Suphero movies part I

I’ve watched several of the Marvel Universe superhero movies now; Iron Man, Spider Man, Ant Man, the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the one where the bad Hulk conquers the universe.  I shouldn’t enjoy these as much as I do (except for Spider-Man), as I am over 50 and the plots are absurd, but I do, mostly for the fantastic special effects, which 

look exactly how I used to wish super hero shows would look back when I read the Incredible Hulk comics and watched the TV show with Lou Ferrigno, and I had to watch the slow motion action scenes they always used in those shows to show superhuman speed and strength, so the actors wouldn’t look ridiculous throwing styrofoam rocks and moving their legs super fast like looney tunes people. It never really worked. 

I wanted the shows to be like the comic books, with dramatic but dignified poses lovingly captured by the artists, like heroic sculptures. Not slowly tumbling stunt men, always getting thrown by the hulk. Never punched or squished. That would have looked horrible, but young me wanted to see that, because wouldn’t that happen?  It happens with cars. 

I tried to make my own hulk comics, on candy company paper that we had reams and reams of because my older brother brought it home from his job at a candy company. Every page had a huge banner that covered half the page that was the company’s difficult to see name and logo over a colorful photo of jellybeans. It didn’t seem to work very well from a design standpoint, because the banner dominated the page and you could barely read the company name. 

I later discovered that the candy banner paper had been my brother’s project at the candy company. He’d envisioned  the candy banner paper propelling him to the company presidency, currently occupied by his scoutmaster Brother Olsen, or at least to a manager position. But Brother Olsen had not taken to the expensively inked banners and limited useable space of the paper, and I ended up with reams of scratch paper that I had the bad grace to complain about to my disappointed brother, after he’d hoped to salvage at least some gratitude, a glow of pride for his generosity to his younger sibling, from the failed endeavor. 

So I ruined it with my complaining, or at least so I surmise, as he did not say anything at the time, just patiently told me how I could draw on the blank side of the pages. But the huge banners bothered me so much that I ended up cutting them off with scissors and only using the half pages for my drawings and calculations which were merely rows and tables and pages of the recorded results of dice rolls, a strange practice which I became addicted to in my youth and early teens, as I had independently discovered what the dungeons and dragons people had already found, that the rolls of the dice afforded a pseudo realistic counterpoint of contingent events to the life of fantasy.  I didn’t see the gaming possibilities of the dice roll determinant.  I thought I was perfecting the ultimate comic book writing technique, a random event generator that would make the Orange Giant’s (my entirely original ripoff of the hulk) adventures more believable with their lifelike unpredictability. Anyone who’s written or tried to write a story will immediately understand how time consuming this technique would be in practice, and I did not devote much time to it in the end, not nearly as much time as I did sitting on my bed in my bedroom with the blue shag carpet that I imagined was the ocean with a book and a half page of scratch paper with the candy banner cut off, pencil poised in the air above the beginnings of an inept rendering of Orange Giant, fantasizing about the incredible glory I would realize with my invention. And the dice rolls that I’d conceived as determining the plot of Orange Giant’s adventures began to determine random numbers like the number of Orange Giant comic books I would sell after publishing my first issue (I had no ten sided at the time, so I used twelve six-sided with results coded as 0-5, six being zero), the scores from the Orange Giant football team’s (one of several sport franchises begun by me after the success of my comic books) first few seasons, and of course my growing personal fortune (devoted to building Orange Giant toys and robot suits).