Sunday Stealing: The Fandom Meme

You can play here.

Rules: We all are fans. Be it Star Trek or Twilight, you are a fan of something. Pick a subject, book, TV or movie series. Now tell us all about it!

I couldn't decide whether to be classical and go with Buffy The Vampire Slayer or topical and go with Doctor Who, so just to disappoint fans of both equally I'll do neither and go with DC Comics.

1. The first character I fell in love with:

That would be Black Orchid, a character who turned up in a handful of stories during the '70s, though unlike other super characters they never told you who she was (no origin, no secret identity) so she had the enigmatic angle going for her. Sadly, Neil Gaiman came along and gave her a backstory in the '80s so I kind of lost interest in the character then, once all of her mystery had disappeared.

2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now:

That would be Barbara Gordon, who used to be Batgirl. I pretty much lost interest in the character when Alan Moore decided to cripple her in his Batman/Joker graphic novel The Killing Joke, thus ending her Batgirl career. However then she came back as Oracle, a character who sits at her computer all day, so the mix of struggling in the face of adversity and computer nerdity made me more of a fan of her than I'd ever been.

3. The character I would shag anytime:

Assuming the characters were real, I wouldn't shag any of them anytime, because I've got a way more super girlfriend. Besides, shagging super-powered beings could be dangerous, have you never read Larry Niven's Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.

4. The character I'd slap:

These people have super-powers, so slapping them wouldn't seem a good move.

5. Who are my 3 favorite characters.

The original Red Tornado (cool '40s cross-dressing hero with a frying pan for a helmet)

Zatanna (a magician who can make anything happen by saying it backwards - though I'm not sure if she just pronounces the words as if they're spelt backwards or actually talks backwards like that dwarf in Twin Peaks)

Mazing Man (if only because he looks amazingly like my avatar)

6. What are my 3 favorite pairings.

If this means pairings in a relationships/fanfiction sense rather than pairings in a Dynamic Duo sense, then I don't really think about such things.

7. Which character I'm most like.

Maybe Snapper Carr who was a powerless character who just hung around the heroes snapping his fingers and talking in cool lingo. Then again, the hero Adam Strange who's unknown on Earth and then becomes a hero when he gets beamed to the world of Rann seems a good metaphor for the comic-reading experience where you're suddenly immersed in a sea of heroes.

8. The coolest thing about the canon:

The imagination and ideas of seven decades that it's all built on.

9. The lamest crappiest thing about the canon:

These days it seems to be one Crisis after another, and character deaths are merely a pre-amble for the characters returning from the dead

10. My guiltiest pleasure in this fandom:

There are all sorts of really awful so-bad-they're-good pleasures to be found in comic books. My blog name comes from a brilliantly banal issue of Brave and the Bold where microscopic hero the Atom made a comatose Batman stops the criminals by bouncing around his brain to control him.

11. What story I wish I could read (or art I wish I could see)

That would have been Alan Moore's Twilight of the Super-Heroes series, that never came to fruition, though the proposal itself is a great read.

12. What story I wish I had written/still want to write

If I wanted to write stories, then I guess I could write substandard fanfiction or hang out at a DC comic fanfiction site (though the people there would be way more talented than me).