human being on the planet) you expected to find it unbearably awesome. You won’t watch Dollhouse because you’ve heard it’s not that good, and you can’t bear to see Joss like that. You want good things for the people you love.

But the awesome never came, the good things never came. And all that time spent avoiding Dollhouse was for naught.

You didn’t hate it, but you wanted to like it more, and you knew that thinking it “wasn’t terrible” wouldn’t be good enough. Like that time that you saw The Dark Knight and pointed out the badly-choreographed fight scenes to your friend who proceeded to have a hissy fit in the theater lobby. You know that only utter devotion to The Avengers’ awesomeness will be acceptable, so you hope no one brings it up and prey that they don’t. You know that, as a film critic, you will eventually have to write about it and plan to publish it under an assumed name. You will mail that piece from in an unmarked envelope from an unspecified location somewhere near East Timor.

And then you will disappear. You will make up a fake identity and move to one of those island nations where Republicans keep all their escort money and change your face to look like Saddam Hussein. You can start over.

Except that you don’t have the money for that. You barely have the money to eat. So, you find little things to comment on that you did like. “That Hawkeye sure looks good in a tank top!” “Captain America hates chicken shawarma. Hilarious!” or “Scarlett Johansson’s rear end is a terrific actress.” Or you find ways to hint at your dislike of the film, without ever actually saying anything unkind about it. You tell people, “If anything, it showed that Joss Whedon, who gave Robert Downey Jr. all the good dialogue, would be the perfect director for Iron Man 3.” “Considering all the work needed to weave those four different movies together, Joss Whedon made the best Avengers movie possible.” “It was like I was watching four movies! Hey, have you seen Inception!” or “I can’t wait for the sequel.”

You aren’t a good liar, and so you practice lying about the film in the mirror in case people call you out on not liking it. You ready your shocked, aghast, flabbergasted and surprised faces, like you’re in a Spanish soap opera. You buy a glove to slap people with. You work on your I’m-in-an-episode-of-Smash drink throw. You perfect your impromptu yawn that says, “Wow! I am suddenly too tired to finish this conversation” or you go back the gym and hit that treadmill hard, in case you need to flee from your assailant. You watch Runaway Bride, Marathon Man and Chariots of Fire to get tips and old tapes of Walter Payton and Barry Sanders to perfect the perfect stiff arm. If you get trapped by a mob of angry comic book fans, you scream: “Look! It’s Alan Moore and he brought scones!” And then you book it the other direction and don’t look back. Never look back and don’t stop running. Pretend it’s like Speed, except that you are the bus.

You get outed by one of your friends for not liking it and then spend most of your time defending your right to not like things, because you have an opinion. You mention that you didn’t like Forrest Gump, The Prestige, Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Artist, Forgetting Sarah Marshall or Full Metal Jacket and couldn’t care about The Usual Suspects because someone already told you the ending. You tell them that not everyone has to like the same things, because the Rotten Tomatoes message boards are not real life, and doesn’t that make life more interesting? You hope this will make it easier for them, to make it okay, to show that my not liking it doesn’t make Joss Whedon a bad director or me a heartless jerk. You mention that even Joss mentioned that he had problems with it, and you tell them how much you respect him for it and how much you were touched by his open letter to his fans.

This has the opposite effect. You will now have to defend not liking The Avengers AND Forrest Gump for the rest of your life. Your name will be synonymous with “stabbing kittens” and posters of you will be put up all over the neighborhood. Children will no longer be allowed to play with you and strangers won’t look you in the eye. This is your life now.

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For years, I begged the library to let me check out The Complete Fantastic Four. The hardcover volume totaled approximately 400,000 pages and contained every single story line that my Connect Four-board, pimply face could handle. My fingers, unable to regulate their moisture, would stain the panels. I didn’t care. I owned that anthology as much as I’ve ever owned anything throughout my life.

As the summer of 1999 dragged on, the heat pushed 13-year-old me indoors. At the request of my parents, I began volunteering at the public library. I was given a cart of books and asked to use a plastic potato peeler to remove all the old “date due” stickers. Needless to say, my hand-eye coordination didn’t lend to the necessary skillset required for such arduous work. Instead I would find a cool corner, preferably near a vent and out of view, and haphazardly scrape off stickers while thumbing through The Complete Fantastic Four, The Spider Man Anthology and X-Men: Volumes 1-10. I hated Doctor Doom and secretly pined after Mary Jane Watson. I thought Gambit was the best even though Nightcrawler’s teleportation was the power I longed to have. I wanted to be a superhero.

Years later, and with much clearer skin, I would purchase every X-Men: The Movie action figure. I had Mystique with the detachable Wolverine-mimic skin. I had Toad with spring-action jumping. I had Cyclops, even though all his action figure did was have a light-up face. I saw the first X-Men movie four times in theaters. I still watch it whenever it’s on television. When The Dark Knight was released, I painted my face like Heath Ledger’s Joker. The air-conditioning in the theater broke. Even as the makeup melted down into my eyes, I was swept away to Gotham City …and found myself sympathizing with a billionaire in a rubber suit talking in a comically-low gravelly growl.

