If pride is a deadly sin, consider me a deadly sinner.

Once again, I'm doing what The Collective tells me to do and writing about things that I am proud of. Buckle up, suckers!

I'm proud of the screenplay that I wrote in college. I set out to write this movie that my friends and I were going to make. It was an action/comedy/parody/funtime about a guy called Rex Driver. My friend Jason (of Buyer Beware Comics) was going to play 'I live by no one's rules but my own' loose cannon Rex Driver, and I was going to play his begrudging partner, the earnest FBI man, Agent Mark Chase. It was going to be spectacular, and it would spawn a series of spin-off movies, a TV show, several comic anthologies, and action figures (of course). I wrote the screenplay during the summer between my last two semesters of college, first as part of a screenwriting class and then just to finish it. Nothing has ever come of it - I've contemplated revising it and turning it into a graphic novel, but haven't gotten to that yet - but I am extremely proud of the 130 pages that I wrote, and of the fact that I finished it, unlike the dozens (hundreds?) of other things that I've started and never finished.

I'm proud of how much I've grown in the past ten years. I think of how I was at the end of high school and it appalls me. And I thought that was normal! What was I even doing? I was spiraling downward into oblivion is what I was doing, and I knew it at the time but I couldn't get out. And then something changed. I don't even know what it was. It's like I was a car on ice, spinning wildly, and then the ice thinned and my tires found traction again, and I don't know how but I am so glad that they did. My life is better now than it has ever been for a lot of reasons. I've been able to learn from my mistakes without regretting their existence, which I'm wildly proud of. So yeah. Sorry if it got heavy for a minute there. I'll follow up with some lightness, don't worry.

The thing I am the most proud of, I think, is the amount of useless comic book trivia I know. I know, that may not seem like something to be proud of, but do you have any idea how many comics I've read? The number is very, very high. I've been reading them since I was 6, and I've got a lot of trivia stored up in my brain. When my comic book nerd friends have questions about stuff, they ask me about it. I was once able to identify an issue of Uncanny X-Men based on a vague description of what was on the cover. Conversely, when I worked at Mavericks (my local comic store!), the aforementioned Jason and I would play a game where he would pick a random Batman or Superman comic out of a box (it had to be a post-1986 issue, as that's the stuff I grew up on) and he would give me the issue number, and I would describe, from memory, what was on the cover. My ability to do this has extended to Flash comics, and now reaches back into the '50s. Go ahead, look one up and rattle off the issue number. I might be a little rusty, but I'll give it a go. I don't mean to toot my own horn, but...well, I'm proud of my vast nerd knowledge. Some people may call it a sickness. I call it fucking awesome.

That's just a few things I'm proud of. I'll try to think of more. Oh, and I'm proud of my kick-ass toy collection, too.


(I'll pretty much take any opportunity to post pictures of my toys.)

On Comics' "Big Events"

I love superheroes. I have since I was little. I don't know what it is about them that I liked when I was younger, but as I've grown up I've become attached to the characters. Which is why what I have to say next is so difficult: I might be done with them.

Well, not superheroes as a genre, but the big two superhero publishers, DC Comics and Marvel Comics. For the better part of twenty years, mainstream comics publishing has functioned under a 'big event' structure, wherein once (or sometimes more than once) a year there is some sort of company-wide crossover that affects all of the books that company publishes, and if you want to understand what's going on/follow the story you have to buy the main event comic plus a bunch of ancillary tie-ins that may or may not really matter in the grand scheme of things. And usually, as a result of these big events, the publisher makes a bunch of money. That's just how it works.

It wasn't so bad ten years ago. Ten years ago there was *just* the event series and *just* the few tie-ins, and for the other six or seven months a year comics were independent of each other. That all changed around 2004 (I think it was 2004). DC Comics took the idea of a shared universe in which all of the titles coexist with each other - and idea that I absolutely love - and started actually doing something with it, which led to the countdown to Infinite Crisis. The countdown lasted for six months, and I have to admit, I lapped it up. The writing was FANTASTIC, the stories compelling, and it was all leading towards this one series that would resolve everything. I was hooked. And then Infinite Crisis hit, and it was a huge disappointment. I didn't realize what a disappointment it was until it was all over. Sure, some of the pictures were pretty, but nothing happened in the story. At all. Then came 52, DC's weekly series, which was brilliant. And then, immediately after 52 ended, Countdown to Final Crisis began. And it was awful. Then Final Crisis itself, which was pretty cool, if not nearly incomprehensible. And now, right now, DC Comics is in the middle of Blackest Night. But wait, after Blackest Night, they're starting another, bi-weekly series called Brightest Day. Which, I'm sure, will lead into the next big event.

The past six years of DC Comics has been one long event. And that's just DC! Marvel saw DC's success with Infinite Crisis, and they've followed suit, with Secret Invasion and the current Dark Reign/Siege storyline.

It occurred to me earlier, as I looked at the teaser image for Brightest Day, the hard truth of the situation: it's never, ever going to end. Event will string into event, which will lead to the next event, and so on and so forth for the rest of my comics-reading life. And I just don't care to keep up with it anymore. Especially when the events are boring. Sure, Blackest Night might seem like a fanboy's wet dream, but nothing has happened. Nothing. And it's been six issues. They have two issues to wrap everything up, and I'm already fairly convinced that this would have been MUCH better as a four-issue series. I just can't take this anymore.

There are plenty of other books out there to read, from plenty of publishers, but DC and Marvel just make me tired anymore. I want a story to end at some point, not just springboard into the next big story. I know that's how an ongoing series has to work, but until the quality improves, I'm out. I've already dropped most Marvel books, and I'm pretty close to following suit with DC (I was already leaning that way now that Barry Allen is back as The Flash, but that as a topic for another ranting post). I'll miss the heroes that I've grown up with and come to love, and I'm sure I'll check in on them from time to time, but it's over.

Sorry, superhero comics. I think we should just be friends.