Showing posts with label personal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label personal. Show all posts

Sunday, June 23, 2024

Me and "Batman" (1989) - at 35


Today marks the 35th anniversary of the release of Batman.   

Our final episode of The Signal Watch PodCast covered this movie.  I invite you to join Jamie and me through a chipper discussion of the movie and the forces around it.  And I've previously written about me and Batman.

To repeat some of what's the podcast and maybe elsewhere - I very much recall my excitement around Batman in 1989. 

I'd really come to comics in 1986, and like a lot of readers at the time, I mostly read X-books and the Bat-titles.  Bat-comics were kind of exploding at the time in the wake of Dark Knight Returns and with the arrival of the terrific talents of folks like Alan Grant on writing chores, veteran Jim Aparo and fresh talent Norm Breyfogle on pencils.  I think this era is one of the many well-loved eras for the books, and with good reason.  

Even in the era of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, Batman was the first movie I ever followed through development and to release date - then through box office and into home video.  It was not the first movie I ever loved, but it was the first movie I felt a level of personal attachment.  

I recall articles in Comics Scene, then the paper.  Reading Nicholson was the Joker and feeling uncertain how that would go.  Prince would be on the soundtrack, which seemed bizarre.

So excited was I - I purchased the novelization prior to the release of the film, and was half-way through reading it when I realized "this is a very dumb thing to do" and I cast the book aside.  I didn't know the term "spoilers" then, but I realized I was going to maybe ruin the experience a mere 4 or 5 days prior to seeing the movie.

My memory of seeing the film itself will always be tied up with a few unrelated things.

Sunday, April 28, 2024

24 Years of Wedded Bliss


So, April 28th, 2024 marks the 24th anniversary of Jamie and I making it official.

We'd "dated" for years prior, back to 1995, but that's if you call "dating" two people just saying "yup" to each other and now we were an item.  There wasn't much in the way of trying to figure things out regarding our status.  I wasn't taking her to a movie and then dropping her off and wondering what she was thinking.  We were just together.  And while I didn't know that we'd get married in the first months, there was just not a lot of work there - we just didn't have a trial period or casual dating phase.  

When I hear about people having relationship drama, I'm just of the opinion that you aren't writing a romantic novel about overcoming all kinds of obstacles in liking each other.  I'm not saying there isn't any work or misunderstandings, but, kids, it can be pretty good pretty early on.  With Jamie's medical history, we wound up having plenty of drama that wasn't us arguing, so don't mistake things for being all smooth sailing.  And I got cold feet a couple of times as we headed toward what looked like a lifelong relationship - what with college ending and next phases of life starting.

But into those next phases we headed, sharing an apartment for two years before nuptials.  We got married on a Friday in April of the year 2000.  We were 25, which was pretty young by the standards of my peers.  But, also, most of my friends responded to the news with "shocker, man".  Which means people probably knew we were getting married before I knew.