In many ways, at almost 26 years old, I should be over superheroes. They were cool when I was scraping stickers off library books at 13, but what the hell? I have a job now. I have a blog now. I can fill out a polo shirt. I wear cutoffs and TOMS in the summertime. Yet there I was, at midnight, freaking out over The Avengers. I was laughing and clapping and cheering with all the fanboys. Before the movie, guys my age were comparing custom Avengers t-shirts. They were brandishing Thor hammers and Captain America shields. There was even a full-suit Iron Man in attendance. We are not kids anymore. In fact, no one in the theater appeared to be under the age of 20.

I was raised believing everything and everyone had intrinsic value. Even the villains (from the high-school bullies to the creeps on the news) had a place. Villains existed so that we could see good prevail. We could hopefully see a bully get beat up by a bigger, older kid. We saw bad men photographed in handcuffs, in mugshots, and plastered on the fronts of newspapers. When I was a kid, comic books taught me about a world that was pretty black and white. Heroes protected the general good, even though they were often complicated men and women. Villains, be they corrupted by power or external forces, sought to expose the worst in society. They needed to be stopped, which is why the good guys, no matter the odds, always seemed to win. What a naïve way of thinking.

The older I got, things changed. Good men failed in real life. I read stories of greed and corruption going unnoticed because the good guys perpetrated it. I saw bad guys and absolute villains get away with blatant crimes. The internet opened me up to a world of confusion, where things weren’t going the way they should be going. I understood motivation and circumstance, but I wanted something simpler. I wanted an escape and a regression. I wanted Doctor Doom to lose.

I don’t see too many teenagers at comic book movies. I certainly see a ton of 25-35 year old men at comic book movies. We walk a line that teenagers don’t. We know about the superhero complex. We came of age before computers slammed us with every angle on every story… minute-by-minute in real time. We had to pick and choose our content rather than have it force-fed to us. We picked the heroes we love because we saw ourselves in them. Batman is just a civilian in a suit with a vendetta, forced to confront extraordinarily deranged foes. Captain America is a soldier who takes order, respects authority, and stands up for good. Wolverine is a misunderstood outsider, fighting alongside a group of mutants who maybe don’t fully understand his internal struggle. There is humanity in each superhero story, even the most fantastic. We want to see ourselves in the panels, in the comics. We want them to fight battles that are too outrageous to totally understand — battles that make our daily struggles feel like nothing at all.

I’m drawn to superheroes, on page and on screen, not because I’m trying to out-nerd someone else, but because I love when the good guys win. For as humanized as actors and directors have become via the internet, I want to believe in gigantic characters they portray and the huge stories they bring to life. The superhero complex is why I keep going, often at midnight, to watch the latest galactic showdown or gritty origin story. Hero stories, for as complex as they get, are still about all of us. They’re about adversity, friendship, broken homes and misplaced destinies. They make our lives more manageable.

If Bruce Wayne becomes Batman to deal with the death of his family and avenge his city, suddenly my petty quarrels seem even less significant. Sometimes we need superheroes to remind us that we can’t give up on the world, on other people, or on ourselves.

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Bromance — A totally heterosexual relationship between two men who just happen to be really close and enjoy spending time together.

Todd thought about how much he enjoyed his bromance with Chad as they took turns spotting each other during their inner thigh workout routine at the gym.

Comic Book — A film script.

I went to the comic book store to check out what movies would be coming out next year.

Global Warming — 1. The detrimental effect of human behavior on the Earth’s climate, as observed in many recent ecological events.

It’s so hot out today, how could anyone think global warming isn’t real?

2. An attempt to generate fear over a series of natural ecological events by connecting them to a nonexistent pattern of global climate change.

It’s so cold out today, how could anyone think global warming is real?

Google (verb) — To instantly acquire knowledge, even in circumstances when the topic is particularly dense or esoteric.

Kathy originally feared that she was unqualified to perform brain surgery on herself, but, after Googling it, she felt prepared and confident.

Newspaper — In modern usage, “newspaper” denotes neither “news” nor “paper.” Rather, it refers to an online source (with nebulous ties to a decaying print-based medium) for gossip and misinformation.

I used my iPhone to read the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of the American Idol voter scandal.

Occupy — To just kind of chill out somewhere, you know? But like in a protest-y sort of way. Get it? That guy over there gets it. That guy’s cool.

This would be a good place to make an “I just occupied (insert noun)” joke.

Reality television — A genre of television featuring scripted scenarios and manufactured personas.

That reality television show has some of the best writers in Hollywood.

Sext (verb) — To text pictures of a sexual nature to another person, with the expectation of eventually receiving reciprocal pictures and/or being blackmailed.

I put a lot of thought into whether or not I should try sexting with Brenda, until I eventually just wound up hitting the “send” button by accident.

Sex Tape — A recording of a sexual encounter, featuring one or more celebrities (or prospective celebrities), that is discretely leaked to the press for publicity.

With his celebrity at an all-time low, Dan Aykroyd released a sex tape to get his career back on track.

Socialism — An economic theory vaguely associated with government ownership and redistribution of wealth, and espoused only the insidious offspring of Satan.

When accused of being both a pedophile and a proponent of socialism, Juan responded, “Hey! I’m not a socialist!”

Social network — A web site designed as a substitute for interpersonal communication.

Thanks to my continued presence on a popular social network, it took years for my friends and family to realize I had become an agoraphobic hermit.

Vampires — Undead creatures (usually sexualized) of varying characteristics, that are used primarily to liven up otherwise mundane movies, TV shows, and books aimed at teenagers.

