What characters were rip-offs of others? Are comics and pro wrestling actually tied together? Is the story from the comic better than the story in the movie? Just what the heck was happening in comics in the 90’s?

These are some questions any reasonable human being who contributes a portion of their weekly salary to the funny books may ask. The Flickcast alumni Jonathan ‘Wally’ Weilbaecher and I join forces with Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles to answer these and more.

With regulars Joe Slepski of The Joe on Joe podcast, Pablo Romero-Estevez and Alan ‘Sizzler’ Kistler of Crazy Sexy Geeks and some guests like Lucha Underground’s Joey Ryan and The Flickcast co-founder Matt Raub, we haven’t come to many conclusions but we have had a ton of fun arguing our way there.

Take two things geeks love, collecting and gaming, and you have a recipe for fun. But add a price tag to them and you have a potential recipe for disaster. It is universally accepted that geek culture isn’t a cheap one. 

Most of it revolves around specific purchases that help people fall in to varying groups. You have Star Wars fans, Trekkies, Doctor Who fans, LotR fans, gamers, roleplayers, LARPers, miniature tabletop players and a horde of others who fall into at least one, but usually multiples, of these options. And how do they show it? Usually with t-shirts, wallets, bags, wristbands, or any other number of options. But there are certain geek hobbies like collectible card games that take the obsessions of the geek culture to dangerous levels.

Collectible card games (CCGs for short) are games where players build their own deck out of an ongoing and ever growing collection of cards composed of those from starter packs and booster packs. Usually the packs have a distribution of cards between mostly common, some uncommon and a single rare. The more packs you purchase and you’ll likely find even harder to find special cards. In Magic: The Gathering, these would be Mythic Rares.

Usually a box of 36 packs will only contain a certain number of these sought after cards. The better the card and more rare it is will lead to players spending more between either pack purchases or just buying a card directly.

Working in both the entertainment industry and in YouTube, you’re bound to hear a lot of silly things said. “There’s no way people would want to watch someone else play video games.” “She looked like she had to be 18, right?” “He can’t wait to put me in his next feature.” But there’s one statement that you hear and you just know people are full of it.

When prepping for SDCC this year, I was asking a bunch of friends from various social circles who was heading to Comic Con and there was a common thread from those who weren’t going. They all used the phrase, “I think everyone is over Comic Con.”

Now I can see where this statement might be coming from. One could argue that year after year San Diego Comic Con can start to wear you a little thin by the end of it. No sleep, bad diet and abundance of partying can kick your butt. But when you look back a month later after recovering from the nerd flu you inevitably were stricken with a few days after it ended, you’re up and ready to rock once again.

But this year, there seem to be people claiming that “everyone” is over the Con.  And this is where I call them out on it.

You know what NFL? You’ve lost me forever. I never cared about your “sport” anyway. I sort of cared about Madden because it at least helped sell video game systems during the holiday seasons. But now, you’ve gone too far. Yesterday, the NFL announced they’d be banning “nonstandard/overbuilt” facemasks.

This includes Oakland Raiders defensive end Justin Tuck’s mask that resembled that of Shredder from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Now I don’t know who that is but damn them for not allowing a Shredder mask. They have also announced that the similar Bane styled masks will also be a part of this ban.

Now what is funny is the reason for the ban: because they don’t live up to NFL safety standards. The group of gargantuan men who are doing everything they can to throw their body weight on top of each other as fast as possible is worried about safety? Meanwhile hockey lets people play with a rubber puck flying at their face with no protection. Makes a lot of sense.

Well now I have given up on ever giving football a shot. The best chance they have is stepping their game up and creating a hybrid of the XFL and whatever the heck futuristic version of the game that they play in Starship Troopers and when they do it’s Team Shredder vs. Team Bane vs. Team Casey Jones vs. Team Mysterio.

Until then, I say “Good day” to the NFL.

It has come to be accepted that during the summer months, comic book stores are destined to be the home of big annual event books. Since House of M, every year Marvel has pushed out event after event with varying levels of success and long term effect. These events have been as discussed as who is a Skrull in Secret Invasion to the utter lack of attention paid to titles like Infinity.

But what makes one event a bigger deal than another? And ultimately, why does no one seem to care at all about Original Sin?

On the surface, the central idea of Original Sin is an interesting one. There is a murder mystery around who killed the Watcher, one of Marvel’s most iconic upper B-squad characters. But quickly you start to care really about who killed him because in comics no one stays dead forever so it doesn’t really matter since big baldy is going to come back eventually.