Reminiscings

Something that always befuddles me when I stop and think about it, is how I never got into superhero comics until the beginning of 2005. I was alive more than two decades before I'd ever realized that this genre was the one for me! Considering how much I love superhero comics now, it's mind boggling to me that it took so long.

Especially since, when I look at my favorite sorts of television shows, movies and books now, I realize that the exact same elements I've loved about them were always prevalent in superhero comics and I was too silly to notice.

I mean take soap operas for example. I loved them for the convoluted history, insane melodrama, rampant retcons, and the occasional tendancy of a meglomaniac to try to take over the world with a fabrige egg.

It's one of many signs that I was destined to be a superhero comics fan.

Recently I found another one. See, I was digging through my old piles of crap back home for spring break and I found my lovely collection of Man From UNCLE tapes which I promptly brought back up to school to inflict on my very good friend who is rather used to me forcing insane hobbies down his throat by now.

Anyway, my collection's fairly small, scattered across the four seasons. I'd gotten them on a stroke of luck. I'd gone to the video store to ask if they had any to rent, and it turned out that through some complicated reasons that amounted to no one wanting to rent them, I got to buy them cheap! Go me!

Ah, how I adore the show. Everything from the snazzy names (you try not being cool with a name like Napoleon Solo) and the espionage, the crazy plots with things like exploding hula girls and microdot laden tobacco containers, and that time Illya Kuryakin had to wear a turban and play a lute so they could find the secret computer leaking UNCLE information to the eeevil THRUSH.

And that's not getting into all the explosions, implausible technology with all its lit-up buttons, unlikely fight scenes, the hanging upside from meat hooks in a freezer, the death traps and that one episode that starred William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy before Star Trek came about...

Oh, and how even though there was a fair prevalence of fairly annoying female characters, there was usually at least one entertaining girl-character each episode that was worth watching too. Even if they usually wound up in the death trap too. :-)

Such a wonderful show.

But thinking about it now, all the things I loved best about the show were probably indicators that I ought to have been reading superhero comics back then too. Oh well, better late than never.