I thought The Catcher in the Rye was okay, but it would’ve been a lot better if Holden Caulfield was a vampire.

Video Games — Software that provides users access to incredibly detailed, fully realized alternative universes that are far more enjoyable than regular life.

Steve became addicted to video games after deciding that killing zombies in a post-apocalyptic wasteland was slightly more satisfying than working at Bed, Bath, & Beyond and living in his parent’s unfinished basement.

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Recently, I’ve begun to question my nerd cred. While I’m nowhere near the bro-main of Axe Body Spray and UFC on pay-per-view, the proclivities of my geekier friends leave me in the dust. In fact, when my girlfriend drags me into a comic book store in search of an out of print Warren Ellis book, and I blithely smile at the employees as they offer their expertise, I doubt whether I’m any kind of a nerd at all.

Honestly, I’m much more comfortable watching football at a bar than playing Magic: The Gathering. But, once the Super Bowl is over and I have some whiskey in me, I just want to play Scrabble. I’d probably crush anyone in the sports bar at a word game. And I’d hold my own against any D&D fiend on a basketball court (even a Level 18 Fighter/ Thief). I really only thrive when I’m bringing a gun to a knife-fight. I kind of win by default, but on the inside, I’m still thinking, “I hope no one realizes I have no idea how to use this gun!”

I don’t fit in with either culture. Although I speak both languages, neither the vast emptiness of deep space nor the padded mats of a gym feels like home to me. I struggled like Manny Pacquiao escaping a chokehold to get through Season One of the recent Dr. Who reboot. But, at the same time, the idea of wearing an Affliction t-shirt leaves me so cold I could crawl inside a Tauntaun for the night. As I said, I am effectively bilingual, but I only have the fluency of a tourist. Yes, I know who Nathan Fillion is, but please, please don’t quiz me on Firefly plot points. I will fail. Miserably. In the same vein, I love Kevin Garnett, but I will, without a doubt, fail to make the playoffs in any fantasy basketball league. My tastes exist in a cultural no-man’s land.

So why am I so attached to this nerd identity? In part, it’s because my sense of self developed in my formative years. As a kid, I read fantasy novels and participated in role-playing games. I did musical theater in high school. I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation with my parents every week. While I played and floundered in youth sports and cowered at the violence of action movies, I excelled in the geekier pursuits.

More practically, though, I’m a much more believable dork. I look the part. Geek-chic fits my general demeanor: Helpful, polite, witty. Visually, I am very nerdy. I am not muscular. I slouch. Most notably, I wear thick-rimmed glasses. Glasses like mine were once the province of the true dweeb, the guy who needed those chunky plastic rims to hold lenses of bulletproof thickness. Now, though, they’re more fashion than function. Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo is the avatar for the bespectacled dork, even though over the last two decades, his lyrics have gone from the niche, “I’ve got a dungeon master’s guide/ I’ve got a 12-sided die,” to the more general, “Girl, if you’re wondering if I want you to… I want you to.” Like Rivers, I feel like I’ve outgrown the persona that people ascribe to me. But I still need the lenses. So what’s a guy to do?

It’s especially easy to identify as a nerd because the bar for certain things is set so low. My social skills are, to many, a pleasant surprise. Romantically speaking, it benefits me to present myself as a dweeb. Because girls who are looking for a “dude” will be put off by my lack of physical strength and refusal to tolerate housewives, real or desperate. But women who are used to meek weirdos are often dazzled by my lack of anxiety over meeting the parents or opening jars. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still plenty meek and weird. I just try to keep it at a functional level.

If I’m being honest (and isn’t that what this is all about?) I’m not a “nerd” or a “bro.” I think, technically, I’m just a “wimp.” That’s kind of hard to admit. There’s no wimp community. Bros bond over cars, sports, and Coronas; Nerds have comics, video games, and LARP-ing. It’s much harder to make friends when your common ground is compulsive politeness or a collection of Notorious B.I.G. t-shirts that you cover up with other shirts. I’m not obsessive (nerd) or abrasive (bro). I just don’t want to get in the way. The nerds have had their revenge, but sadly, that revolution was not mine. A similar wimp uprising will never take place, simply because we’d spend the entire time thinking: “Is everyone going to hate us now?”

If pressed on the issue, I’ll readily admit my lack of Nerd XP (experience points, if you lift weights). But there’s really no other way for me to dress. I can’t pull off jock, prep, thug, or Jersey Shore style. It’s argyle by default.

So if we meet, and you assume I’m a nerd, that’s fine. I probably won’t correct you. But that’s not because you’re right. It’s because wimps don’t like conflict.

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DuckTales has been rebooted as a new ongoing comic book from Kaboom!, and guess who’s read the first four issues? Guess? It’s me. I read them.

What’d you do today? Did you go to work? Read an article about Ryan Gosling? Have sex with another human in real life? Not me — I read the DuckTales comic book. If it has anthropomorphic ducks running around in people clothes, I’m probably going to invest an inordinate amount of time examining it, and DuckTales has that shit on every page. You see, this is how I’ve chosen to devote a small portion of my finite time on this planet — looking at images of ducks in airplanes, ducks yelling at yetis, and ducks eating top hats. Like dressing Kate Moss in clothes from the Gap or feeding Anthony Bourdain a plateful of McNuggets, so I treat my intellectually malnourished brain to an illustrated narrative concerning duck people.

