By Lucretius

It’s Wednesday and your money is begging to be spent.  Comic Book Day is here!  Your excitement bubbles because your favorite title is beginning a new event that claims that “Nothing will ever be the same again”.  Never mind if it’s an utter lie…you’re psyched.  Your heart is racing and your adrenaline pumping.  You arrive at your comic shop, get your books, and enjoy a day of reading at home, at work, on the bus, or on the toilet.  Once it’s over, you sit back and contemplate the experience.  It’ll be seven whole days before you can do it again and you hope your good feelings will tide you over the next six days.

That’s pretty much the typical comic fan experience, right?  No.  The fanboy experience is no longer a one-day affair; it’s a 24 hour, 7 day extravaganza of debate, speculation, regret, and tears.  It’s creator interaction without the letter pages, previews without mystery or ambiguity, interviews without Wizard’s monkey jokes.  It’s where comic movies are no longer stuck in developmental hell and where superheroes are analyzed in major universities, where video game characters have webcomics and where 27 years of Cerebus can be stored onto a device the size of your thumb.   (more…)