Monthly Archives: March 2022

The Fever (Or: “Dabid Reviews ‘Gremlins 2: The New Batch’”)

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There’s a particular psychological phenomenon that has happened to me throughout my life that I’m not sure others experience in themanner that I do. I call it “The Fever”.

In essence, I am overcome by The Fever when my mind fixates on some particular specialized interest—usually brought about by some newly revealed or released toy/collectible—and I can no longer function except in ways that help feed the breadth of my knowledge of or interest in whatever my brain has fixated upon collecting.

The Fever cannot be reasoned with, circumvented or fought against. It can only be extinguished by being allowed to run its natural course until abatement, which can be anywhere from minutes to years.

From playing tedious LEGO video games to add enthusiasm to purchasing LEGO Indiana Jones sets(inspired by movies I’d never seen at the time) to reading thousands of old Marvel comics to learn about the significance of characters I’m happily buying expensive resin Bowen statues of to watching 80s He-Man and She-Ra cartoons in the modern day to justify buying “ultimate” retro-styled figures based on shows I never watched, The Fever is an “ailment” that has helped me to expand my knowledge within my sphere of interests to virtually unrivaled capacities.

My most recent bout of The Fever occurred while I was out hunting for the new NECA Gargoyles figures of Bronx and Demona at Target. This quest brought me to the specialty collectibles section on the back wall at Target, which is an area filled with various collector-aimed (and often pricey) items from a plethora of brands.

There was no sign of Demona and/or Bronx, but while slowly scanning the shelves (which takes a while since I’m largely blind now), something else by NECA called an “Ultimate Gamer Gremlin” caught my eye. While I had only seen the original Gremlins movie once in my life and never the sequel, seeing this excellently executed action figure immediately caused me to become overwhelmed with a need to know everything about this franchise—and toy line—that I had previously ignored.

It turns out that NECA has been pushing out Gremlins figures for the better part of two decades now, but not being enamored with ugly/creepy/horror toys, I was oblivious to the many, many NECA Gremlins collectibles released.

After doing as much internet research on the toys as possible, my next destination was an Amazon site search for any Making Of books or novelizations that could explain the property to me textually. None are in print or available on Kindle. So I had to fall back on what I didn’t want to do: actually attempting to watch the movies.

When your brain primarily only processes motion as a shadowy blur and you can no longer see the left hand side of the screen at all, trying to take in what is happening in a film is not the relaxing recreational activity it once was. So watching movies is no longer my preferred choice for fueling my collecting-related obsessions.

Having previously viewed the first Gremlins about 15 years ago and the sequel never, I opted to first stream Gremlins 2: The New Batch, a critically panned and fan-despised sequel.

Opening with a bonafide Looney Tunes cartoon, it turned out that the film was in fact all-out insanity with a barely coherent plot. Upon finishing the movie, my wife declared it one of the worst things we’d ever seen… but I wasn’t so sure.

While I couldn’t necessarily discern what was going on on-screen to the same extent as my wife, I felt like there was definitely something there in this film. That the director had made deliberate choices to subvert what viewers wanted and to throw it into their faces.

While the original movie is iconic and beloved, it’s also a pointless romp with nothing to say—suitable material for this admittedly needless follow-up to parody and make into a full-blown mockery. As a self-hating sequel made with the clear intent to satirize itself, the Gremlins “franchise” and sequels as a whole, I view this movie as a rousing triumph.

The bold decision to include such absurdities as a Vegetable Gremlin, Bat Gremlin, Spider Monster Gremlin and sex-changed Lady Gremlin (her name is Greta, according to her first official action figure ever, which was released this past winter) makes this film quite a bit more toy-etic than its predecessor.

Coupling these wild varieties of Gremlins with bombastic scenes such as the Gremlins attacking a film critic who blasted the first movie and a segment with Hulk Hogan threatening the Gremlins speaking directly to the audience made for a movie experience like none I’d had before

The human characters are milquetoast and poorly written, but I think that kind of works for the type of story being told here: an unnecessary one that directly calls out within itself that profit and merchandising is its sole motivation.

As a whole, the sheer lunacy factor of Gremlins II and its own self-hatred make it a movie I’m glad to have experienced. Taken as a serious movie in a vacuum, my grade for Gremlins 2 would have to be an ‘F-‘, but as a parody/satire it earns a conditional ‘A’ from me.