Scrooge McDuck, to me, is arguably the most morally ambiguous character in the Disney cartoon oeuvre. On the one hand, he takes care of his nephew’s children, he abhors cheating, and his success is one built on self-reliance and hard work. On the other hand, he often resorts to exploitation, cruelty, and selfishness. While nearly every other Disney character is always portrayed with huge vacant grins, Scrooge McDuck’s face is perpetually frozen in a bitter hateful scowl. The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Carl Rosa is a goddamn masterpiece and the quintessential exploration of Scrooge’s development from ambitious young duck in a poor Scottish village to someone who swims in a money bin. It’s a well researched lushly plotted 12-issue series, and it won an Eisner award for best serialized story. Pixar should adapt it. Children should read it in school. It’s a fucking classic, you philistines.

When Warren Spector set out to write a DuckTales series, he faced a difficult dilemma. How do you make a rich old miser the hero of a comic book following a stock market crash, a bank bailout, and a recession? Greedy CEOs and their (white people) problems don’t exactly appeal to the young demographic Kaboom! seeks to attract, even if they are talking ducks. So for his first storyline, Spector pulled a brilliant move by centering the plot on a bet between Scrooge and his rival John D. Rockerduck over who can return the most plundered treasures to their original native owners. This comes about after Webby calls out Scrooge for either A) tricking natives out of their cultural treasures or B) exploiting their desperation. At first, true to form, Scrooge dismisses her cries for social justice as a fat load of hippie bullshit (in not so many words). Then Rockerduck appears on TV, declaring that he will return all of the plundered artifacts he’s collected to their original owners, galling Scrooge’s ego and the stage is set for the globetrotting plot.

Although the expedition itself is an altruistic one, truculent old Scrooge’s motivations come down to his inflated ego and his need to be the best — even if it’s at charity. Throughout the series, he orders his nephews around (“Lead on, double time! Neh, there are three of ye, so let’s make it triple time!” He treats a character named Farquardt like human — or whatever species he is — garbage. He demands that Launchpad pay for the airplanes he’s crashed and asks for a 30% cut of the tourism revenue for one of the items he returns. Yet despite these ethical failings, he has a brief realization toward the end: “Doing the right thing, even when it’s hard, is one of life’s most rewarding experiences,” he tells Webbie. Hmm, it feels disingenuous I think.

Interesting to note is Webbie’s expanded role in this series. Past depictions have portrayed her as a sort of caricature of a girl rather than a fully realized character. Here, however, she’s the only female sibling of boy triplets who have largely ostracized her. She’s presumed to be an asinine little girl, and thus, patronized and disregarded. Because of this, she’s forced to work extra hard to prove herself. One of her brothers says at one point, “This is man’s work,” to which she replies, “What does a girl have to do to up her status with you boys?” and proceeds to list all the ways she’s demonstrated her superior intelligence and audacity. Huey, Dewey, and Louie look at her like their balls are in a vice. Later, she gives her iconic pink bow to a yeti in what I would assert is a feminist gesture symbolic of the stripping away of cultural conventions concerning gender, but is more likely an excuse to see her bow on the evil dog guy cause it’s funny and stuff.

This series does not approach Don Rosa’s standard of quality in terms of writing although the art approximates the look of the cartoon fairly well. At times, the pacing feels rushed, but then there are long stretches of agonizingly dull dialogue about museum revenue and such. I think the problem was that the stakes weren’t high enough, and John D. Rockerduck just isn’t a threatening villain. If it were up to me, this wouldn’t be a light and breezy comic, but a haunting character study exploring the depths of Scrooge’s cruelty as he busts unions and lays off workers, but it’s for kids or whatever so fuck me, right? I did however enjoy all the references to past episodes of DuckTales as well as to the Don Rosa series. There’s even a cameo from a certain Darkwing Duck villain in there.

In my opinion, fans of the Uncle Scrooge comics will be disappointed by this series while those who feel nostalgia for the cartoon might glean some mild amusement from it. Me, I’ll keep reading regardless because I’m possessed by a rapacious appetite for images of ducks doing people things. It started in daycare when the teachers would turn on DuckTales after they’d run out of activities, and the images metastasized through my brain like an insidious weed. Sometimes late at night, I lie awake, humming the theme song. It’s probably the best theme song in the history of television.

And let me conclude with this little nugget: Scrooge McDuck died in 1967.

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I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve never been much of a comic book freak. I had childhood flirtations with X-Men, Spiderman, and, of course, Wolverine, but it didn’t take long for me to grow out of them. The rampant use of dues ex machina, the soap opera relationships, and the sometimes unintelligible back-stories and tie-ins quickly had me throwing up my hands in despair at the superhero genre altogether. It was actually William Blake that wooed me back, half-unwilling, to the pages of story told with pictures. So, now I’m discovering late a bunch of comics that lots of people like me probably never discovered at all.

Transmetropolitan Vol. 2

One of the first books I read upon returning to the fold was Transmetropolitan, and it’s still one of the best. Think Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Blade Runner. Spider Jerusalem, a drug-addled gonzo journalist of the future is forced out of seclusion by his publishers. Armed only with his laptop, a pair of camera-glasses and a ray-gun called “the bowel disruptor” (which does pretty much what it sounds like) Jerusalem proceeds to rampage all over the dystopian city of the future, culminating in a battle of words with two corrupt presidents.

