It's Truly a Marvel

I rely heavily on my Playstation Portable to get my through my workouts, and I've once again scored a terrific game to keep me distracted while I sit on the accursed exercise bike - Marvel Ultimate Alliance. You put together a team of four superheroes from the Marvel universe, and they have to fight through a series of challenges. It's nerdcore awesomeness.

It does remind me, though, that I am far from a comic book geek. I read whatever they have at the library, and I'm a fan of some of it. I think the Sandman series by Niel Gaiman, for example, while starting out kid of rough, ended up being something that really stuck with me, and as previously reviewed, I quite enjoyed Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. I'm far from what you'd call a fan though, always preferring the more text-based storytelling of novels.

Marvel, however, has proven itself an entertainment juggernaut, and having loved the first two X Men movies as well as last summer's Iron Man, I know enough about the characters to be interested. The problem is that, well, sometimes it feels silly. I mean, at least in Marvel's case, the X Men came along to give an excuse for why all these people were showing up with super powers, but some of the story lines just put to much pressure on my suspension of disbelief if you follow them too far.

Take Spiderman for example. A spider gets all radioactive, and somehow doesn't die. Then that spider bites a dude. As we all know, he's suddenly super strong and can climb walls and stuff, which is awesome. (I'm enough of a geek to deny the movies allowing him to sling web, which the comics always did with a gadget he invented, but only because I still don't like the idea of some guy leaving bodily fluids all over New York. Well, okay, another guy.) In real life, the guy would get an slightly less awesome welt, along with some form of necrosis. Don't Google it - trust me that it's something some spiders give people, and it's icky.

It's like that over and over. Dare Devil goes blind when exposed to a radioactive substance, and all of his other senses go through the roof instead of him getting the normal heightened sense of smell. (Plus he's supposedly a hero and a lawyer. Please. Like that could ever happen.) Bruce Banner is exposed to a ton of gamma radiation, and he turns into a super strong behemoth, which is much more exciting that the more realistic cancer. I think you see where I'm going with this.

Of course, most of the time I try not to think so much about all of this. I mean, some of these characters were created over fifty years ago. It's not like they could hop on Wikipedia and look up gamma rays like I can. So, not unlike my complaints about Swiper, I should probably learn to just accept that it's silly and enjoy it, or not bother with it at all. Knowing me, I'm going the silly route.

After all, it seems like the people there are always having more fun.