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"Daddy, do you have X-Men #161?" Virginia asks this question without looking up from the kitchen table, where she's eating a Pop-Tart and poring over a New Mutants graphic novel I bought twenty-five years ago. She's just been introduced to the Marvel Comics comprehensive footnoting scheme, which-- if followed dutifully-- can take one down a cross-referenced rabbit hole that lasts for hours on end. I tell Virginia that I don't have that issue-- my couple of years of X-Men collecting didn't kick in until the #230s-- but I make it a point later in the day to check for it at a comic book store and after I come up empty, I find #161 at the Carnegie Library in a collection of back issues and I check it and several other collections out. I am nothing if not an enthusiastic and aggressive supporter of nascent childhood hobbies. Over the course of the ensuing week, we watch five X-Men movies, four of which I had passed on seeing before

When I was sixteen I worked in a steakhouse and met a brainy, pretty senior with definite college plans and everything. To my great surprise, she was willing to entertain the idea of dating me. At that time, I was engrossed in the Mark Gruenwald "Captain America No More" storyline, in which Steve Rogers

For the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas I drove around with two

Maybe this will tell you everything you need to know about me: I saw Race to Witch Mountain in its second day of wide release, but have not yet seen Watchmen,, which was in theaters around the same time and was released on DVD yesterday. And I didn't even see the well-hyped and widely-downloaded Watchmen trailer until I broke down and saw The Dark Knight at the end of August. So I'm sitting there in the theater, watching a trailer for a big-budget Watchmen adaptation I thought about how much the version of me alive in 1988 would have soaked it all in. I would have felt culturally triumphant. My seventeen year-old self, who was spending $35 of hard-earned waiter tips a month on Action Comics Weekly, Concrete, the Silver Surfer, Love & Rockets and a dozen or more other titles, would have been aghast by the scene-- first, a Batman movie that took the character seriously, preceded by a trailer for a Watchmen movie, with adjoining theaters showing big-budget Hulk and Iron Man movies. didn't catch nearly t wasn't like I went with guess I'm also reluctant to see the new film because I'm getting a bit of nostalgia paralysis.

An item in the alumni magazine of my university

Reading stacks of Marvel comics in her downtime, Rogers said that even she was becoming desensitized to the images of women. “I heard the editors say it a hundred times: ‘Sex sells.’”

She describes the typical woman in mainstream comics as strong, tremendously buxom, and usually wearing something that resembles a bathing suit. It’s not uncommon to see the character lounging around in her underwear or thinking in the shower rather than, say, at a desk.

“Are they behaving the way real women would?” Rogers asked. “We don’t know because most of the editors, writers, and artists at Marvel and DC [DC Comics, also based in New York] are not women.”

There's been a renaissance in superhero movies, and of those that I've seen, I pretty much hate all of them. I checked out of the Spider-Man franchise right after the scene where Doc Ock comes to life on the operating room table and slaughters the medical team attending to him. I was sitting right behind a woman about my age who'd brought her son, who was around six or seven. It's a scene of such sudden, palpable cruelty that I wanted to leave the theater immediately, and I can't remember a single thing that happened after that scene because I couldn't stop thinking about that boy sitting through that sort of unnecessary savagery . Sure, his mom should have thought twice before taking him to a movie rated PG-13, but everybody (other than me, apparently) knows that this boy, who's had this movie and its characters aggressively marketed to him in toy aisles and fast food meals, is going to be in that theater. But the fanboys like their superheroes grim and gritty, so the villain origin story morphs into a slaughter. When I was that kid's age, I saw Spidey juxtaposed between Easy Reader and Rita Moreno.

The only superhero movies I've really enjoyed over the last few years were those Fantastic Four movies of the last few years which are reviled by the twentysomething and thirtysomething , where they dress Michael Chiklis up in an orange foam suit.

Last summer, when she was three and change, Virginia had her equivalent moment. I was browsing through the movies and music at the library and she was standing next to me pushing a row of CDs back and forth. She pulled this out of the row and asked me why the Silver Surfer was on a CD cover.

Parents push their kids into all sorts of activities and interests, with the results ranging from

But let's assume she becomes a fanatic? Where does she go next? Power Girl? Some of Marvel's creepy
detritus (to pick two recent punching bags)?

Fittingly enough, the epilogue of TOY STORY 3 provides the perfect metaphor for how the geek generation has held superheroes hostage. At the film's beginning, Andy, the toys' boy-owner, is packing to leave for college and his mother gives him an ultimatum: he's got to take the toys with him or he's got to dispose of them by putting them in either the trash or the attic-gulag. Andy decides he's going to leave the rest, but take cowboy Woody with him to university. Hey, I can buy into toys that walk, talk and carry out complex escape schemes when people aren't looking, but a kid who wants to take his cowboy doll with him to college? This I am not believing. Of course, I thought to myself, you can probably go to any college, and in at least one dorm room on every floor you'll find some grittier equivalent of Woody-- Leatherface, Krusty the Clown, Beatrix Kiddo-- displayed in some kid's room. Anyway, this plot point is really just a narrative crutch designed to create the necessary separation of the characters and to set up the last of the film's poignant choices. The little girl to whom Andy decides to give the rest of the gang wants Woody, too, and Andy can't bring himself to give the cowboy to her. He can give up this and this and this, but not that. He eventually does, of course, and then mouths an unnecessarily maudlin "Thanks, guys" to his playthings. Boy, I'd love to see the geek generation do the same thing with superheroes. It won't happen, of course, but I wish they'd follow Andy's example and leave the toys to the kids.

Appendix: But don't think for a moment that all of this looking askance stopped me from...

It motivated me to take this perfectly good, child-themed room...

...and turn it into this:

Among wallpaper borders, this one will never be exceeded. DC may have the better heroes and mythos, but Marvel has more iconic covers, and a fair percentage of them are represented here.