Once Upon a Geek

Have you heard of the term “Sense Memory”?  It’s used in acting, but it also refers to the interaction of the senses and the memory, and the ways in which certain sensory stimuli can trigger memories.  Have you ever caught the scent of a former girlfriend’s perfume, or heard a particular song, and it unexpectedly brought back a wave of memories and emotions?  That’s what I’m talking about.

I have a pretty strong sense memory.  One in particular sticks out for me. Lemon-Lime flavored Slush Puppies bring back a flood of emotions and memories related to The Marvel Saga comic books.  Weird, huh?  Now we don’t have any convenience stores in my area that carry Slush Puppies anymore, but just the thought of one triggers the memory.  I can clearly taste the lemon-lime and once again feel the excitement and wonder I felt when reading The Marvel Saga.

When I was 13 years old my mother sometimes picked me up after school and took me to her office until quitting time.  The rule was that I had to be quiet and stay out of her fellow co-workers way.  So she’d give me a few dollars and I’d walk down to the local convenience store.  I’d immediately make a beeline for the Slush Puppie machine.  Now don’t be confused, there is a tremendous difference between a Slush Puppie and an Icee or Slurpee.  If you don’t know what a Slush Puppie is, then you’ve never lived.  It’s that simple.  An Icee and/or Slurpee machine simply dispenses a frozen foamy drink, whereas a Slush Puppie requires action on your part to create the heavenly concoction.

When approaching a Slush Puppie machine you are immediately confronted with the difficult decision of choosing which flavor you want (usually there are about a dozen bottles of flavoring to choose from).  Once you’ve decided on your flavoring, you grab an empty cup and dispense the flavoring from a pump bottle.  You are supposed to pump out three squirts per cup, however, I usually went for six or seven squirts.  Talk about lemon-lime tart overload!  Then you fill the remainder of the cup from the spigot.  This pumps out glorious sweet-infused icy water into the cup and mixes the entire drink.  The sweet icy water isn’t foam-based like an Icee, this has zillions of ice pellets.  Little tiny ice pellets perfect for crunching.  It’s a religious experience!

Anyway, I would mix my super-sweet/sour lemon-lime Slush Puppie and then peruse the comic book rack.  I didn’t go to my mother’s office very often, so there were always new comics to check out.  It was during a visit like this I picked up my first issue of The Marvel Saga which happened to be issue #2.  It seemed like everytime I went to my mother’s office, I bought a new issue of The Marvel Saga. If you’ve never read the series it was intended to follow Marvel’s continuity as closely as possible starting with the inception of the Marvel Universe and then continuing forward in chronological order (also incorporating retcons).  The interior was a mixture of comic panels and large text pieces (sort of like Marvel Universe or Who’s Who).  It took me hours to read an issue cover to cover.  It’s was like hitting the lottery for a kid just getting into Marvel back then.  First of all, my $1 would buy hours of entertainment, unlike other comics that could be read in 15 minutes.  Second, it provided all the background on my favorite characters at a time when I didn’t know the Marvel Universe inside-and-out.  This comic provided hours of wonder and joy as my curiosity about the history of these characters was slaked.  A copy of The Marvel Saga in one hand, a lemon-lime Slush Puppie in the other.  That’s happiness.

Sense memory is a funny thing.  Nowadays if I taste something with a really tart lemon-lime flavor, I’m immediately overwhelmed with an inexplicable sense of wonder and curiosity.  That’s what comes first.  It’s later that the memory materializes of Slush Puppies and The Marvel Saga.  Now if I could just find a Slush Puppie machine in my area and a copy of the Essential Marvel Saga…

Hey gang! More of an administrative post today.  I was hoping to get some feedback from you readers about a change I’ve recently made to the blog.

If you look in the right-hand sidebar I’ve added two Twitter feeds, one for comic books and one for Doctor Who (both popular topics here).  I thought this might be a nice geek-news aggregation resource for readers while on my site.  What I’m looking to find out is if this is useful to you.  If not, are there any ways to make it useful to you (i.e. list 10 tweets instead of 5, create a feed for Star Wars, only show tweets from news sources, etc).  Also, is there anything I can do to make the blog more interesting or relevant for you?

