Ten days ago, I finished a long and occasionally arduous journey deep into the heart of nerdom: I finally read every issue of Marvel's THOR and its sister comic, JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY, published since the character came back in 2007.*
Between here and there, there have been about 60 issues of the main Thor book, plus 37 issues of Journey into Mystery, plus assorted one-shorts and miniseries. (I'll confess, I haven't read every single one of the one-shots, mainly because Marvel released a ton of them around the time the movie came out and I'm sorting out what's what. If I stumble onto any gems, I'll let you know.) That's a lot of comics - Gods bless the iPad, without which I doubt I ever would have taken up the project.
Although I was an early adopter of Facebook - way back in the days of legend, when one needed to be a student at an approved college and we spelled Facebook with a The - I had managed to avoid the time sucking vortex of Facebook games for many years. They were, after all, Skinner boxes, one and all, designed to slowly but persistently separate dollars and time from those gullible enough to fall into their traps. In terms of sophistication, Facebook games are little better than the puzzle in the polar bear cage on LOST, except Facebook games don't even have the courtesy to reward you with a fish biscuit.
Warning: blatant self-promotion ahead! But, there is a really good reason for said self-promotion, so please bear with me.
Science fiction as a genre is both extremely popular and notoriously difficult to define. It is often a case of "I'll know it when I see it." Stars Wars? Yes. Star Trek? Yes. McCaffrey's Pern books? Yes. KA Laity's Owl Stretching? Considering the people-eating aliens and near-future setting, yes. Devon Monk's The Age of Steam series? Um ... it's set in the Wild West, but it's steampunk, which is often considered a subgenre of science fiction, but it's got faeries and magic, too, so ... maybe? Lucian of Samosata's True History? Um ... second century fable-ish proto-science fiction?
Comics are my first love. I taught myself to read with Spiderman; my first after-school job primarily financed my $100 a month comics habit. And even today, comics may be my favorite medium, even if I have left the month-to-month antics of superheroes behind me. (Not for outgrowing superheroes, mind you, but because I was fed up with the companies behind them. I'm sure I'll end up ranting about this at some point.)
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Mr Scott, I wholeheartedly agree that Marvel doesn't give a hoot about the worshipers of the Norse gods, and therein lies proof of
Mr. Ward, Speaking of Xena: Warrior Princess, I must say that both it and its companion show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, ha
