Guest post and photos by the Hawthorne Hawkman, photo of the Hawkman in costume by Ty Jaramillo
Every year the Hawthorne Neighborhood Council opens its doors to the kids who play for the Jordan-Hawthorne soccer team. (I got it right this time; I hope JACC folks are happy.) But word spreads and kids invite their friends and the group just gets bigger and bigger.
They cover their faces and various parts of our office with paint before heading out to Halloween parties and trick-or-treating. Usually we have the extraneous paint cleaned up by the time they come around the next year.
This was just the START of a fun-filled Halloween in NoMi...
Here are a few pictures of the face-painting festivities:
Once faces were painted and kids were off to their parties with CURA organizers Jay Clark and Yia Yang, it was time for me to get ready for a NoMi Halloween festival of my own. I WANTED to dress up as the Hawkman from DC comics, but I couldn't find a respectable pair of angel wings. It turns out this is not as easy one would think. So I'll have to take time to put together a decent Hawkman costume for next year or perhaps the next time I need to speak at city hall.
Unable to piece together a Hawkman costume, I settled for V from "V for Vendetta." To the uber-geeks who might be reading this, and to whom the difference is important, I was dressed as the character from the movie, not the graphic novel. Given the criticism for political speech that has come upon this blog in recent days, I felt the movie's ending was more apropos. If those two sentences were virtually meaningless to you, well, it would take far too much space here to explain the distinction.
With JNS and NoMi issues on the brain, I then added a few accessories of my own. Faithful JNS readers may spot them here (click the photo to enlarge):
It's not entirely clear from the photo, but at my hip is a dragon. Look for the gigantic stuffed squirrel to make various JNS appearances in the future.
What was most impressive to me, though, was the geek collection at this place. It makes my version of "geek-o-topia" feel about as successful as an attempt to build a working model of the international space station entirely out of Legos. I actually got to hold, in my own hands, the very first issue of my favorite comic book, Daredevil. I've never seen the shroud of Turin, but this moment filled me with a sense of reverent awe normally reserved for such spiritual experiences.
And then two different people pointed out items I should have noticed in the first place:
Later, I almost inadvertently started a geek war by calling this character the lamest comic book of all time:
Non-geeks, trust me. If you Google this name, you will be disappointed, or at least confused. Luckily, crisis was averted through this time-tested, Nobel Prize-winning strategy. And so ended another fun night in NoMi.
Nope. You're still wrong.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's not the character's name, just his magic word.
And you call yourself a geek...
Oh, that's RIGHT. It's a MAGIC WORD a little boy utters to call upon the powers of the following Greek gods:
ReplyDeleteSocrates
Hercules
Atlas
Zeuss
Aristotle. No, wait, not a god. Ares.
Mephisto (Morpheus?)
That's SO MUCH COOLER!
Consider this: The Shazam bank was formed in 1976, named after this dude. No, wait! Named after a CATCH PHRASE! A mere thirty-three years later, the entire global financial system is teetering on the verge of collapse. Coincidence? I think not.
Oh, yes. And a kid being struck in the head by a container of radioactive material falling off the back of a delivery truck rendering him blind but giving him radar vision, trained by a ninja, in love with a Greek assassin also trained by the same ninja, (but not when he did and years after they had dated in college), whose main villains are more ninjas, a big fat guy ALSO trained by ninjas, a guy with a target branded into his forehead who was raised from the dead BY ninjas and a dude who lumbers around on sixty foot walking stilts (and probably has a ninja dog) is so much cooler. How could I not see that?
ReplyDeleteAt least my guy wasn't played by Ben Affleck.
ReplyDeleteAnd he's also one-hundred percent NoMi, published by a company from Robbinsdale, created by a guy born and raised on Lyndale Ave N and written and drawn by a host of North Siders.
1. Oh, that is SO NOT FAIR to bring Ben Affleck into this! I swear, that was the only time I have EVER seen a comic book adaptation that managed to be both TERRIBLE and oddly faithful to the source material.
ReplyDelete2. Ninjas are cool. Can't have too many of them running around. And now Daredevil is IN CHARGE of all those ninjas. Hiiiieeeeyaaaa!
3. Female Greek assassins are hot. Even when played by Jennifer Garner.
4. It is also unfair to bring Stilt-Man into this. Do you want me to bring up the glow worm with the transistor radio around his neck?
Ok, on a semi-serious note, I got into Daredevil when Kevin Smith started to write for it and have been hooked ever since. The writing by Smith, Bendis, Mack, and Brubaker has been a terrific run of writing and art and I've been spoiled there.
And then to make an even more personal connection, I started working for Hawthorne. Kind of overseeing an obscure neighborhood draws some very fun paralells between the Daredevil storyline and my own work. Granted, my partial deafness wasn't caused by toxic waste and the closest I've come to being trained by ninjas is recent hula hooping.
And Daredevil doesn't need extaneous punctuation to make him seem more exciting.
Oh, and in case readers didn't realize that the sarcasm font was broken, I intentionally misspelled Zeus to look like Dr. Seuss, and I know that Socrates wasn't an actual Greek God. Roman, or maybe Norse, but not Greek.
ReplyDeleteGeektopia, I assume you're going to make the obvious comment that the Daredevil movie was terrible BECAUSE it was faithful to the source material. Three words: Not enough ninjas.