Wednesday, January 28, 2009

I Am So In Geek Heaven Right Now


You may have heard, our new President is a collector of Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics. If you do the math (uh, let's see, he's 47, and most kids reach their peak interest in comics around age 12, which leads me to suspect he read Spider-Man thirty-five years ago, which would have been 1973, which means... OMG, he knows I killed Gwen Stacy!) you'll realize the Spider-Man stories he read were probably those written by yours truly, and the Conan comics he collects are most likely those scribed by my buddy Roy Thomas.

Which makes this Onion article all the funnier for me, particularly the reference to Conan the Destroyer.

Yippee!

3 comments:

Richard said...

I'm glad you're more pleased about this than Roy Thomas was! :-/

It does seem that every reference I've seen to Obama's comic book preferences traces back to one article in the Daily Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/article3401168.ece

I've never seen the Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian part independently confirmed anywhere else; it always comes back to this one totally unsourced piece. It could be true, or it could be something the reporter pulled out of nowhere.

However, this much superior article in the Guardian has a nice description from his childhood friend Rully Dasaad, which places their comics reading in a useful historical context:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/26/barackobama-uselections2008

Michael A. Burstein said...

"OMG, he knows I killed Gwen Stacy!"

I'm guessing he's over it by now. :-)

The Irredeemable Shag said...

Given the time frame, he may also know you created the Punisher. Who knows, maybe he'll call you for advice on gun control. :)


The Irredeemable Shag
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