Here's a round of questions that's always popular among longtime comic readers:
Did reading comic books help shape your adult self?
Did reading comic books influence your career choices?
Aside from collecting, have comics influenced your hobbies?
Did reading comic books make you want to do "adventurous stuff" like learning karate, exploring caves or any sort of somewhat out-of-the-ordinary physical activity?
Answer one or all!
(Please no shell-riding!)
Replies
Did reading comic books help shape your adult self? I dunno. Probably? Almost certainly really. I don't think I could point to anything specifically though.
Did reading comic books influence your career choices? Um, no. I've always admired people who have known what they wanted to do. I have never known what my career would be. In college I was a computer science major, but I quickly realized how boring that got for me.
Aside from collecting, have comics influenced your hobbies? It proved I really have an addictive personality. I still have large collections of sports cards, magic cards, and quite a number of games I was able to rescue from my dad's garage sale (I would have taken them all if I had the space for them). Also the first comic book conventions I went to showed me what tabletop gaming could really be. I still think back on that first set I saw for a Battletech game, it was amazing.
Did reading comic books make you want to do "adventurous stuff" like learning karate, exploring caves or any sort of somewhat out-of-the-ordinary physical activity? Nope, you wouldn't think to look at me now, but I was pretty outdoorsy and active growing up. I tried just about every sport offered growing up.
I'd say that comics instilled a love of reading for me -- or at least capitalized on it. And somewhere along the line, that love of reading became a love of writing -- and since I work as a writer and an editor, I'd have to think comics had at least a little to do with that.
And a few months ago, when I was a substitute copy editor at The Village Voice, I was still around after business hours on a Friday night, because there was a late-breaking story about a local prison. The reporter, Graham, was updating it on the blog, and I was copy editing as he went, in real-time. And Jessica, the deputy editor, said something to Graham about how he should keep pushing for a quote from someone, before the other papers got it. "Right now, you own this story," she said. And honest to god, I felt like I was at the Daily Planet. It was Friday night, and I was already late for a party, but there was something about that moment that lived up to every comic-book newsroom I'd ever been in, and I wouldn't have been anywhere else.
What's "shell riding"?
Did reading comic books help shape your adult self? If so, not until much later. Becoming interested in Spider-Man during Brand New Day really did teach me a lot about not giving up, always doing the right thing no matter what, and taking problems with a light heart, knowing that they will always be waiting for you when you get around to them.
Did reading comic books influence your career choices? No. But I do have fun talking super-heroes with the kids sometimes in my classroom.
Aside from collecting, have comics influenced your hobbies? Not really. I'm a comics books-only kind of guy. Don't really care for novelizations, toys, etc.
Did reading comic books make you want to do "adventurous stuff" like learning karate, exploring caves or any sort of somewhat out-of-the-ordinary physical activity? I've explored caves and I do karate, but the first was a one-time thing and the second was so that I could get myself into shape. It would be cool to punch out a bad guy sometime, but that wasn't my motivation.
I think Lumbering Jack was referring to the picture of Captain Marvel riding the shell (above).
Wandering Sensei: Emeritus said: