So, basically all day today I’ve been trying to pithily pontificate the joys and wonders of Star Wars: this being the unofficial holiday of one of the greatest Sci-Fi properties in the history of Man.

For all that Star Wars means to me, it is a downright crime that I haven’t done much writing about the subject.

Basically stated, I’m a huge Star Wars nerd. I couldn’t tell you how many different copies of the original trilogy I have on VHS and DVD, and the amount of Star Wars ephemera that occupies my house borders on ridiculous.

I’ve read all of the novels of the Expanded Universe (and actually like those characters and scenarios better than what I’ve seen on the screen so far), collected trinkets from the four corners of the Earth with “Lucasfilm, LTD.” stamped on them and I’m a tad embarrassed at the amount of money I’ve spent on individual action figures.

All that and I find it incredibly hard to write about. It seems that only when I get hot under the collar (reference my “heated” Why, George, Why? blog from last year) do I delve into my Lucas-inspired nerdery.

To be honest, I often only talk about Star Wars to address the things I’m not happy with. I guess that’s all part of being a “critical” fan. Why can’t I just be happy with Wookies, Mandalorians, Jedi, Sith, etc. and ignore the horrible gaffs like Episodes I-III, the Marvel Comics and Rokur Gepta? To that end, why must I justify my love of the Expanded Universe to “purist” fans who find it anathema to look beyond the six movies (does the Christmas Special count?)?

Oh wait. I know. Star Wars fans just LOVE to complain. We bitch about “special editions,” proposed “ultimate editions,” lack of Blu-Rays, lack of the “Yub Yub” song, being a little short for a Stormtrooper and a bajillion other little things that just bug the ever-loving shit out of us. In general we will sit in awed silence for ninety minutes at a time, and many of us will still tear up at the “I know” line on Bespin during Empire Strikes Back, but when that is all over, it’s right back to the bitching.

Honestly, I should really focus my attentions on mocking continuity-lacking Trekkies or those freaks who stuck through Battlestar Galactica (and I don’t mean the one with Lorne Greene).

I can be a horrible creature of habit. For example, if I don’t hit the comic book store on Wednesday I get panicky as all hell. Granted, I’m usually weeks behind on my reading, so I won’t even get to the books that I’m purchasing for several weeks, but I have to hit the shop on Wednesday. Irrational? Yes, but who doesn’t have an irrational behavior or twelve?

Similarly, I have a list of books (comic and conventional) that I tend to read over and over and over. I’m not sure if this is a unique behavior (I would think not) — but who knows?

The first of these books is Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. This book opened so many doors into my budding love of secret societies and cults back when I was in high school. It’s a fantastic story of “what if we make up a conspiracy to sell some books” that gets way way out of hand.

This is a book I read about once every two years just to keep the material (and paranoia) fresh. After I read the Da Vinci Code, I immediately read Foucault’s Pendulum to cleanse my palette. This is a book that was shelved with its own concordance when I first picked it up. Shit like that makes me do a happy dance.

The most important book that I read over and over and over is The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson. Anyone who knows me well should read this book just to see how my brain works. I’m not saying this book will change your life or anything, but THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!!!!!

I read this book every year without fail. Sometimes I read it twice just for good measure. I’ve already finished my first reading of 2010 and I’ll probably pick it up again after I finish reading the odd young adult fantasy series I’m reading now (Fablehaven for those who are interested).

The third multi-read book I keep close at hand is of the comic variety. Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan.

Spider Jerusalem is almost as bad ass as Warren Ellis himself and Transmet (as those in the know are oft to call it) is the ultimate in dystopian futures. It’s got drugs, politics, social commentary and oodles and oodles of bad attitude. The fact that it makes me giggle like a little girl is just the gravy on the cake.

While it is always nice to read Transmet all the way through, if I need a quick fix, I read what amounts to the first collected volumes.

Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein is also quickly crawling up as being one of those books I’ll read over and over, but I need to give it a third read just to make sure.

So, gentle blog reader, any books you revisit on a regular basis?

I’m a slow learner. Rather, I’m a stubborn learner who doesn’t pay any attention nor know any better when it comes to certain topics that “blind” me. First and foremost of these is Star Wars.

I have quite the different perspective on that “Galaxy far far away” than most typical casual fans. Over the past twenty years, I’ve read almost all Star Wars related comic books and definitely all Star Wars novels (there are a lot more than you’d think). Over this time, I have developed a much larger appreciation for what is known as the Expanded Universe than just the handful of films that were made.

I found it delightful that George Lucas created this incredible base of worlds and characters and then had the foresight to establish continuity ground rules related to stretching out beyond film; causing all the various Star Wars-related novels to fall into a singular timeline.