Typically when I ask for feedback like this I get a couple responses.  That’s depressing considering hundreds of people read this site everyday.  I can prove you’re not alone.  Scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar.  Towards the bottom, there is a section labeled “Users Currently Online”.  That’s the number of people on ONCE UPON A GEEK at that moment.  See, you’re not alone.  Now c’mon folks, help me out here.  Suggestions you provide will only make your experience better here.  Y’all are a great audience, so I’d appreciate any feedback you’ve got to share.  Please feel free to comment here or send me an e-mail at shag@onceuponageek.com.  Thanks!

Happy Valentine’s Day to the most beautiful woman in the world… my wife, The Irrepressible Gena.

It’s been a big week for me.  Just got back from an amazing 7-day eastern Caribbean cruise.  Probably the most fun vacation I’ve ever had.  Unfortunately, I’m exhausted from the vacation so today will be very brief.

While on the cruise I got to snorkel in some of the clearest, most beautiful water in the world (St. Maarten and Grand Turk).  Sped around on a waverunner at Emerald Beach while on St. Thomas.  Met Nick Maley, known as “That Yoda Guy” (more on him in a later post). Saw Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen (boy was that movie the suck!).  And did a zillion other things, but most importantly I spent some quality time with my gorgeous and brilliant wife.

It’s worth mentioning for Terry’s benefit that I read a Thor trade paperback.  I read my copy of Thor Visionaries: Walter Simonson volume 1.  It was a great read.  Awesome art, solid storytelling, and good adventure.  After reading this, I think I can quantify my dislike for Thor a little further.  When written well, I really enjoy Thor’s adventures in Asgard.  It makes for good fantasy/high-adventure.  However, I don’t care for Thor on Earth.  I feel like he sticks out like a sore thumb.  This fits with my dislike of Thor all these years in the Avengers.

Finally, saw Avatar last night with my 10-year old step-son.  What a movie!  Now I see what everyone is talking about.  Not the most original storyline, but breathtaking visuals, great action, and very enthralling.  Definitely worth seeing on the big screen.

Talk with y’all later!

After more than a decade in the attic, we decided to give the old Star Trek: The Next Generation collectible card game a try.  Ed’s in town this weekend (pictured below in his “Nerd Herd” t-shirt from the TV series Chuck) and he decided we should tackle the game again after all these years. After procrastinating for hours, we finally cracked the decks sometime after midnight. Needless to say, this is not a game you can simply jump right into without reviewing the rules closely.  I cleaned Ed’s clock (or Romulan Outpost in this case) and we called it quits after one game.

Below is Ed building his inferior Romulan/Klingon deck.

Here I am trying to remember the rules after something like 14 years.  I suppose we could have bothered to read them before playing, but that would have taken all the fun out of it.  And we discovered we’re getting too old to sit on the floor for very long.

Finally, in going through my old cards we re-affirmed how insanely geeky I really am.  We came across two custom cards I produced myself for the game.   Check them out below.  I color-copied images, then literally cut-and-pasted them together.  Also, it appears I used my old Commodore 64 dot matrix printer for the text boxes.  How frikkin’ hilarious!  I’m such a dork!   As Ed has pointed out, he proclaimed my dorkiness long before these cards were stumbled upon.

Live long and geek out!

Here is a cute outfit my daughter wore when she was still itty-bity.  I was so proud to show her off in this!  Well… at least until that other little girl at her daycare, Lena Luthor, got a kryptonite baby-rattle. What a spoiled brat that kid was!

Happy Halloween from the Rambunctious Rascal!

Because nobody demanded it! Here are some updated pictures of my Comicatorium (a.k.a. Shag’s Sanctum Sanctorum).  Did some rearranging recently and I’m pretty pleased with the results so I figured I’d show it off here.  My thanks to the Irrepressible Gena for her assistance and inspiration.

Biggest change below is the new flat-screen monitor for the desktop!  Hooray!  Love it!

