I recently celebrated the high holy days of my marriage: my wedding anniversary and wife’s birthday are four days apart in October.
Go ahead, make a joke about how dumb-man me did this so I won’t forget either one. It won’t matter that we both wanted a wedding in October (neither too hot nor too cold, and likely not rainy), while also staying away from our Halloween activities.
So it is.
As two geeks in love, we usually spin anniversary/birthday time through any one of our many geeky fandoms. Our honeymoon was at Walt Disney World, after all. (Not all Disney fans are geeks, but Disney fans visiting the parks without children definitely are.) On her birthday, my wife met Cinderella and showed off her earrings designed as tiny glass slippers.
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| Cinderella examines Mrs. Blerd Vision’s glass-slipper earrings. |
This year of Geek Love High Holidays was no different.
For the birthday, I first bought my wife a Cinderella-themed bracelet charm styled as Cindy’s magically endowed ballgown – a nice callback to that honeymoon birthday and to when she met Cinderella nine (!) years ago on another Disney World vacation. (My parents came with us, the only table of only adults, and grumbled about all the girly stuff until that prime rib buffet dinner came. You’d never seen people change their tunes so fast.)
Later on this birthday excursion, as we scanned a Hot Topic and felt entirely too old to be there, my wife came away with two Doctor Who shirts: one featuring a schematic drawing of a Dalek, and the other a Weeping Angel with the words “Don’t blink.”
I’m no Whovian, but I always appreciate any love of villains.
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| Wayyyyyy too many cyborgs and mutants here. |
It’s all part of how Two Nerds in Love work things out. Some fandoms we have in common, and we share some with each other as well.
I wasn’t really into Disney, but my wife’s enjoyment of it has made me more appreciative to the point of getting back into the older classics such as Sleeping Beauty and Pinocchio. My wife really digs old Hollywood musicals. I did musical theater in high school and college, but you can’t really call me a fan. However, I’d sit with her for Singin’ in the Rain and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers any day.
Things also work the other way around. I recently brought my entire comic book collection – all seven longboxes’ worth — from my mother’s house as she prepares to move.
Do you understand how much of my collection is crappy ’90s comics? So many, from the electric Superman run, to 361 crossover crises across 75 Batman books (“Legacy,” anyone? RIP to The Clench.), to when Jim Balent’s Catwoman went totally in the toilet.
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| Believe it or not, this was during Balent’s glory days. |
Stuff I haven’t read again since I bought it, such as the Brian Azzarello/Richard Corben Cage miniseries from 2002 under Marvel’s explicit-content MAX imprint? Gone. A ton of the New 52 comics that aren’t even continuity any more, or maybe they are? Gone. (I’m keeping Animal Man and Swamp Thing, though.)
But then there’s a lot of stuff that I still like, that even if they don’t stand the test of time, they evoke the time they were made and remain good for me.
It was satisfying to get the new Eltingville Club comic and then dredge up my Dork issues from the ’90s and early 2000s to read, and then share with my wife.
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| Tommy Monaghan, the one and only. You’re missing out if you never read Hitman, if you ask me. |
When she saw me reading Garth Ennis and John McRea’s All-Star Section 8 from DC’s everything’s-back-now Convergence crossover this year, and I explained Six-Pack, Tommy Monaghan and the Noonan’s gang, she wanted to know more. Oh, what’s that, the entire issue-by-issue run of Hitman in longbox No. 4? Yes, please. She also likes Preacher, so maybe we’ll get to Ennis’ The Boys too.
I already made my wife cry with James Robinson and Tony Harris’ Starman, but what would she think of Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark’s Gotham Central?
She loves Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarksy’s Sex Criminals, but would she be into superfreak inspiration Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss, Cyberella and American Century? Would she like Fraction and Chaykin together in the sex-death-kinkfest Satellite Sam?
She’ll get to them, some day. Likely after she reads my stack of Bitch Planet, and the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl issues I recommended for her.
We hit up a comic book store on our first date, took wedding photos at that same place nine years later, and three years after that we’re still getting started on a lifetime of these comics.
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| Mr. and Mrs. Blerd Vision get their Marvel on. |
This is how we do.
Our recent anniversary was a little less geeky, though we did eat at an Italian restaurant where Goodfellas and The Godfather run silently on endless loop via ubiquitous TVs in the bar and dining rooms. The first floor looks like a tribute to Casino, with all-champagne everything, and our waiter looked like a Peter Bagge character.
I say this about our waiter to my wife, and she laughs.
So we are, united in pencil and ink, body and soul, in this flesh-and-blood world.