The story, characters, and art are simultaneously engrossing and gross; I think there’s more vomit than sex in the series, which I know isn’t selling it, but there’s something less cheap about vomit in a comic book. I mean, I don’t often hear people exclaim, “That’s just how it is: vomit sells! We need more vomit!”  But bowel-disruptors and other ejaculations from various orifices aside, the story pulls you in with a coherent over-arching plot bedecked now and again with amusing side-shows that are expertly interwoven back into the main line by the end of the series. Oh, and that’s another thing going for it: this series knew how to end. I don’t know if the creators had the ending in mind from the beginning, but it reads like they did, like a satisfying novel rather than a rambling attempt to end every little stint with a cliffhanger and see how long they could drag me along.

Jerusalem himself is also surprisingly coherent (as a character, not as a person). He’s a little schizophrenic, but one passably assumes that this is due to his steady diet of unnamed narcotics and not due to unimaginative writers forcing their characters into bizarre molds to fit whatever absurd story happened to occur to them on that particular day. And, though he’s not even super-likable, which I always found likable in hero, you still find yourself rooting for him most of the time.

Meanwhile, throughout the series the writers use their darkly comical vision of the future to deal ironically with issues both real and invented. Corporate corruption allows the use of information pollen, a kind of biological advertising agent that causes incurable degenerative mental diseases. The perpetual absurdity of our party system is personified in the Evil and Eviler Presidential candidates, one of whom is modeled after Nixon, the other of whom masturbates into an American flag while editing the Constitution. Gender issues are dealt with by way of the transient movement, a group of social outcasts who splice their genes with that of aliens to transform their bodies. The preservation of culture in the face of progress is accomplished through a system of “Reservations” in which people sacrifice modernity to constantly reenact otherwise extinct forms of human culture. And, perhaps most hilariously, the apathetic attempts to rehabilitate thawed cryogenic refugees mock our desire to forget our cities’ least desirable occupants.  It’s all there, and it’s all funny, and most of it is pretty smart.

Perhaps the coup of this book, though, was the fact that Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise, bitches!) expressed an interest to the writers in playing the aging Jerusalem in an as-yet-undeveloped movie adaptation. I don’t know about anyone else, but the thought of Stewart playing a sex-crazed, drug addled, cyberpunk Hunter S. Thompson gets my geekdar pinging… Although, with our luck, the movie would just be picked up by JJ Abrams, Stewart replaced with Tom Cruise, and all the vomit would just be CGI glittering with lens flare. But we can still dream.

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Marvel and DC are preparing to duke it out for a place in your hearts in a 21st century revival of the superhero movie genre. For those unfamiliar with the distinction, Marvel is responsible for characters like X-Men, Spiderman, and Wolverine while DC’s most famous are Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Both have an expansive pantheon of characters and stories, and both are taking remarkably different strategies with their current franchises.

Marvel’s strategy, to create an internally consistent universe in which each of the characters can interact with each other, is really coming together this summer. The last two Iron Man movies have been quite successful, largely because of Robert Downey Jr.’s smarmy portrayal of the titular role. This summer, they’ll be adding Captain America and Thor to their world, and they’ll be purposefully interweaving these two characters and Iron Man by means of less-than-subtle allusions to previous and future films across these and future franchises. These three characters and more will then share the big screen in an adaption of Marvel’s superhero team the Avengers, which will be directed by Joss Whedon of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame.

DC’s strategy is markedly different. Its big contemporary success is, of course, Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise. His re-imagining of the Dark Knight is arguably the best thing done in mainstream superhero movies to date. It is certainly the most financially successful, having exceeded a billion dollars in revenue, with the closest runner ups hundreds of millions of dollars behind. With the profound success of Batman, Warner Brothers has asked its Producer/Director to play an advisory role in their re-imagining of Superman, which will be directed by Zach Snyder; but Nolan’s Batman and Synder’s Superman will not inhabit the same world. They will not crossover, and, according to the studio and the filmmakers, they will never meet and shake hands. Even where DC is discussing a potential Justice League movie, a superhero team roughly equivalent to Marvel’s Avengers, we’re hearing that the Batman and the Superman in such a movie would stand alone. They would not be Nolan’s Batman, or Synder’s Superman, but a new take on each character appropriate for a movie in which they cohabit.

Herein lies the gulf: Marvel is trying to interweave some of their key characters into an internally consistent world, whereas DC is comfortable allowing each of their characters to stand alone, and even be simultaneously re-imagined by different directors. The former is a fanboy’s paradise, but the latter allows for better storytelling.

The problem is about suspension of disbelief, and letting the story, rather than consistency, dictate the world.

In the Marvel world, for example, we’ve already got Iron Man. We suspend our disbelief about technology, genius and the limits of private wealth to believe that one man could single-handedly design, build, and operate a super-powered flying suit of armor. It works. It’s cool.

This summer, we’ll have Thor, a Norse god banished from his heavenly realm to Earth where he becomes a hero, directed by the Shakespeare-loving Kenneth Bragnaugh. That’s not half bad, and in a story about Norse gods, I feel confident that I could suspend my disbelief and get involved in this supernatural world.

