details, details

Another reason I don't read a lot of comics is that I don't have the required capacity for minutiae. Now I'm no dummy; I love me some crossword puzzles, and I'd go head-to-head with any other Jeopardy! viewer at 7:30 weekdays (oh, Trebek), but the sheer amount of detail needed to comprehend the vast universes and the characters living therein frankly blows my mind.

Take a look at the X-Men. You've got Uncanny X-Men, Ultimate X-Men, X-Men First Class, Uncanny X-Men First Class, Unspammy X-Spam First Spam, and so on and so forth. Most of those books are in slightly different universes. If you want to read any of the others, you have to separate out which is canon in which book, and then there are the other X-teams and the Canadian teams and the Wolverine teams (that guy is the town bicycle, am I right?) and books with writers who don't write the book anymore but they begged to finish their own damn storylines and they've been going for like 40 years and they've only aged about 10 and GOOD GOD EMMA FROST PUT SOME CLOTHES ON. NO ONE NEEDS TO SEE THAT. EVER.

Just now, I was telling JC how much I like the way he looks in his purple shirt. We're getting married in 3 days, I can do sappy shit like that. He says,

"I don't have a purple shirt."

"Wait, what?" says I.

"I've never had a purple shirt," he says confidently.

Dear readers, I bought JC a purple shirt and two new pairs of pants no more than a month ago, and he wore the purple shirt twice. He agreed that he looks very fine in it. Now he's forgotten it ever existed. (Edit: He found the shirt on the shelf with the tags still on it. We were both wrong.)

AND YET. Mention just a few words to this same man - "House of M" or "Chris Claremont" or, god forbid, "Spider-Man reboot" - and he'll expound for hours, discussing not only the main storyline but all adjoining storylines and interviews with the writers and artists and editors and why he doesn't care for Joe Quesada. (Neither do I, for the record, but only because I blame him for every sucky script I read.) I think that without the capacity to hold these details in his head, he'd simply be flipping the pages for the pretty pictures, so I appreciate the enormous brain power that goes into his comic habit.

It's not easy to be the partner of a comic fan. Every night at the dinner table is an adventure in the vast network of connections between comics, books, TV, and movies that is JC's beautiful mind. I can usually remember my to-do list from one day to the next, but his fully coherent stream of consciousness astounds me. When he starts talking, all I can do is sit back and enjoy the ride. It might not be so frustrating if the babble didn't contain its own inertia, if I could easily redirect him by asking about his day at work or telling a funny story of my own; more often than not, he'll listen more-or-less patiently while I talk, and then pick up where he left off, always adding, "Just one more thing, just let me say this one thing." And then, because I love him, I sigh and let him keep talking. I've learned more about the Marvel Universe in the past two years than I ever thought it was possible for a non-comic-reader to know. And I've loved every minute of it.

He'd better wear that purple shirt tomorrow.

- RD