Re: OOC #35
I never got into comic books as a kid...my parents were very practical, products of rural Idaho in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression, and it was the rarest of occasions that I managed to arm-twist them into springing for a comic book. By the time I was old enough to purchase them on my own, I was already steeped in sci-fi and fantasy novels and would much rather spent my money on 'real' books. I think it started with a bunch of childrens' novels by Thorton W. Burgess, the characters were anthropomorphized forest animals, and the stories were largely about them living in the forest, occasionally interacting between each other (the mink would show up in the squirrel's story as a secondary or tertiary character, stuff like that).
Then Rankin/Bass televised their animated version of The Hobbit. I think I was in second grade at the time? By the end of the school year, I was reading my older brother's copy, by the time I was in third grade, I was reading Lord of the Rings. We had a Bookmobile that came to the school every other week, I started finding other fantasy books there (Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, some other less notable books and series...)
And then Star Wars came out. My dad was a closet sci-fi fan, Star Trek was in regular rotation at home and he tuned into it quite often, had books about UFOs and Bigfoot although he wasn't vocal about them...so going into Star Wars, I had some background (I also vaguely remember Space:1999 on TV, but it was gone by the time I was old enough to really follow it). I was introduced to Star Trek first, but Star Wars was my first true love. I'm one of those who is comfortable with a foot in either camp, though.
My big intro to comic books came in college...well, actually, just before college, for reasons that had little to do with interest in comics. I spent a couple of years in Sweden, and one of the people I met told me that the best way to learn the language the way people actually speak it on a daily basis (instead of the oddly formalized version that they teach in language programs) was reading comic books. So, I have a couple of years worth of Transformers comics--in Swedish--along with a few X-Men and some Batman titles (including the comic-book adaptation of the first Tim Burton Batman film). Got back to the states, didn't do much about comics (because I already know English)...and then I got a college roommate who had grown up on comics. Seriously, the man was a walking encyclopedia of both Marvel AND DC, along with many of the lesser-known publishers. That got me into X-Men for a few years...
But when Iron Man came out, I knew enough to realize where they could be going with all of this. Then came The Incredible Hulk...and Captain America, and I knew they were building an Avengers universe. Had no idea how far beyond JUST The Avengers they'd end up going.
But I also studied a lot of writing in college, so I'm really nitpicky about what works and what doesn't, for me. For instance, a lot of people consider the first Thor as a major letdown...I thought it was incredible in the way it became almost Shakespearean, while maintaining a very modern sensibility. But that was also the reason I had a hard time with a lot of the earlier DCEU movies...Zack Snyder makes beautiful pictures, but he is NOT a good writer.
So, I take them in stride. I've been less than impressed with a lot of the recent Marvel stuff...feel kind of like they've made the same mistake, in their effort to move on from the whole Infinity War saga, that DC made in introducing their cinematic universe...too many characters, too quickly, with little or no connecting fibers between them, so they feel disjointed. And without a clear storyline to work towards, the writing is really inconsistent. I still watch them, because on the whole, I feel like they have a direction they're going and I'm curious to see where it's going to end up...but I don't feel the necessity to rush out and see them that I had with the early MCU movies (granted, part of that is that I work at a movie theater and I know, if I'm patient, I'll get to see them for free...but even then, I think we had Wakanda Forever for a couple of weeks before I sat down to watch it...as compared to The Winter Soldier, when I snuck onto the balcony on our opening night to watch it.) I'm neither critic nor fan when it comes to comic-book movies...I try to see the good as well as the bad, and weigh the whole thing before I make up my mind about it. And I'm not burdened with preconceptions of what the characters are supposed to be like...aside from the X-Men and Batman, I don't really know my comic book characters all that well, and even then, my knowledge of those characters is built around the writing of a handful of writers that worked in the late 80s and early 90s, and I've also seen enough retcons and rewrites and reinventions of characters that the notion of them being a little different for the sake of fitting into the MCU is just one more writer's revision to make them fit his storyline, as far as I'm concerned (but they better have a good story to tell!)
Getting into theater steered me a little more into 'traditional' dramatic scenarios...but sci-fi and fantasy are always going to be near and dear to me, and anytime someone puts together a movie in one of those genres that doesn't suck, I'm happy (which means I'm appalled that James Cameron has finally released a sequel to Avatar...not many movies I can think of where I cared less about the main characters or the plot line...maybe Titanic, but since I've only seen about twenty minutes of that and it didn't intrigue me enough to watch the rest of it, even though I've had the option for decades, I can't really say that I care less about it...the only reason I saw Avatar in the first place is because a group of friends took me to see it. That group of friends did NOT go see Titanic...) I'm even in the extremely rare group of people that recognizes the Star Wars sequels have some serious problems, but I still enjoyed them, overall (it's too late at night to get me started on that...I'll be here for hours, if I start analyzing what I liked and didn't like about them...*grin*)