In Iron Man we’re getting movies exploring themes about a man reforming himself, trying to balance this massive ego with a competing desire to do good; it’s about a man who may well be an alcoholic with a super-powered military weapon. Not the subtlest of themes, but they’ve done entertaining things with them. If Thor is a good movie, I presume we will see a host of very different themes— themes that are more readily explored in a world populated with Norse gods who are, themselves, the embodiments of dark, primal archetypes.

But if you mix these two characters together, could I suspend my disbelief about both at once, and even if I could, does the addition of a supernatural Norse god to a story about Iron Man actually add anything? When you mix them, you get a theme clash. A story about a superhero whose power derives from magic and a superhero whose power derives from technology thrown into the same world could have interesting themes. You could take up a kind of naturalism versus supernaturalism, or the ingenuity of man over the unexplainable super-power of a god. But it sort of stalls, with the grinding sound of a teenager learning to drive stick, against the themes you might explore (and in this case already have explored) in movies about either of those characters on their own. We get Iron Man, Interrupted. It only gets worse when more characters are added.

Worse, the potential for fanboy absurdity is heightened by the choice of Joss Whedon as the director to bring all of these characters together. I know that this guy has a loyal, die-hard fan base, but he’s not the man to hand halfway-decently developed characters to develop further. From previous Whedon films we can expect what he has given us before: half daytime soap opera and half people looking really cool while they blow things up, but it seems to me that what really sells the superhero genre to a wider base is substance and some attempt at a meaningful story. See the one billion dollar profit of The Dark Knight. Sure, we expect action from Iron Man, but when the ego versus morality theme is explored in a half-way decent manner, it’s a pleasant surprise that makes us remember the movie and come back for more when it’s time for a sequel.

From what we can gather from rumors, though, Joss Whedon’s movie is essentially: “What if Iron Man, Thor and Captain America team up with Josh Renner and Scarlett Johanson to fight the Hulk and a group of green-faced alien invaders called the Skrulls?!?!?!”

If you find yourself replying, “Awwwwwwesome!” then you might be a fanboy. I can imagine people walking out of the movie:

“Oh man, what about the part where Iron Man was mind-controlled by the Skrull Commander and he fired a missile at Thor, and Thor smashed it with his hammer?!”

“Phtt. There’s no way Captain America could stand up in a fist-fight to the Hulk. That was so lame. They covered this in The Incredible Hulk number 892!”

“Oh Em Gee (OMG) did you see that outfit?! I can’t wait for them to give ScarJo her own Black Widow movie!”

Imagine if Marvel decides to tie the solo movies for these characters in with their “team up” movie. What if they start throwing magic into Iron Man just because they can, or alluding to things that happened three movies ago in a different character’s storyline? It’s going to be as bad as Batman and Robin. People who don’t care about that shit are going to be sitting in the movie theater asking, “What is happening?” and behind them, someone will whisper, “It was in Thor 2, don’t you remember the Asgaardian golden duck of power?”

It’s going to suck for everyone who isn’t a fanboy. It’ll probably sell some tickets, but it’s not going to compete with DC. When Nolan has finished with Batman, we’re getting indications that the franchise will be passed on to another director who will take the character in a new direction. Perhaps we’ll get an exploration of Batman that is darker, or perhaps one that is more over-the-top. Perhaps we’ll see a world in which Batman hunts supernatural and super-powered villains, taking the emphasis away from the madmen of his rouge’s gallery. Hopefully we’ll see a new look and feel. Nolan’s Batman will stand alone, and whoever comes next will have their own opportunity to make something that stands alone. Think of it as graphic novel trilogies or one-shots, rather than a serialization that becomes increasingly unbelievable and incoherent as you add episodes, writers and revisions. We get to explore the many potential themes around Batman, instead of trying to mash them all together into the same world.

This makes more sense from a damage-control perspective as well. Snyder is currently re-imagining Superman. Maybe it will be good, maybe it won’t. If it’s not good, you just give the job to someone else and see how they can imagine Superman. You’re not bound to interweave the fuck-ups with the good stuff, and the good stuff doesn’t need to pigeon-hole later revisions of the characters. The stories are free to stand and breathe on their own; they can be changed, explored and developed down different tracks.

When and if DC decide to bring their characters together in a superhero “team-up” movie, it’s much smarter for that movie, too, to stand alone. The Batman in the Justice League doesn’t have to be as hyper-realistic as Nolan’s Batman, but his lack of realism doesn’t have to go back and infect future interpretations of him. The Superman in the Justice League can have a heavily developed friendship with Batman, but that doesn’t mean we have to play it up or even mention it in movies that are just about Superman. This kind of cross-over work, in even a three hour movie, is distracting and irrelevant at the very least, and DC’s being very wise in its decision to avoid it.

By avoiding tie-ins and crossovers, DC is really going to show us how this genre can come into its own. At their best, these superheroes have the seeds of an iconic exploration of contemporary culture, a sort of modern Mount Olympus populated with gods and monsters that distill questions of sanity, power, justice, and morality into potent archetypes. The Greeks weren’t afraid to remake their stories, and neither should we be. The “remake” has been slammed as being unoriginal, but what makes an archetype interesting is its power to represent different things and evoke different emotions in various stories and settings that are not concerned with internal consistency. And that’s what makes sense if this genre is going to make good movies. I like the popcorn, the beautiful men and women in spandex blowing things up, and the epic music, but we need something more if these movies are going to be relevant not just to the fanboys, but to the rest of us.

