Captain Marvel #24
Writer: Peter David
Art: Pat Quinn and Chris Sotomayor 

Okay. I’m never doing this again. So I bought this issue from a bargain bin last week, and I figured it’d be fun to post on it since I seem to be on an inadvertent Captain kick. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that 1) I had a miniscule amount of prior Captain Marvel knowledge going into this reading / knew nothing about the other characters who pal around with him and fight him and 2) this is the conclusion issue to something called “Odyssey.” The whole time reading this issue, I had absolutely ZERO idea what was going on. Now I know what Wil must feel like.

It was actually really funny because towards the end of the comic there is a part where a guy, Rick Jones, comments “What the blazes just happened?” I started cracking up. The comic basically read my mind, and even though that was probably completely unrelated to my not getting what was going on, it was nice to have someone just as lost.

Anyway, I got to thinking, and I was thinking of different stories that it would be stick to stick my head into during the conclusion.

Take The Matrix for example. How great would it be to flip pop it into your DVD player for the first time, and with zero private knowledge, you see Neo wake up from the dead and fly into the Agents? Or if you’ve ever seen Snatch . . . well, nevermind, you can turn that on at the beginning and still have no idea what’s going on or who people are. Or how about the movie Crash, when everything comes together and all of the stories end up affecting each other — THAT is when you decide to begin.

Film isn’t the only medium where this would be funny, though. Have you ever seen a television show where they do something completely unlike the show? Like maybe one time it will be in “live sit-com mode” with laugh tracks and everything. What if that’s the first time you turned it on? Or what if you had never seen or heard of Colbert Report and turn it on when he’s saying something factual, leading you to think it’s news before turning the channel. No wonder people in this country are so mislead . . .

This actually reminds me of a funny story where a friend of mine’s mom saw a copy of The Onion on the street. She started reading it and thought it was a real newspaper. I can’t remember what the article was, but I can only wonder how many people do that and never realize it’s fake . . .

One last story. In New Jersey or New York or somewhere around there, there’s a radio show that does something called “Phone tapped.” It’s basically candid camera on radio. So someone calls in and gets the DJ to prank call someone else. Well, I once tuned in the middle of one of these things, and I didn’t realize it was fake. So I started complaining about how wrong the DJ was for accusing someone of something (sorry for being so vague). Well, it turned out the DJ was leading this person on only because it was a prank. But should I not have listened the whole time (and I was ready to turn it off), I would probably have never tuned into their show again because I thought she was being a total douche. Is it just me, or is that kind of a risk?

Anyway, if there’s a moral to this post, it is “don’t buy conclusion issues of series that you hardly know.”

the end.