Rocket raccoons, new mutants, and imaginary friends
The undeniable weirdness of being a nerd when nerds are cool.
I’m not sure I’m ready for Guardians of the Galaxy to drop in a week and change.
Don't get me wrong: It looks great, and I was lucky enough to catch Marvel’s 17-minute preview in the movie theater a few weeks back. It is almost definitely going to make billions of dollars before it’s through, and if any Marvel Studios marketing executives are reading this, feel free to quote me on that.
Man. A Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Who’d have ever thought?
But you have to understand: Living in a world where hundreds of people line up for an hour or more beforehand to watch little more than an extended trailer for a movie featuring Rocket Raccoon in a leading role — I mean, Rocket Raccoon, come on — increasingly makes me feel like an alien in my own life.
Growing up, I was first introduced to comic books by way of a tremendous treasure trove of hand-me-down comic books: My uncle’s collection of comics from the time he was a kid all the way through his admission to law school, when he no longer had time for such things.
At maybe five years old, I was already more interested in books than in people. In this pile of eighties-vintage comic books, particularly Marvel’s The New Mutants and DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes, I found the friends and role models I was having trouble connecting with in my everyday life. The fact that the titles I was most drawn to featured characters closer to my age than, say, Superman or Batman, was lost on me at the time.
Comic books presented an alternate reality for me to inhabit when I just couldn’t cope with the world as it presented itself in my day-to-day. Opening an issue of X-Men was both an invitation to hang out with my cool friends who could stick to walls and turn to metal and maybe also a blueprint for how to treat others and what was important in life. We could argue all day about the healthiness of those particular lessons, but to say they were a guiding influence on me would be understating matters severely.
Once I finished going through that stack, my enthusiasm waned considerably. I’d still go back to the pile for the occasional favorite issue, but the novelty had worn off. This was during the mid-nineties, a time when superhero comics were characterized by guns, enormous musculature strapped onto unlikely frames, dangerously tremendous bosoms, clones, and titles like Gunfire and Extreme Justice (seriously). It was a tough sell on my parents to get me to the store for that stuff, and honestly, with the entrance of video games into my life with the release of the Nintendo 64, I didn’t really try too hard.
My return to comics came with Ultimate Spider-Man #13, which a new student at the school gave me in an attempt to make friends. By that point, I had been lapsed for several years — this was the first time in my pubescent life that I had really attempted to get back into it. And it blew my mind. In that issue, Spider-Man reveals his secret identity to Mary Jane Watson, his girlfriend, considering it the responsible thing to do. Again, as an awkward teenager, I found the closest thing to a how-to manual in comic books about being an awkward teenager.
From that point on, I was hooked. I set up a pull list at the local comic book store, spending any available minute consuming as much as I could, at one point literally turning my pockets out for enough spare change to afford the new issue of Ultimate Spider-Man.
When my high school demanded that seniors spend the last two months before graduation in a job as kind of a workstudy thing, I ended up working as a stockboy at that same store. When I left for college, I spent summers and holidays in their back room, alternately reading and filing. Just being surrounded by this thing that I loved so much was enough for me, and I’d often exchange my paycheck for more comics on the spot, to my mother’s eternal chagrin (though she mellowed when store owner Irene, a living saint, let me borrow comics from the store for free and return them the next day provided I didn't damage them).
To this day, I perpetually have stacks of comics read and unread crammed in my bookshelves, on my desk, and in my computer bag. I spend a lot of time talking about comic books, thinking about comic books, reading about comic books, and especially learning more about comic books and how and why they’re made.
In case you couldn't tell by the hundreds of words preceding this very sentence, comic books are something I feel strongly about. Speaking broadly, not many people are into them the same way I’m into them, and it’s something that I made my peace with many, many years ago. I learned the hard way in high school that no, nobody actually thinks it’s interesting that Wolverine’s claws are bone under the metal. Even among those who shared my nerdy tendencies, I felt like my lack of interest in TV, wrestling, Star Trek, and making awkward passes at women set me that much further apart.
Which brings us back around to where I began. To me, Guardians of the Galaxy was a fun,team of superheroes who lived in the future, obscure even by Marvel Comics standards. When the concept got revamped in the mid-aughts to become the team of intergalactic misfits that the upcoming film is based on, I thought it was a fantastically fun run that not enough people were into. I shoved copies at my similarly nerdy friends, some of whom loved it like I did, and lines like “I AM GROOT!” became a catchphrase; an inside joke between my friends and I.
I remember once, shortly after I graduated college in 2008, I started going to a gym in my then-neighborhood of Bayside, Queens. The owner of the gym, spotting my Avengers workout shirt, got me into a conversation about his love of the Hulk, and how the only issue of The Incredible Hulk comic that he ever hated was the one where Rocket Raccoon shows up. When I told him that Rocket was a major player in a Marvel comic book that had just come out, I thought he was going to kick me out of his gym. I can only imagine him gritting his teeth now through the current Guardians of the Galaxy commercial marketing blitz.
So you may understand the essential weirdness of suddenly seeing Groot, and Rocket Raccoon, and Falcon, and Thanos, and the Winter Soldier, on t-shirts and toys. It’s like the voices in my head came to life. Now, at parties, I inevitably end up regaling a rapt audience with the differences between the movies and the comics. All the things that used to make me feel left out in the broader cultural conversation suddenly and without warning made me a desired resource and a sought-after authority in my social circles. The same behavior I was socialized to suppress is now considered a strength. And besides, the groundswell of interest in comics makes previously-unheard-of things possible: You mean there’s a novel? Called “Rocket Raccoon and Groot Steal the Galaxy?” Could we truly be so blessed?
This feeling must not be wildly dissimilar from suddenly finding out that everybody else can see your imaginary friend, too. You’ve been extolling their virtues for years and greatly valuing their friendship in your private life, and it’s amazing that you can finally, finally show your friend off to people who understand why they’re so great.
But on the other hand, there’s a little bit of cynicism there, too. If your imaginary friend is so great, why couldn't everybody else see him before? Why didn't they believe you that your friend was great, and now suddenly they’re so willing? Is it something wrong with you, that maybe you only thought they were imaginary? And will that friend have any time for you, now that you have to share it with the rest of the world? If absolutely nothing else, it’s, again, just plain surreal sometimes.
Personally, I love the idea that more and more people are coming to love these characters and these stories. But there’s a certain kind of person who focuses so much on protecting their imaginary friends that they lose sight of the real people in front of them.
This kind of “fan” feels like they need to protect their imaginary friends from the wrong crowd — those who they think would threaten their relationship with the characters and whatever lessons they learned from them. If Captain America is black, then what about all those stories they loved as a kid where he was white? But that’s a topic for a whole other essay.
In short, it’s undeniably a good thing that more and more people are coming to these characters and stories, and it’s my fondest wish that they get as much from them as I have. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me happy to see little kids wearing Iron Man t-shirts.
It’s weird that Rocket Raccoon is set to be the breakout character of 2014, but ultimately, it’s the good kind of weird. And when Disney’s Big Hero 6 comes out, based on an even more obscure Marvel property, that’s going to be the good kind of weird, too.
For my part, I’ll keep recommending comics to people at parties until I’m reliably informed that it’s no longer acceptable to do so. Just please understand the cultural whiplash that I, and nerds like me, am experiencing from suddenly being thrust into a world where the rest of the world suddenly seems to learn what we’ve known all along: Comics are for everyone.