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On August 11 of last year, the web comic Penny Arcade posted a strip called “The Sixth Slave,” which depicts a role-playing game warrior callously refusing the rescue pleas of a pitiful prisoner. In the second panel, the slave details his plight: “Every morning, we are roused by savage blows. Every night, we are raped to sleep by the dickwolves.” If, like me, you listened with fascination to each episode of PA’s old podcast Downloadable Content, in which we were treated to the process of two excitable nerds making their living by cracking inappropriate jokes on the internet, you’d know that, though the final panel of every strip contains a punch-line, they normally save their “money line” for the second panel. Just how this came to be their favored format is buried in the details of Mike “Gabe” Krahulik and Jerry “Tycho” Holkins’s thirteen-year-plus creative odyssey, but one imagines the spontaneous invention of two ambitious, capable twentysomethings riding the crest of a technological renaissance, invigorated by the innovation of their adopted medium. The second panel shocker works as a figurative formulaic marker of their role as cultural iconoclasts. If you flip through their archive—aided in its revelatory wealth by the presence of Holkins’s news posts (pre-dating the mainstream weblog culture) alongside almost every comic for the last decade—you watch the ascent of a couple of ‘net-age mavericks enthralled that nobody was telling them what to do.

On August 12, the feminist blog Shakesville ran an essay denouncing the comic’s use of rape as a comedic device. Penny Arcade’s response on the 13th, called “Breaking It Down,” tried to defuse the tension with snark: “We want to state in clear language, without ambiguity or room for interpretation: we hate rapers, and all the rapes they do. Seriously, though. Rapists are really the worst.” In the accompanying post, Mike and Jerry express their incredulity that anyone could take such offense, especially at such unprecedented volume after years of horribly sick content throughout their oeuvre.

The hubbub over “The Sixth Slave” may well have died down quickly had PA simply ignored the initial response, but its profile plainly exploded following this second comic. The subsequent series of combative/defensive reactions is chronicled exhaustively in a Tumblr simply called “Debacle Timeline” launched in early February, the original page citing the “unacceptable” way that actors on both sides of the debate were conducting their arguments as a reason to sift through the debris. (Krahulik tweeted the site, referring to it as “what crazy looks like.”)

Penny Arcade is neither the most popular web comic—Randall Munroe’s xkcd, for instance, gets far more traffic—nor the most acclaimed (that would probably be the infrequently updated Achewood by Chris Onstad), but it’s certainly the most influential. I don’t make that claim arbitrarily; last April, Time included Holkins and Krahulik among the one hundred on their annual list of “the people who most affect our world.” The substance of what makes Penny Arcade so important—how some representative content could have such an impact on the digital media realm where it is broadcasted—is sort of unclear.

Within six years of its inception PA had launched the two other bodies that comprise the platform of their empire apart from the comics-and-merchandise foundation. The Child’s Play charity, begun in 2003 to obtain toys for a local children’s hospital, has since raised some nine million dollars for hospitals worldwide. In 2004 they began a convention, the Penny Arcade Expo, which is now biannual and boasts tens of thousands of attendees. In September 2008, Holkins reflected: “Penny Arcade is an extension of gaming culture as well, certainly, but it’s more idiosyncratic and far less universal. PAX and Child’s Play will outlive it. Substantially.” Calling the strip “less universal” than the convention implies that they’re cut from the same cloth, just on a different scale. Certainly the company couldn’t have gained the traction to live so long and accomplish so much if their initial project hadn’t been so captivating. Time said that the authors “have become the tastemakers… of an industry the size of Hollywood,” but their work is clearly more in line with the hardcore niche than the increasingly vast mainstream audience—the archive shows them as inclined to obsess over some cult role-playing game or other bit of nerd esoterica as to comment on the latest front-page blockbuster. For the sake of a blurb, then, the magazine oversimplified the particular je ne sais quoi of PA’s sum product—the air of confident, privileged indulgence they exude so effortlessly. Watch their pointless, self-congratulatory documentary series, updated every Friday on “PATV,” and try not to be seduced by the modernist utopian charm of their operation.

The disruption of that ideal illusion is part of what makes the “debacle” so striking, and amplifies it. In October, PA made “Dickwolves” t-shirts available in their store, sporting an ironic athletic motif; the vulgarity of the concept is made into a joke by the plainness of its design. This, along with Krahulik’s habitual Twitter provocation (Holkins would refrain from comment until February stoked the ire of the various agitated parties. As detailed on the Tumblr, harsh words and sentiments flew freely. The items were removed from the store in late January. But Krahulik declared that he would be wearing his to the next PAX, and, encouraged, the Twitter account @teamrape announced plans for a “Dickwolves flashmob” at the convention’s opening.

PAX East 2011 begins on Friday at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The keynote speaker is Jane McGonigal, one of those annoyingly sunshiney tech idealists, who has been hyping the progressive power of games everywhere from the TED Talks to The Colbert Report. It’s hard not to suspect their choice of a prominent—and mainstream-intellectual crossover—female figure in the industry as the heralding speaker at their latest geek love-in to be a tacit appeal to the loudest voices in the dissent against their work, the feminist bloggers (many of whom claim to be former fans) who have roundly condemned the PA figureheads for their self-centered and flippant expressions of entitled, decidedly male-centric derision.

