Letting My Geek* Flag Fly

I recently realized that a lot of the blogs I follow through Google Reader and most of the tumblogs on my Dashboard are trending more and more into the realm of comic books while I wait for baseball season to start again. A while back I had started to notice a lot of people getting excited for an upcoming episode of "Smallville", the series that is "re-imagining" the Superman mythos.

Now while I still buy comic books, I don't tend to watch any of the television shows that are geared for comic book fans. Don't get me wrong, back in the day I watched so much "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that when my wife flipped past an episode two nights ago, I was able to name it from a snippet of dialogue I heard and then extensively quote O'Brien's scene in Ten Forward ("It's not you I hate, Cardassian. I hate what I became... because of you. ").

So while I've seen a random "Battlestar Galactica" or two, these days I just don't have a lot of TV watching time in my schedule and reserve it for shows both Nan and I enjoy.

All that being said, I couldn't pass up the chance to see an episode of "Smallville" that was being written by Geoff Johns, the go to guy at DC right now, and was to feature characters (in costume) that appeared in some of the first comic books I ever bought (All-Star Squadron) AND was being billed as a "Movie Event".

We gave it a whirl on Saturday night, after The Penguin plunge. I've got to say it was an enjoyable romp. I thought the casting was dead on, even in the non-speaking newsreel footage roles. The costumes weren't overly cheesy, while I thought Dr. Fate's was really good...except it did suffer from the "cross-eyes" effect at times. The script was tight and provided me with lots of "cool" moments as a comic fan. As a casual viewer of this particualr show, I never felt too lost with back story and felt that devoted fans were probably tossed a nugget or two that kept them happy.

While this episode won't necessarily make me a regular viewer, it felt like time well spent and will have me checking other people's blogs for a heads up when the show does something fun like this again.

It also got me excited for what can be done for the big screen, with a bigger budget, longer lead time, better filming equipment and so on. And I think it showed that the somewhat garish costumes CAN indeed translate to the big screen. It actually looked odd for the Superman character to be dressed in black (like "The Matrix" or "The X-Men" movies) while everyone else was wearing the colored spandex.

*I went back and forth between "geek" and "nerd" here. While I use both to describe myself, I know there are some who don't like one or the other. I asked my wife which was less "offensive" and she said "geek". And she would know, being far geekier than me....she just hides it a WHOLE lot better!