Different authors, writing to their different strengths, have developed fantastic characters outside of the major six or seven and really developed a broad variety of cultures and even, to some extent, language.

Now George has stepped in and changed some things that I see as pretty damn important.

For those not nearly as geeky as myself, I refer to the recent retconning of the Mandalorian culture in the Star Wars: Clone Wars cartoon.

Here’s a two minute primer into the Mandalorians. Everyone familiar with Star Wars knows Boba Fett and Jango Fett. Both of them were Mandalorians. What a lot may not know is that the Mandalorians are a nomadic group of beings made up of multiple species organized in clans who often fill the role of mercenaries or bounty hunters. The commonality amongst them being honor and pride in the community and rabid devotion to their clan. Think of them as the Star Wars equivalent to Viking or Celtic tribes.

This has been beautifully developed in novels (Karen Traviss’ works especially) and comic books.

Now, however, it appears that George has turned the Mandalorians into a peaceful race with a militant faction called “Death Watch” (not unheard of in both comics and novels previously) that is seeking to overthrow the peaceful Mandalorian leaders.

I call shabla osik! It seems that the worst thing George Lucas has done since releasing his first three movies is staying involved creatively in the property. I’ll agree that the Clone Wars as a concept were a pretty good development from the second three batch of movies, but that is about it for those.

C’mon George, take some time off and enjoy your billions of dollars and leave the storytelling to those talented people who actually give a damn about the fans.

Every couple of weeks my email inbox gets bombarded by offers of contract employment in strange and far off cities. I just about always check out where the job is in case I know someone that direction who might be interested (referral cash is as good as free money), but I generally just click the delete button and send these offers off into the ether to be recycled as ads for penis enlargement or lap band surgery.

Today, however, I got a contract offer for the one place I never thought I’d see in a contract employment email: Sunnydale, California. For the uninitiated, Sunnydale is the “town” where Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes place. Sunnydale is renowned for being a Hellmouth: a location of increased supernatural energies and basically serves as a portal between Earth and Hell.

Imagine my surprise to get a job offer there. For the seven seasons Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran on television (not to mention all the Buffy comic books I’ve read), Sunnydale as spit out baddie after baddie to terrorize the general populace and generally cause much mirth and mayhem.

Now the big question. Would I want to work there?  Even though the contract is only for a couple of months doing UI development (User Interface for you non-technical types), the thought of being smack dab (not sand dabs. Look it up) near the Hellmouth has some serious potential. At the very least I could team up with the local Scoobies (you know they exist) and hang out picking on weird homeless people after beers (or whatever they served) at the Bronze.

Wait a minute, that job was in Sunnyvale, CA and not Sunnydale, CA? Screw that.

It’s long been said that there really aren’t any new ideas out there, and that, for the most part, creative vehicles are nothing more than rehashes and combinations of stuff that has come before. In comic books, especially, this isn’t a new concept. For years heroes from the “Big Two” (DC & Marvel for you non-geek types) have been killing off characters left and right, reinventing characters and flat out replacing characters by putting new people in old costumes to keep the drama and continuity going.

In the early 90s, Marvel upped the ante and launched their 2099 line. It was basically a couple of books (Spider-Man, X-Men, Punisher, Dr. Doom, Hulk, Fantastic Four and Ghost Rider) set in 2099. The people behind the masks were all new (for the most part), but the banner and basic premise were familiar to comic fans. This amused people for a couple of years, but got old. The 2000s roll around and Marvel was back at it with the Ultimate Marvel line. The Ultimate line differed from 2099 in two major ways: character reboots and serious writing firepower.

Now it’s 2009 and DC is jumping into the Ultimates-styled pool with Earth One. As mentioned yesterday on DC’s The Source blog, Earth One is going to be the vehicle to reboot Batman and Superman (like it hadn’t already been done with their All Star titles) with DC’s answer to Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar: Geoff Johns and J. Michael Straczynski.

Normally I would just roll my eyes and read some of the story hightlights to see if I wanted to jump on with this, but I can’t really see how yet another Batman and/or Superman title is going to do much more than dilute the property. I’ve been lucky enough to have avoided titles from the Last Son of Krypton since the early 90s: he just doesn’t interest me. I am, however, currently reading about 250 Batman or Batman related titles. Hell, I’m not even sure who is behind the cape and cowl in half of them (spoiler alert, Bruce Wayne is supposedly dead) and I’m really not interested in following him to a title that will likely be destroyed in “Insert Modifier Here Crisis” when the storylines start to get a little tired in three years.

What I really wanted from this “major publishing event” announcement was that DC was going to commit themselves to getting their damn titles out on time (something Marvel has a way worse problem doing). They can keep their Bat-One and Super-One.

