Ya gotta love the geeks, freaks, nerds, and dweebs.  You just  gotta.  Because if you don’t, they’ll mow you down with their oversized wooden replica swords from Final Fantasy MXXXVVVIII or whatever.  This is my assessment after two days at a comic book convention.  These are My People.  These are from whence I came.  I’ve actually grown rather fond of football season, thanks to my wife, but given a choice, I’ll take a good comic book or any other fantastic tale any old day of the week.  (And now so too does my wife.  So we’re even.)

So, I’m more or less a bona fide Joss Whedon disciple, principally because the man can tell a great story.  He also has an eye for exceptional talent – male and female – and he gives them outstanding stories to work with as actors.  I got caught up into Buffy somewhere around season four originally, but what sold me was (SPOILER!…like it’s a secret anymore) when Angelus killed Jenny Calendar in season two.  Still a little shaken by that.  (And not just the murder, but the method and the motive.)  It was a brilliant, risky move.  I wish I took more of them in my own writing. 

Anyway — Joy and I had the pleasure of meeting Georges Jeanty at the Phoenix Comicon, and first off, we were just thrilled to meet an artist of his caliber who so well continues the Buffy arc through the Season 8 comics.  We’ve had a poster of his on our living room wall for years.  He’s just awesome.  (So is Jo Chen, who paints most if not all the variant covers; she is wicked incredible.) 

What made us appreciate Georges even more, though, was his emphasis on storytelling.  He gets it.  Big summer blockbusters with Whatshisname and Whatshername, those hottest young stars…they’re fine, they’re entertaining, I don’t begrudge them that.  But to be entertaining and spin a riveting story that sincerely examines our collective human conditions, that’s a whole other thing.  While Georges isn’t the writer of Season 8, it’s his job to make the words come alive.  It’s art, it’s entertainment, and above all, it’s story.

Like so many modern immortal characters — Kirk, Wolverine, Jules, Batman, to name a few personal favorites — those characters in the Buffy universe are, before anything else, human.  Prone to errors in judgement, to mistakes, to making the hard call when the hard call is what’s needed to win the day.  But they’re also heroes, of a sort.  I realize naming Pulp Fiction‘s Jules as a hero might be a stretch, but I think part of what goes into making a hero is that sense of trying to right past wrongs, to strive for redemption.  A good storyteller can take these fallible humans and show us that anything is possible; and not just show us, but make us really believe it.

It’s fiction.  It’s make-believe.  We pay storytellers to lie to us.  And we love it!

I don’t dress up like my favorite characters, I don’t cosplay (whatever that is).  And while I laughed as hard as anyone at Shatner’s notorious “Get a life!” bit on SNL, the reality is these fictions reach us on a very important level.  You want to dress up like an anime character and sing an a’capella version of the Superman theme at full volume (and a spot-on version, I noted, because I’m a geek), be my guest.  Because for as silly as it might look to those championship atheletes* who happened to be walking by at the time (which was hysterical to me), these freaks, dorks, and assorted spazzes — exactly the kids I would’ve hung out with in high school, and in many ways, still do — are on to something.  What some see as ridiculous, I see as high praise.  As the most heartfelt “Thank you” I can imagine anyone bestowing.

They’re saying thank you for getting it right.  For understanding.  I’d consider myself lucky to have that kind of impact someday.

Good storytelling mirrors us.  It’s what people like Jeanty, Whedon, Roddenberry, Stan Lee, and Bob Kane (to name a few) understood best:  We’re all heroes, if we dare to be.

So thank you, Comicon, for reminding me that it’s okay to “be a kid,” to act a little nuts sometimes, and to dream.  That’s a gift.

(* and if a person spends time and money playing fantasy football/baseball/whateverball, while dressing up in his or her favorite team’s costume, then that makes them…?  Well, let’s just say they’re storytellers, too.)