nerdiest. crush. ever.

comic books are fun. they're pretty to look at, easy to read, and even if you're illiterate you can get a good ballpark idea of what's going on just by looking at the pictures. and nowadays, they're printed on glossy magazine paper! even my cat likes comics, if by 'likes' you mean 'sits on'.

because the colors are so vivid and bold, and shiny, and the stories are told in such easy-to-digest mouthfuls, it's easy to find yourself lost in the world of whatever comic you're reading. sometimes, in a particularly well-written title, you can find yourself looking out through the eyes of the main character, feeling what s/he feels.

suspension of disbelief is god in all works of fiction, comics in particular.

admittedly, when i was first taken to the local mecca of all things comic book, i was in my early teens, so naturally i gravitated towards the x-books. they're like comics 101. i picked up an issue of the x-men restart title. you know, the 'blue team' one. asian psylocke, gambit, rogue, i think beast, and i can't remember everyone else now. oh well. i remember being attracted to the book because the cover had rogue and gambit ALMOST kissing on it. now, in my vague, undereducated brain, i remember rogue's power was the touch-initiated draining of mutant abililites, personality, etc. of people, and that she had no control of said power. so naturally, i thought 'how the HELL is she gonna pull this off?'. upon purchase and subsequent reading of the issue, i learned what a 'teaser' was. they didn't kiss. what crap.

over the next couple of months, i continued to buy that particular x-title, rather confused about the psylocke/kwannon drama, having absolutely no idea what the hell was going on. but i admit, i kept buying the issues for rogue and gambit.

i almost cringe... well, okay i DO cringe to remember it, but i was obsessed with them. not HIM, not HER, but THEM. at 15, i ate up fictional sexual tension with a spoon. yum yum. i even made a marvel character that was the the product of rogue artificially inseminating herself with gambit's dna. HOW RETARDEDLY NERDY IS THAT CRAP?!

upon reflection, that character was pretty cool. she absorbed energy from other people (just like her mommy!) and when she reached capacity, she'd spontaneously combust. except i found out later there was a dc universe character called the human bomb. and here i thought i'd been original. well, i'd been kind of original. she didn't sweat nitroglycerin or anything.

so i don't know if that quite qualifies as a comic-book character crush, but i think it's pretty close. or at least the closest i'd gotten when i was the age in which comic book character obsession was somewhat normal.

as i got older, my tastes matured as well, and i started reading the dc vertigo trades of sandman and hellblazer. i started developing attractions to both morpheus and john constantine. yeah, they were assholes, but they were kinda neat all at the same time. i got tired of the 'mon chere's and wanted a man on paper who wasn't afraid to say 'fuck'.

i'm not attracted to any comic book characters anymore. i think i reserve my attractions to television show characters now.