Confessions of a Comics Junkie: Rooting for the Underdog (or, Characters Marvel Forgot to Love)
Readers of my personal blog will recall that I recently got back into comic books. And by “got back into” I mean “I now have almost three long boxes full of comics.”[1] It’s an obsession. So sue me. One of the things that has been most interesting to me on this journey back into comics is discovering how much has changed since I was a lax reader in the 90s. I don’t mean in terms of the narratives, mind you (though those have changed, too), but rather in terms of the characters who have stuck around, moved to the background, or (supposedly) left us for good.[2] Things have really changed. The most alarming change for me was the realization that some of the characters I loved as a kid have since taken a sideline to more “popular” folks. Oh, hell, let’s face it. The characters I liked as a kid, and the characters I have since started to cling to in the now, will never be as popular as Wolverine or Batman or Captain America or Iron Man or most of the folks gracing our movie screens these days. They are, and probably always have been or will be, the underdogs. But they’re also the characters for which I can’t help rooting.
