Posted 7:39 PM by Gene

High on my list of GET A LIFE types are comic-book aficionados; they've helped turn what at best was an agreeable time-killer into an "art" form, full of pretensions and neuroses. And the rags aren't even that well drawn; look at a wall full of comic books at a distance (as I did today at a comic-book store) and you see one boldly-colored airbrushed jumbled indecipherable mess. These people also share a considerable part of a circle in a Venn diagram with another GET A LIFE type, the fantasy-game fan (but then the fantasy game and the comic book and the Web have melded into a world of pointless time-consuming obsessions of its own). Highest on my GET A LIFE list is any writer, particularly a BLUNDER writer, who calls a comic book creator a "genius." Needless to say a new Valenti based on said genius's comic book has not exactly inspired the most fulsome critical encomiums, nor is it causing a stampede at the box office. You can get out all the Ph.Ds and write all the fancy disserations you want; in the end, comic books STINK, and so does the rest of our similiarly woebegotten pop culture. (Of course one of the biggies in comic books is AOL. Has the company thought of unloading that business? Alas, I fear not; it's part of licensing.)