Warning: Charming Smiles Ahead

Listen, I know the first thing you think when you see me. Tall, beard, wearing a uniform with a deer on it. Yep. That guy has a Pinterest page. Well yeah I do. And early on, I started following boards about comic books, and an interesting thing happened. The comic book pages were very rarely about comic books and very often about comic book movies. Especially loving tributes to the male actors in said comic book movies. Especially Tom Hiddleston.

Warning: Charming smiles ahead

Interesting.

It's an amazing world out there, you guys, and if you don't explore some of its nooks and crannies you'd never know about this subculture. The subculture that calls themselves "nerds" and "geeks" but should really call themselves "moviegoers." If the genre of movie you are a nerd about is also the most popular genre of movie in the world right now, I think that makes you pretty normal.

Yeah. That's 1,518 million AKA ONE POINT FIVE BILLION

Oh, you're into handsome guys with British accents? YOU DON'T SAY. WHAT A NERD. What next? Guys saying they like to see Scarlett Johansson in a skin-tight black suit? Let me write this down because I took two sociology classes in college and I think I'm going to get published here.

I spent my whole life being called a nerd, you guys. I fought in those trenches. I was a nerd when being a nerd meant that you were teaching your teacher how to use her computer and then getting sent to Gifted and Talented Computer Camp. When publicly reading a book adorned with a spaceship or a muscle-bound warrior with an ax was grounds for having cookies thrown at you.

Yeah, I got bullied, but in their defense I was the one wearing a scout shirt to school.

You want to be a nerd now because black plastic-framed glasses are now sexy and Star Wars shirts are apparently acceptable attire on adults (debatable) well NERD UP, FANBOY. Read the dang comics before they're movies.

Here's how you get in on the ground floor, geek. Read The Runaways, by Brian K. Vaughan.

What's that you're seeing? Well. The one on the left is Gertrude, AKA Arsenic. The dinosaur behind her is Old Lace. They're pals. On the right you have Molly AKA Bruiser AKA Princess Power. I know there's a lot to process.

Here's the deal.

The Runaways are a group of kids who find out that their parents make up an evil group of supervillains called The Pride. The Pride's sole goal is to usher in the destruction of humanity. Gert and Molly, along with a group of goofball snotty kids whose only unifying characteristic is a distrust of all adults (even Spiderman), *spoiler alert* foil that plan and go off on their own derring-do. Molly punches Wolverine. One kid steals Beast's glasses. They fight Ultron.

The fact that they manage to save the world while all the female characters manage to always be wearing pants or skirts makes it all the more phenomenal.

Anyway, this is as accessible as comics get, you guys. It's probably at your library. Read it before the inevitable movie or tv series comes out, pin it to your "geek" board. Get some cred, people. Sometimes you embarrass me. Have some self-respect. Like me.

Wait wrong board

scorch the earth

"Sweetie, if and when somebody shuffles me off this mortal coil, you can scorch the earth avenging me, but for now, every so-called "evil" kid deserves the benefit of the doubt as much as we did. I mean, I appreciate the whole Tom Sawyer gimmick of getting to attend my own funeral, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. Apparently, I've still got an annoyingly long life to live."
-Brian K. Vaughan, Runaways

Pictured: Weird Stuff

Swamplandia! is a cool title with a cool cover. Let's just get that out of the way right now. It's also a pretty cool book. I don't know how much to tell you because it's one of those stories that I think the less you know about it, the better. According to Goodreads the ending is controversial, but also according to Goodreads baby animals are ugly and Kit Kats aren't gross and lame.

The basic outline is this: 13-year old Ava Bigtree is an alligator wrestler. Her family operates a theme park called Swamplandia! The park's main attraction feature's Ava's mother diving from a high dive into the alligator infested water, then swimming serenely across to the other side. Ava's mother has just died of cancer in her mid-thirties and nobody knows what's going to happen to the park.

Ava has an older sister, Osceola, who in an attempt to reach out to her mother, ends up getting pretty into ghosts. Her older brother Kiwi is a self-proclaimed genius who feels hampered by the family's lax efforts at homeschooling. Especially charming is his vast vocabulary of words he's never heard before, and therefore pronounces wrong.

Have you ever pronounced a word wrong your whole life because you've never heard it said out loud? Like bourgeois or ornery or I'm proud of you?

Also there's her dad, who insists people call him The Chief because part of the theme park's conceit is that the Bigtrees are a tribe native to the island upon which their park is located even though Ava's grandfather, the venerable Sawtooth Bigtree, was just a mainlander who got tricked into buying some terrible farmland and made the most of it. Anyway, then the story gets weird.

I've read some of Karen Russell's short stories in Vampires in the Lemon Grove, and thought they were just great. I'm told by the internet that Swamplandia! is based on one of her short stories. This is her first novel and for the most part I think it works. Maybe there's some pacing issues in the middle, but when it gets rolling at the end you can't stop. Or I couldn't. I read like a third of it in one long, increasingly ridiculous night. I thought about it all the next day, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a sign of a good book
.

They got ideas in their heads

“A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose.”
Kent Haruf, Plainsong

(Happy birthday, Jo!)

you had to mourn amply and well

"There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic--a "damn, fool math"--in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery in Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.

At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well."

-Karen Russell, Swamplandia!