Reason #2,432 to doubt Photogal's devotion to me.


She hasn’t gone to see Batman Begins with me yet.

When I was younger I was a nut for comic books. My first job, when I was 11, was working in a comic book store. This was the mid-80s when the things were still not exactly at the height of being cool. As a matter of fact one of the few fights I got into when I was a kid was over an issue of X-Men that some girl mangled. She kicked my ass. It really didn’t help my social standing.

One of my co-workers was an insanely intelligent black Republican (I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms but it was so true and he was really someone to admire) who went on to contribute to speeches for Ronald Reagan, and just the other day I heard him as a commentator on News & Notes on NPR. He was the same guy who, three issues in, wrote down the name of who the central villain of The Watchmen would be and sealed it in an envelope to be opened at the series’ conclusion. He was right. It was Ozymandias! If you were into comics in the mid-80s you were smart and you were a bit of a freak. There weren't a whole bunch of us around.

What I’m doing here is giving context. When the first Batman film came out I was obsessed and in love with the concept and then incensed when I found out that Ray Liotta wasn’t the Joker since I thought Jack Nicholson would be too hammy. I still think Liotta would have been a better psychotic. I remember visiting relatives in South Texas when the movie was released – incidentally I lost my virginity a few days before so my spirits were probably at an all-time high between the two events – and my mom was gracious enough to cart us all down to the first midnight showing of the movie. I was so pleased Hollywood finally got it mostly right. It wasn’t as dark as I had hoped, but it certainly wasn’t your average summer popcorn fare.

Once I started college my love affair with comics started to wane as they grew more and more commercial and there were more and more “event” books coming out. I noticed more and more comics were emerging as movies and for a while they were getting it right. Recent films have me worried though. X-Men 3 is being directed by a hack, the Fantastic Four film looks pretty lame, The Watchmen looks dead in the water, and don’t even mention the evil trifecta of films (Daredevil / Elektra / Catwoman) that I consider to be worse than the Swamp Thing movie.

Batman Begins could be the one to save my faith in comic adaptations though and I’ve been almost as excited to see it as I was that hot South Texas night so many years ago when I first heard Michael Keaton rasp, “I’m Batman.”

So come on Photogal, let’s go see the movie already!