Recently quite a bit of attention has been given to so comic book industry professionals who have found ways to simultaneously toss a nerd hand grenade and then throw themselves on the same hand grenade.
I'm finding it all to be sort of tiresome and I'm not posting links. You can find it yourself.
One minute we're all having a good time bitching about the quality of our comics and the next we're making each other prove their loyalty to the genre itself.
One minute we're pissed that Magneto is breaking up threesomes and the next, we're mad that some little know film maker said a few years ago that he'd love to have sex with some fictional characters but not others, in a way that makes me pretty sure I never want to see his search history or look in that box in his closet behind his old luggage.
I'm pretty sure there was a time when these things didn't happen in public but I can't tell you when that was.
I'm not really one to want to take a bullet for jack asses in our business but I will say it might be time for us all to help kill this before it grows.
Can we become better fans?
I own a comic book retail shop and when I hear someone in the shop making juvenile comments about characters (or worse, actual people), I pretty much let them know that we're really not in the mood for it.
There's a certain level of discourse I can deal with and believe me the bar is NOT very high but I don't need to constantly hear jokes about Power Girl's boobs or Batwoman's sexual orientation.
If you have friends who read comics and all they want to talk about is having their way with Thor, feel free to change the conversation to something like the current market value of Avengers Mansion or whether or not Nightwing is the sort of guy who'd get to a crime scene in a hybrid.
I already have standard responses for when someone tells me DC hates women or that the comics industry hates Black characters and people.
I do realize for us to all be consistent, we'll have to cut our fanfic consumption WAY down. You fans of Sherlock are SCREWED if you want things to get better.
Make no mistake, I like when we fans can think outside the box. I like when we deconstruct our favorite hobbies and cobble them back together in our own image. Ask me how often I recreate wrestling stables of the past with current wrestlers! We love to engage in dumb navel gazing nerd pursuits. It just seems that now we've hit a point where the things we'd have just said to our friends when drunk in the back yard are coming out of our mouths sober and on the Internet.
Can all of you help all of us be better fans? When you see a chick cosplaying Zatanna, Phoenix, Black Cat, American Maid, Batwoman, Maria Hill, Spider-Woman, Harley Quinn, Misty Knight, She Hulk, Firestar, or Dawnstar, just respond like you do when you see that dude cosplaying Fat Punisher or Fat Superman, Fat Shazam or Granny Goodness:
"Hey, nice job." - Meaning it
"Hey, nice job." - Totally faking it
"Scuse me Bro, can I check and see if there's a decent copy of Legion of Super-Heroes #294 in that box behind you?" - Meaning that shit because that's really what we're all at the show for.
At the next C2E2, I'm gonna post up somewhere and thank all of you geeks just for showing up. I won't even talk mad shit about that giant ass statue of Lorne Greene as Adama that you are wheeling out of the show or call too much attention to the fact that you stood in line for 2 hours and paid a lot of money to see "Celebrity X" when for the price of a martini you could have waited and met them at the bar.
I used to think that we needed to do all we could to make sure we even had a generation of comic book fans after us. Now I'm a bit more concerned about whether or not we can have decent conversations with the ones we still have right now!
Lets be better fans so I don't have to see people openly declaring that NOW they can't BARE to pay actual money for Guardians of the Galaxy while at the same time asking me if there will ever be a hard cover for All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder...
Yes...I'm leaving that right there....
Me and you...better fans...for our FUTURE!
