Alex Ross’ adapted “secret wars” #1 cover
I am a Marvel, DC, Star Wars and Tolkien geek. I am also a politics geek but for the sake of this particular discussion on geek culture that’s neither here nor there. I own reprints of all of Stan Lee’s Spider-Man comics. I have all of Frank Miller’s Batman and Daredevil work. I own the extended 12 disc box set edition of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I can explain to you exactly what’s right and wrong about every Star Wars thing ever.
But lately I’ve been different. I still haven’t seen any of the Hobbit movies in their entirety. I haven’t seen Amazing Spider-Man 2 or Thor 2. I don’t watch Agents of SHIELD, The Flash or Gotham. Hell…the only comic book I still read every month is The Walking Dead ( I used to read Grant Morrison’s Batman every month until he finished his run). So what happened? Have I given up the boyhood fantasies of comic geekdom for girls, politics and hip-hop? I don’t particularly think so. My girlfriend is a bad-ass who likes to watch Rick and Morty and Futurama with me. Comic books have been more than sufficiently politically aware at least since the 1980s and my band the West Coast Avengers specializes in nerdcore hip-hop.
I think there are a few things actually at work with my arguable ‘lapse’ in geekery. Firstly, despite being very pleased with the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man reboot, I am pretty tired of seeing origin stories. Firstly, some of these shows are designed to tease you. The whole SHIELD show is based on the premise that we should give a damn that Iron Man proooobably just flew out of the hangar of the Helicarrier before the episode we’re watching started. Gotham’s whole point is that one day these characters will interact with Batman. Yawn.

Marvel, DC and the Star Wars universes are finally all addressing this. Marvel is going to give us a version of their 2005 Civil War story in the next Captain America movie. DC is going to incorporate Frank Miller’s tale of old Batman and old Superman (Dark Knight Returns) into the Batman/Superman movie. Star Wars is finally going to show us what happened after Return of the Jedi. So why am I still not satisfied? I do plan to see all 3 flicks and maybe giving me something later in the story of these timeless characters will be great but I suspect I will never fully return to the frequency with which I used to digest multimedia stories of my favorite comic book characters.
Thirdly, I wonder if any camera can compete with the mind’s eye. The Lord of the Rings movies are dead accurate to the books (with the exception of Tom Bombadil) and they still don’t make me want to watch them very much. In the end, I suspect that the version of the stories I saw in my mind when I read the books as a high schooler was just too vivid and deftly depicted for me to ever be fully addicted to an adaptation no matter how meticulous. The casting director is almost never going to see the same face that you did when you see the actor playing your favorite character. Recent Walking Dead seasons have introduced Abraham, Eugene, and Rosita in versions startlingly similar to the versions shown in the comic books yet the characters still don’t quite look how I saw their faces as I read the comics. A good friend of mine recently pointed out that his phenomena is why Guardians of the Galaxy was so successful: few had preconceived notions of what GOTG characters and stories should actually look like; even us Marvel geeks were by and large clueless about them. So some of these things are structural and I don’t blame the studios for acknowledging this reality and marketing merch to little kids with these shows and movies.

--Tristan D. Acker
Tristan “Tanjint the Wiggy Woo” Acker is a San Bernardino based writer, performer and musician; he holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from California State University at San Bernardino. You can read his poetry at Squalorly, Inlandia, El Portal, Dead Flowers and other print and online magazines.
Listen to his work and his work with his band the West Coast Avengers at westcoastavengers.com.
Follow him on twitter @Wiggism or e-mail him at tristanacker@gmail.com.
Tristan “Tanjint the Wiggy Woo” Acker is a San Bernardino based writer, performer and musician; he holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from California State University at San Bernardino. You can read his poetry at Squalorly, Inlandia, El Portal, Dead Flowers and other print and online magazines.
Listen to his work and his work with his band the West Coast Avengers at westcoastavengers.com.
Follow him on twitter @Wiggism or e-mail him at tristanacker@gmail.com.
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