Besides, didn’t Elseworlds address all of this?

When I was around twelve years old, my friends and I would hop on our bikes (a remarkably heavy yellow Schwinn hand-me-down in my case) and ride down to the grungy old used book/comic book store that was a tiny gas station in a previous life. Thanks to a massive loss of brain cells in the past 20+ years, I cannot, for the life of me, remember the name of the place, but I do remember some rather unsavory goings on there after I found a “more proper” shop while in high school.

Back in those days, I read two, maybe three, titles a month. This was the mid-to-late 80′s and the big companies (pretty much just Marvel and DC in those days) had yet to figure out the monstrosity that is the multi-issue/multi-title crossover, so I wasn’t forced to buy twenty-five books a week just to follow a single storyline. At that point in my life, Marvel was king and DC was pretty much the devil to me. How the hell was DC supposed to survive without mutants?!?!?!

As I grew a little older, and got exposed to the broader range of what is out there, I got really turned on to the plethora of indie companies and titles there are out there.  Mind you, I grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico:  there wasn’t a whole lot of anything streaming into town during that period, so finding indie books was an effort. Sure, I was snatching up a whole mess of stuff that, on retrospect, wasn’t all that great, but there was honest-to-god curse words and straight-up nudity in these books.  They just weren’t going to do that in an X-book!

Going into my college years, I really had to consider how comics were going to affect my life.  To say that  I’m anal about my comics is really an understatement. Don’t screw with my comics: don’t touch them when they aren’t bagged, and freakin’ ask before you go pawing through a box. That’s the opposite of college: especially in a tiny three-person dorm room like the one I had my Freshman year.

I honestly thought about getting out of the comic racket entirely. I had no car, so getting out to where the shops were in Waco, Texas wasn’t reliable, I had no space (as mentioned before), and, most importantly, I didn’t have any money. Contrary to logic, I stuck with it.  Even during the period of the horribly disgusting hologram card cover and polybagged foil exclusives, I stuck with it. By the time I finished undergrad, it was beginning to show that I had a developing problem.

Owning one or two long boxes of comics isn’t such a big deal.  They honestly don’t take up that much space and can, generally, be ignored in most rooms. Three is the lynch-point. When you have three long boxes, you have a substantial number of comics. When I moved to Dallas after graduate school, I had four long boxes. I was still a poor student, so I really couldn’t splurge on all the stories I was dying to follow. Public access to the internet was just taking off like crazy, but there still wasn’t an accessible way to find digitized comics.

I settled into Dallas, found an excellent shop, and visited it around once a month or whenever the owner called me to say I had a stack of books that I needed to come buy. I was only buying nine or ten titles a month at that point, so waiting a month wasn’t terribly hard. Additionally, a lot of those were indie books that were basically self-published and horribly calendar agnostic. Boy oh boy did I not see what was coming.

My descent into my current “condition” can almost be diagrammed. At the end of 1998 I got a job in Downtown Dallas with no  Downtown parking but a free train pass. My drive to the train station took me past Keith’s Comics old cramped location on Mockingbird. The little gnome that lives in my skull woke up one day and said, “Hey, dummy! It’s a helluva lot easier to go here every week than to wait a month and go to that far place.”

As is often the case, that damn obnoxious gnome was right. I started going to Keith’s, had a nice paycheck that allowed me some discretionary spending on books I wasn’t reading previously, and I was reading my books more often.

The spiral started from there. Just about every week I’d be adding titles left and right. Here an indie, there a Dark Horse or Vertigo title. What? Is that another vampire-related book coming out?  Oooh, I’ll definitely take that one.  Five long boxes (sloth-like reading right after my move to Dallas necessitated only one extra cardboard coffin) quickly turned into six and then seven.

Here we are eleven years later and I’m out of control. I swear it is much easier for Keith and Co. to just give me the tiny list of books I’m not buying in a given week rather than list out what I am slated to purchase. It has gotten so bad recently that I leave the shop each week with a cardboard box rather than a nice little plastic grocery bag. My long boxes number well into the double digits these days, and there really is no slowdown in sight.

One of my very few saving graces is that I actually do read everything I buy. I don’t really see the point of buying comics if you aren’t going to read them. Hell, that’s the type of crap that almost tanked the entire industry back in the mid-90′s. The bad side of that is that if I don’t stay immaculately vigilant in my readings, things get out of control very quickly.  As of this writing, I have a stack of unread books that is, no hyperbole, two and a half feet tall. A stack like that is daunting, but it’s my Sisyphean task. If I don’t keep reading, that stack will quickly reach three and four feet tall. That would just make me even more neurotic than I already am. It’s not like I can stop buying the things.

Did I mention I have a problem?