DOTWW – Part 3

Wednesday is the Geekiest of Days, at least when it comes down to documenting my particular worldview. As has become a bit of a theme here during Days Of The Week Week, the association between the midweek point and all things genre-ghetto-licious (though mostly having to do with comics) is not something I ever sought to establish myself. It just kind of happened due to things I had little or no control over.


On the no-control side, there is the fact that Wednesday is new comic books day. The way that the comics publishing industry is set up, each company puts out one new issue of each title every month (by and large) and splits up the distributions to comic book specialty shops (and presumably bookstores and grocery stores and the like, although that’s become such an afterthought of a system that very few people talk about it so I can’t say for sure) into weekly shipments. The distribution shipments are actually handled by an independent (and fairly monopolistic) entity and long, long ago it became the standard practice that the comics would all arrive at the stores on Tuesday nights, where they’d be inventoried and shelved overnight, and available for purchase on Wednesday morning.

So if you go to a comic book shop on a Monday or Tuesday you might find the racks a bit picked over, and even Thursday or Friday might be too late to score a copy of a particularly fast-selling favorite (or under-ordered surprise hit), so most self-respecting geeks know that if you’re only going to go to the shop one day a week, Wednesday is the day to do it, and plan accordingly.

(There are various ways around the requisite Wednesday shopping trip, including a practice known as “getting a box for your pull list” but that, in addition to sounding kind of filthy when I quote it out of context like that, is a subject I will perhaps return to another day.)

You might think that going to the comics shop every single Wednesday would be more exception than rule, if you were to assume that most comics geeks were fairly focused in their fandoms. (And given the laser-like intensity of said fandoms, that is not a wildly specious bit of reasoning.) My deep and abiding love for all things Green Lantern compels me to pick up his monthly comics adventures, but that “monthly” bit would imply that on three out of every four Wednesdays, there are no new Green Lantern comics available. Sort of. Because there is a spin-off series, Green Lantern Corps, that focuses on his alien allies and comes out on a different Wednesday. This is clearly a blatant exploitation on the part of the publishers, preying upon my inherent addiction to completism that is part of being a geeky comics fan in the first place. Actually I get off pretty easy, as fans of Spider-Man and Superman and Batman and the X-Men have been ensnared by franchise expansions of four or five or more titles that see new issues featuring their favorite characters hitting the stands every single week. But by the same token, every once in a while DC Comics will release a special mini-series or annual or stand-alone prestige edition that happens to focus on Green Lantern, and they are of course savvy enough to do so on one of the off-weeks. Thanks to the proliferation of comics news sites and blogs and whatnot on teh interwebs, these one-offs don’t usually catch me by surprise anymore. But back when I started going to comics shops regularly, when the habit first emerged and later calcified, I was in high school and the inner workings of comics distribution were still a mystery to me. My choices were to show up every week or potentially miss something. And not only do I hate missing things, but I find predictable routines deeply soul-soothing.

I’ve mentioned occasionally that my geekiness does indeed extend to what is considered the darkest depths of all trollishness: role-playing games a la Dungeons & Dragons. In an eerily similar way to the manner in which I was able to engage in regular drunken tomfoolery with a close-knit circle of true friends, I was also lucky enough to find equally boon companions for polyhedron-rolling and imaginary adventuring. (A couple of these buddies actually overlapped, truth be told.) In college, the roleplaying game sessions were catch-as-catch-can, often on weekend afternoons. But once my friends and I graduated college and got jobs, but stayed close and wanted to keep the gaming going, we concluded that the scheduling needed a bit more formalization. I wasn’t part of the negotiations for this adult-phase incarnation of our pastime, I just remember being invited to join in a new game that had been established. The gaming group got together on Wednesday nights.

I role-played with the same crew almost every Wednesday night for years and years, literally: from early 1999 until some time in 2001, the breakpoint being an incredibly long and semi-irrelevant story that ends with me moving from Virginia back to NJ ever so briefly, and then again from late 2002 until around the time my son was born in the fall of 2008, when I couldn’t keep up with the weekly commitment any longer.

It was a rock solid commitment for many years, though, by mutual agreement. There are two levels to a good role-playing campaign. One is the central game of skill and chance, in which you assign some numbers to the abilities of a fictional character (the skill) and then pit that against opposing forces with the outcome determined by math and the randomizing influence of dice (the chance). If that’s your cup of tea, that’s as entertaining a mental exercise as playing a dynamic video game. The second level, though, comes when you imbue your fictional character with more intangible touches, and collaborate with the other players to give the whole fictional world setting of the game a life of its own, and you end up telling a long and elaborate story that is partly about mechanical combat but also about the same real themes and emotions that pervade all escapist entertainment. And that combination of both active creativity in what I bring to the gaming table, and external enjoyment of what others are bringing, is really what gets under my skin and makes the hobby so freaking irresistible to me.

The point being that for the game to really work as an ongoing, epic story, for the characters to feel real and have emotional weight, for mysteries to unravel over time and feuds to burn slowly and then detonate meaningfully, you can’t have players dropping in and out randomly. And my friends and I all tacitly agreed to this as the game picked up momentum, to the point where most of us scheduled the rest of our week around Wednesdays. Need to work late? Do it Tuesday, or Thursday. Want to get together with some folks for a weeknight dinner? Monday or Friday is fine. Wednesday was inviolate.

I always invoke D&D as the archetypical RPG (because, you know, that’s what it is) but for most of the years that Wednesday night was role-playing night, we played other games that were not pastiches of Lord of the Rings but of super-hero comics. I enjoy sci-fi and fantasy and various genre mash-ups, but super-heroes are my perennial favorite, so supers RPGs are my quintessential chocolate-and-peanut-butter combo. Circa 2003, I would peg the number of Wednesdays that I went to the comic shop at some point during the day, brought my purchases over to my buddy’s house in the evening, and spent hours reading super-hero comics or playing a supers RPG (or both at the same time) at somewhere around 46 or 48 out of 52. You might think this would be too much of a good thing but I assure you that it was not. I was a proverbial pig in excrement, to put my happiness in livestock terms.

I’d like to say that I gorged myself on Wednesday geekiness the way that I did because I knew it couldn’t last forever, but I think that would be revisionist. Like most things, I just did it because it felt good and seemed like a good idea at the time. Nowadays, that’s how I would describe being a husband and a father. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the camaraderie and the predictability of Wednesday night gatherings, but my pants would be just as much on fire if I said I didn’t enjoy the freedom of not having every single Wednesday already spoken for. And I still see my gamer-geek friends, and sometimes I’ve even arranged for a weekend game that fits better with my evolving life schedule, and that’s cool.

I don’t maker weekly pilgrimages to the comic shop, anymore, either. As I alluded to, online release schedules make it feel like less of a necessity, and I barely have time to sit down and read and catch up on the few comics I do still buy (as I’ve griped about more than twice hereabouts).

But my mental picture of Wednesday remains the same: a Fortress of Geekitude. That’s the day of the week my mind is most likely to drift into considerations of comic book minutiae, and when I swear to myself that this weekend is when I’m going to plow through the issues waiting for me at home, and when I toy with ideas of getting another gaming session on everyone’s calendar. I honestly don’t see any of that changing any time soon.