Added a new bookcase, which will help get some things organized.  I still need to fill the shelves (which won’t take long).  Yes, the top shelf of the left bookcase is entirely full of Doctor Who audio dramas, and the middle bookcase is almost entirely full of Doctor Who books and RPGs (with Doctor Who videos and magazines stacked on top).  Some of those book shelves are actually stacked three deep.  Feel free to be jealous or horrified.  Your choice.

This corner is most interesting because all the yard equipment is gone!  We enclosed an outside shed-like-thing and moved all the yard equipment out there.  So my Comicatorium is no longer an impromptu garage.  Also, got my Tom Fleming prints framed and hung.  Loving them!  Thanks to Sterling for buying the Aquaman print and starting my love affair with Fleming’s work.

Finally, here is the overflow of comic boxes from my closet.  The nice thing is that they are alphabetized and organized!  Hooray!  I’m now up to 47 comic long boxes.  I’m dreading ever moving again.

Dear Mr. Watterson is a film project spearheaded by Joel Allen Schroeder.  According to their website,  “Dear Mr. Watterson is a film that will look to the readers and fans of Calvin & Hobbes to tell the story of the strip and its creator. As we follow the life and career of Bill Watterson through this unique perspective, the undying appreciation and love of Calvin & Hobbes and the man behind it will be evident in the anecdotes, stories, and memories shared by readers of the strip and friends and colleagues of Mr. Watterson.”

If you’ve been reading ONCE UPON A GEEK for a while, then you probably know I’m a big fan of Calvin and Hobbes.  I gotta say folks, this film looks great!  Check out the trailer below:

Teaser from DMW on Vimeo.

I’m really excited for this project!  In the spirit of the upcoming film, I wanted to share my own first experience with Calvin and Hobbes here.  I first became aware of the strip in the summer of 1987. I was about 15 years old and visiting my father in Madison, Wisconsin.  Where I lived in Florida, the local newspaper did not carry the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip; in fact, I’d never heard of it. Like any bored teenager in the 1980s, I read the daily comics for amusement.  I quickly discovered that the Madison paper carried a much wider variety of strips than my paper back home.  One such strip was called Calvin and Hobbes.  It was hilarious!  I immediately related to the character of Calvin and began seeking out the strip each morning. As Madison was a recycling town (not a common practice back in ‘87), my father’s garage was full of old newspapers. I spent hours sifting through these old papers reading Calvin and Hobbes strips. Within the matter of a week, I’d read several months worth of the strip.  I was hooked!  At the end of the summer, I returned to my hometown and it’s sadly inadequate newspaper.  This could have resulted in the end of my love affair with Calvin and Hobbes, however, my step-mother intervened to provide my much needed Calvin-fix.  She dutifully cut out the Calvin and Hobbes strips every day and would mail them to me in batches about once every three weeks. I would wait anxiously for this package of joy. I’d then tape the strips down on three-ring paper, essentially making my own books. Eventually, my local paper picked up the strip and the official collections became readily available. However, I’ll never forget my initial discovery and those wonderful packages from my generous step-mother. There you have it… the secret origin of a Calvin and Hobbes junkie!

If the upcoming film looks interesting to you, there are a few avenues for you to stay connected with the project.  First, check out the web site at dearmrwatterson.com for updates on the film.  Next, join the Facebook group dedicated to this movie.  Finally, check out their new Twitter account.

I found out about the film recently when I was interviewed for Racket Magazine.  They stumbled across my praise for Calvin and Hobbes here and contacted me to ask about my fandom of the comic strip.  You can read the interview Racket Magazine did with both Joel Allen Schroeder and myself by clicking here.

And remember each night as you lay down to fall asleep… something under the bed is drooling.

Below you’ll find a drawing of Batman I did back in 1988 that I recently unearthed.  I drew it free hand, but based it upon a Brian Bolland panel in Batman: The Killing Joke (see further below for that original panel).  My drawing measures 13 inches by 17 inches, whereas the original panel measures a mere 2 inches by 3 inches.  I never finished the drawing completely, but got pretty far along.  I’m guessing I did this while I was learning about pointillism in school.  While I don’t claim to be an artist of any sort, I thought this came out pretty good.

Below is that original panel by Brian Bolland from Batman: The Killing Joke.