Their opponents’ accusations of insensitivity are pronounced in the light of Time’s designation of the Penny Arcade maestros as the “conscience” of the video game world. In the name of populism, and probably in the interest of commercial universality, they’ve shied away from real-world partisanship even as they take sharply defined sides in industry rabbles. (I remember an old Tycho post commenting on the absurdity of the 2000 election, and then assuring that politics would never be brought up on the page again.) The biting parody of the strip made its mark more via gleeful, anti-P.C. amorality than measured critique. It would seem that they’re anything but conscience. The Dickwolves imbroglio has served as a reminder that, especially in the democratic realm of internet media, not even a Geek God is safe from censure. Penny Arcade is still standing, but you can tell they’re shaken. Gamers are never more taken aback than when the battle’s not on a screen.

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A couple Mondays ago I was sitting at the kitchen table trying unsuccessfully to read when my roommate showed me the recently premiered AMC show The Walking Dead on his computer.  He mentioned that it was about zombies and said that I had probably seen the promotional posters in the NYC subways.  I did not expect it to be a show that I would find very intriguing. I expected it to be television’s usual attempt at transforming a classic cinematic genre to fit the T.V. format, such as how True Blood or Dexter each turn their respective (vampire and serial-killer) genres into fairly formulaic television.  I thought, “Zombie-movies themselves are usually—on the whole—unreliable, yet alone if they have to go through the kind of retarded format/formula of T.V.”

Surprisingly, The Walking Dead has not fallen into any such quagmire, and the show’s adeptness at developing long and cohesive story lines fits well with its 45-minute episodes.  While some of the dialogue is cliché and the acting is a bit weak, the show’s premise and plot quickly fed on my addiction-prone nature.  Pivoting around a small-town Georgia cop (played by a Liev Schreiber look-alike, whose actual name is Andrew Lincoln, who I guess was in the movie Love Actually), the show opens with him falling into a coma in the line of duty.  When he wakes from the coma he is in a deserted hospital and meets a plethora of zombies as he attempts to find survivors (in this respect, the show is suspiciously similar to the 28 Days Later film series, although I don’t know at whom exactly my suspicion should be directed).  The show also goes along similar lines as that film series’ through having a very blatant rural-urban juxtaposition in the progression from scene to scene (Atlanta being the featured city).

I don’t really understand how I have become so easily enthralled with this program; I guess the endless violence and delayed drama are my main attractions to it.  There have definitely been several times throughout each episode when my roommate and I have cheered, “YES!” or “FUCK….” as a human gets bitten by a zombie or a zombie gets their head chopped off by a human.  But the violence, while it gets me off, is nicely complemented by the show’s ability to delay drama and get me thinking not just about how explicit the violence is but about also the humans’ contribution to the insanity of its world.  The plot is pretty predictable, but such is television.  I think that the drama that the show is able to build each episode (as we repeatedly wonder how someone will survive death, or how far insane a survivor of the zombies can become) is effective not in surprising twists but on the suspense it builds as it goes through those twists. The cinematography is what most helps create the suspense: it shows great talent at lingering on single shots and scenes rather than fucking around with different angles and montages (this makes sense, as the show is adapted from an acclaimed comic book of the same name).  On the other hand, the show’s score is somewhat corny in a calculated fashion, but this fits the zombie-genre perfectly.  It creates a surreal atmosphere wherein the show’s talented depiction of an apocalyptic world is given a soundtrack that is so appallingly campy that it fits with the show’s genre perfectly.

But if you are already a zombie-lover, then you are probably going to check this show out, but you may be wondering what it adds to the genre itself.  In this respect, its main strength is that it follows the very realistic bent of films such as 28 Days Later, but that it doesn’t seem to take itself quite as seriously as a statement about politics or society.  That being said, there are a couple of white brothers (inadvertent pun) who are very racist and there are scenes dealing with gender issues, but the show doesn’t allow itself to get bogged down in making too many grand statements about the human race.  My usual thoughts during zombie movies of “are the survivors really any different than the zombies? (or ‘walkers’ as the characters call them)” have gone through my head as I’ve watched the first few episodes of this show.  I feel as if the show is honest that this was one of its thematic purposes yet also honest in that it realizes that people want to get sex and violence when they watch the show (because a show about zombies in which there is nothing edgy won’t make money, and would probably be very boring). Also, the television format actually aids the show in that it is able to develop sex and other dramatic tropes that would seem more ridiculous and less fitting if restricted to a 90-120 minute film.

The Walking Dead should fit well as part of the AMC brand.  The other “AMC original series,’” Mad Men and Breaking Bad, are also part of my small television show list, and I believe The Walking Dead will probably become and remain a “staple” of my limited television experiences (it should be noted that another AMC series, Rubicon, premiered this fall as well, but I found it utterly exhausting in its attempt to emulate 70s conspiracy-thrillers).  Of course, there have been many shows that I have watched for several episodes or so and then realized I was wasting time.  The Walking Dead is a show that will attract people who want to have a show that they can relax to as they watch but still be stimulated at the same time. Further, the show could very well join others dramas such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Boardwalk Empire as the evidence towards the promise that aspects of the current generation of television offers, and this hope may be its central draw.