We've been off work for over a week now, enjoying a quiet holiday staycation. The Sports Desk has demanded most of our time and attention, live-blogging almost all of the college football bowl games. Meanwhile, the Music Desk has been posting some year-end lists and when neither the Sports Desk nor the Music Desk are busy, the Gaming Desk has been playing Fallout 76, which cast sort of eerie aura ovr the West Virginia-Syracuse football game.
But during the one slow moment, back when the Boston College-Boise State game got cancelled due to severe weather, we spent $60 and bought Marvel Unlimited, full online access to over 20,000 Marvel comic books, new and old. Let that sink in for a minute - 20,000 Marvel comic books, accessible on both our laptop and phone. Usually, this is the kind of purchase one only makes when drunk and late at night, but we did this one stone-cold sober and in mid-afternoon.
We’ve been re-reading old 1960s and 70s Fantastic Four and Spider Man comics, and naturally on the very first day we read Amazing Fantasy #5 (1962), the first Spider Man story and the Holy Grail for comic book collectors - it sells online for $18,000.
We've also been catching up to the latest new series. It’s pretty amazing how much the comics have progressed from our teenage memories - they’re far more complex now, with sophisticated layouts and complicated narratives. The coloring and shading are better rendered for 3D-like effects, and the days of having six panels across each page to be read left-to-right are long gone. The illustrators seem to each be trying to top the others with splashy, full-page layouts and action extending beyond the borders of the frame and empty space is sometimes used for dramatic effect. Frankly, they’re a lot harder to follow and demand more attention. Sometimes we have to look at a picture or a page for a few seconds to just try and figure out what it is we're looking at - it’s like solving a puzzle but like a puzzle, once you figure it out, your brain rewards you with a dose of serotonin. It takes a lot more work, but the effort is worth it.
The characters are also more diverse and far more interesting. Instead of mostly white adolescent boys and young men, today's superheros could just as easily be female as male (the new Hulk is a woman), middle-eastern, or any shade of tan, brown, or black (the new Spiderman is a black latino named Miles Morales). There are biracial romances and openly gay characters, and the best part is their ethnicity or orientation isn't the defining factor of their characters or the plots, and it's all dealt with very matter-of-factly.
In a recent issue of Spider Man, Miles and his best friend, a chubby Asian teen named Ganke Lee, have a very nuanced and revealing argument about who experiences more prejudice - an athletic, good-looking black teen in Brooklyn, or an overweight Korean-American. And when a girl hears them bickering and asks them if they're a couple, neither over-reacts or takes offence. "No, we've just been best friends since kindergarten," Ganke tells her. This is far more topical and relevant than Peter Parker mooning over whether or not Mary Ellen will or won't go to the prom with him.
But reading these comics is even more addicting than playing video games. They all still end with cliff-hangers that just beg you to start the next issue after finishing the last, and there's lots and lots of cross-over plots from one series to another, so to understand how say, Iron Man got his power armor back, you might have to go back and read the previous Avengers book, and to understand that issue of Avengers may require you to go back several previous issues to figure out what's going on. You can't read just one, and once we start, we find ourselves reading and browsing and researching for hours.
Just what we needed - more distractions and more alibis to avoid our ever growing list of chores.
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