Just finished watching an episode of that Hulk show I keep yammering on about, and I am stoked.

But to understand why, you will need some backstory. Luckily, I have lots of it to spare!

Way back when I was a teenaged nerd in the 1980’s in beautiful downtown Summerside, Prince Edward Island, I was heavily into comics. I spent a huge portion of my allowance on them, as well as all the magazines I read. They were a window into a more exciting and colorful world for a lonely teenager.

And it was all Marvel. I sneered at DC comics, considering them to be kiddie stuff. Tightassed, excessively perfect, watered down fit only for the sort of household where you get sent to your room for saying “darn”.

Certainly in no way fit for an intelligent, sophisticated person like myself, who read Vonnegut and Asimov and Bradbury, watched crime shows on TV, and was into serious heavy metal.

As opposed to that retarded hair metal crap. (Teenagers…. so judgmental!)

So I read a fair chunk of Marvel’s output at the time. Spider-Man, X-men, West Coast Avengers, Power Pack, X-factor, the New Mutants, Xcalibur (it was mutant mania back then), Avengers…. and probably more that I am forgetting. My room was stuffed to overflowing with comics and books. I read, therefore I was.

This was, of course, before the Internet.

So I was already quite well versed in the Marvel universe (the ORIGINAL one) when the greatest thing to ever happen to a nerd like me happened :

Marvel started putting out the Official Handbook Of The Marvel Universe.

This was an encyclopedia style comprehensive guide to all of the Marvel universe that existed at the time. Through it, I was able to acquire a vast and comprehensive knowledge of all things Marvel, and if you know geeks at all, you know that we love to learn more about the things we love.

So I was getting a power dose of that every single month. It was like I was reading every single comic!

In fact, it was even better than that, because I was learning the entire backstory of every character, organization, and confusing embodiment of an abstract concept out there. Granted, each entry was at most four comic pages long, so it was far from every single detail, but the sheer breadth of the knowledge lent it a form of depth once I began to have enough of the stuff in my head to start to cross-reference.

Eventually, I had the whole set, and that’s when the awesome really kicked in because by the time I finished the last one, the first one was old enough to me that I could read it again within feeling like I had “just read it”.

That’s one of the great things about high density content : it “freshens” so much faster.

So whenever I wasn’t reading new comics, I was rereading the OHOTMU. Reading it purely for enjoyment, I nevertheless built up an absolutely massive amount of Marvel knowledge, and what’s more, I retained it.

In fact, I retain most of it to this very day.

And it’s this vast knowledge that these recent shows like Hulk and the Agents of Smash, Ultimate Spider-Man, and Marvel’s Avengers Assemble, bring to the fore because these shows are obviously written by people with my kind of knowledge because all kinds of stuff from the Marvel mythos keeps showing up in them like gifts for a geek like me.

And the last episode of HATAOS I watched was extra bonus because it featured The Inhumans, a group I only know of from the OHOTMU and whom I always thought were very cool.

So finally getting to see them in something was exciting enough, but getting to see them animated and voiced nearly put me through the ceiling. Black Bolt! Medusa! Karnak! Triton! Lockjaw! Gorgon! And that sniveling dickwad Maximus.

Lockjaw is fascinating for many reasons. In fact, the fact that he has massive teleport powers is the least interesting thing about him. He is totally a member of the Inhuman Royal Family, which means he is definitely a blood relative to the rest of them.

And yet, he is a great big dog of questionable sentience.

And while many of us have had reason to question the sentience of our relatives, for the most part, in the vast majority of cases, are nor giant freaking dogs.

Karnak is cool because he has one of the coolest powers ever : the ability to sense where the weak spot is on anything and apply direct force via snake style kung fu to make said thing crumble.

Is that cool or what? Imagine how awesome it would be to be able to go up to some huge boulder, put your hands on it, then HAI YA the whole thing crumbles into pebbles.

It would be like being a combination of Bruce Lee and The Fonz, two of the coolest people from the 70’s.

But for character goodness, you have their king, Black Bolt, whose powers amplify the sound of his voice to such an extent that the one time he whispered something, it blew a big chunk out of the Moon.

How’s that for a tragic hero? He must rule, but he can never speak. He commands vast destrcutive power that he is too noble and pure to use. The slightest mistake could kill everyone around him. Everyone he loves.

And yet, instead of having his vocal cords removes and crawling into a bunker somewhere, he still does what he must do : leads the Inhumans via his wife Medusa.

How? Um, don’t ask. He apparently can whisper in her ear without vaporizing her head, which suggests he talks so incredible low that it doesn’t activate his powers, yet she can hear and understand him.

So anyhow, I love these Marvel series because practically every episode involves me “meeting old friends”. Even the villains, like that twit Sauron from the Savage Land, and Annihilus from the Negative Zone.

Excelsior, my friends. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.