In Embrio

I am sure that this comes as no surprise to anyone, but not only do I enjoy the occasional comic book, I make good use of Dr. Volt’s (http://www.drvolts.com/) free hold service and follow a number of different ongoing monthly series—mostly Batman titles, but I’m a bit of a Green Lantern junky, too.

Perhaps weirdly, Green Lantern has always been one of my favorite super heroes. There are not a lot of casual comics fans—and I wasn’t more than a casual comics fan until recently—that can say that.

Most people, in my experience, tend to gravitate toward the icons (Batman or Superman) or the not-quite-iconic-but-almost-there-(maybe) (Spiderman or the X-Men (which almost always is code for Wolverine)). These preferences stem mostly from their experiences with the movies and cartoon series from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I know this because I lived this—I loved Batman because of Tim Burton’s first Batman film and the animated series that followed.

But I was introduced to the Green Lantern via an action figure that my cousins had that no one else would play with because their dog had chewed off both feet and one hand. The head was scarred, but still, for all intents and purposes, a head. It was nice to have an action figure that looked like he’d actually been through some of the epic battles that we orchestrated in my cousins’ basement.

So, when I became serious about reading superhero comics, after Batman, Green Lantern was a foregone conclusion for me.

The upcoming Green Lantern movie, then, has become something that I am interested in much more so than anyone else I know. I followed cast developments early on (Nathan Fillion would have been way better as Hal, sorry Ryan Reynolds) and have been relieved as subsequent trailers and footage have looked better and better (the first one had me worried).

A few weeks ago, to feed into the media storm that the studio is trying to build around the film, the DC Comics blog, The Source (http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/), started a strange-ish series of posts in which, "every Monday-Thursday, as we count down the days until the movie arrives in theaters June 17th, The Source will be revealing images, bios and fun facts from the comic books that every Green Lantern fan is gonna want to know" (http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/2011/05/07/free-comic-book-day-special-edition-green-lantern-the-essentials/).

Now, other than the fact that these posts clearly reveal DC’s concern that nobody—even superhero comics fans, who have to be the only people actually reading a comics publisher’s blog—knows enough about these characters to care about them enough to see a movie about them, today’s post is pretty funny:

Today’s spotlight is a biographical sketch of the villain Hector Hammond. We read that "Growing up, Hector Hammond was always an outcast. Only interested in science, he never competed in sports or played with his peers. Hector preferred the company of a book to that of his friends" (http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/2011/05/17/senator%E2%80%99s-son-becomes-scientist/).

Do you think that superhero comics fans—who on some level, at least, think it would be cool if this stuff was real—are ever concerned that almost every one of them (minus the science part—maybe) fits the description of a burgeoning, hydrocephalic super villain?