External validation

One of the benefits of having my own blog (and one which I had no idea was awaiting me when I took to bold step of starting this enterprise) is that I have my own Blogger home page, which allows me to set up a blog feed, so I get all updates to all the blogs I care to follow spoon-fed to me. It’s become a part of my morning ritual every day, seven days a week, to see what other people are saying, across an eclectic blend of comic books dorks and parents of toddlers whom I don’t know from Adam as well as some old friends.

Anyway, this morning I saw that one of the comics bloggers, who has no idea I’m alive, had posted a question to stimulate discussion in a comments thread, a question which I thought I had at least a semi-interesting answer for. (The question was essentially “Why is it that whenever Marvel comics riffs on Arthurian legends, the results are lame?” and is kind of besides the point of what I’m on about right this moment, but I wanted to at least give you a sense of the geek-saturation point at play here.) The blogger is someone I really enjoy reading because, oh man, if I’ve successfully made the case that I’m an overthinking type of pop culture acolyte, take your sense of me and multiply it by a thousand and make the overthinker actually fairly erudite. So posting an answer (a mini thesis, really) to this guy’s question was a bit of a personal risk for me because I was somewhat afraid that the blogger would respond to my ramblings with something along the lines of “Shut your stupid piehole, uninvited lurker scum!” (Or, you know. A more erudite version of that.)

So I was actually blushingly delighted when the blogger himself commented on my comment and briefly praised my “cogent thoughts” before promising to elaborate more after sleeping. Doubly so because in the course of sketching out my thoughts on mythology in comics in general I got to make a passing reference to this:


Which would be the Marvel comics version of the thunder god Thor, after he was magically turned into a frog, which is something that did not ever happen in the Norse eddas, but totally should have. COME ON.

And that’s the note I’m going to end this week on, since not much else went down today, barring a weird conversation with a random co-worker who saw me carrying my box of Lean Pockets toward the office microwave and started ranting about how dangerous they were. At first I thought she meant either that they were addictive or that they had the approximate gastrointestinal transit speed of the proverbial grease-through-a-goose, but it turned out she meant their tendency to get magma hot at the center and burn one’s mouth. Fair enough.