And thankfully, I managed to do enough reflection and research to stall out The Fever long enough that it ran its course before I spent a fortune buying random Gremlins merch. (Although I’d totally still buy a NECA Bat Gremlin if it didn’t cost an unbelievable $200+ on the aftermarket.)

Six-Month Brain Damage Anniversary! (Or: “Dabid’s State of Mind “)

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Today is the official six-month anniversary of when I had my blinding quadruple stroke, so I wanted to use today’s entry to reflect on how my life has changed since that event and commemorate what my present state of mind is.

To say that these six months have been the most difficult of my life would be an understatement of hyperbolic proportions. Suddenly becoming mostly blind at this point in my life is beyond debilitating. It sort of goes without saying, but virtually everything you do from when you wake in the morning until you go to sleep at night is dependent upon your vision.

It’s next to impossible for me to put how broken my vision is into precise words, because even after half a year of talking to doctors and therapists, I still really don’t understand it myself.

What I do understand, though, is that even with all of the vision therapy and experimental research I’ve done over the last six months, I would still say things have only improved by 0%.

I’ve been rather dreading this six-month mark, since that’s the traditionally agreed-upon cutoff for when chance of recovery drops to zero. But my neuro-ophthalmologist already told me I had a 0% chance of recovery after two months, so I’m a bit numb to it by now. I’m doing everything that can be done, so I won’t have to live with the regret of thinking I could have done more, but that’s cold comfort when nothing is helping.

Playing video games and watching TV/movies are next to impossible, since the on-screen motion just processes in what remains of my brain as flashing blurs. I mostly just listen to stuff anymore (I even got a dreaded “Audible” account, which I admit is not as bad as I thought it would be).

Reading comics is a nightmare, as my brain cuts off half of whatever I’m looking at. Whether I focus on a single panel or a whole page, half of whatever I’m trying to see blurs away. I’m getting better at puzzling out what I’m seeing, but image processing is still an immense challenge overall.

Just web browsing and typing on my phone is an ordeal, but with hundreds of hours spent doing it since my accident, I’ve gotten a bit better at typing without seeing half the keyboard and fixing errors as I make them so that the mistakes aren’t lost forever as my eyes move on to the next word.

Collecting is still a driving focus of my life, but a large amount of the joy of getting a new toy is definitely lost when you can barely see it at best and can’t see it at all if your eyes move away slightly. I’ve started to include additional context and personal anecdotes in my reviews and unboxing videos to make up for some of the discussion of the actual collectibles that’s lost to me not being able to see them.

You might think I would be buying less since I can’t independently drive to stores anymore, but I’m getting really good at making copious amounts of impulse buys online instead.

I haven’t thought too much about going anywhere or visiting anyone, because even if I could get somewhere else, what’s really the point of traveling to something or someone I can’t see anyway?

I think it’s an ironic and suitable Hell for me that after living most of my life distancing myself from others (consciously or otherwise), I end up being permanently distanced from living in this world and having normal relationships with others by an abrupt life-changing injury.

One of the hardest things has been coping with the fact that I look fine to friends and family from the outside (probably partially due to my propensity to overachieve through effort and force of will), but from my point of view the world is a nightmare kaleidoscope it’s a battle just to navigate through every day. “You don’t seem to be limited at all!” What a joke.

It’s still really hard for me to comprehend that this is forever—that I won’t wake up someday and be able to see the world around me and be able to interact with it as I did for the first 39 years of my life. I’ll never finish Cuphead, watch all those iconic normie shows and movies I wanted to experience, play Smash Bros. competitively or read all those comics Omnibuses I’ve accumulated and be able to really comprehend what I’m seeing.

If all the things I love aren’t truly accessible to me anymore in a manner that allows me to appreciate them, I have to wonder a little bit about what meaning there is in living on in this condition.

I haven’t given up, though. A wise ninja once told me that it’s all over once I give up on myself, so I need to keep going nonetheless.

I still have over 5 months left before the deadline I set for myself to finish this book, and I know in it’s completed form it will somehow be meaningful to someone and help them in their journey. I know it.

Wrestling (or: “Dabid’s Unlikely Favorite Sport”)

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If anyone asked me what happened in the world or in my life in 1992, I would stare at them blankly and silently. But if asked about Wrestlemania XIII from that same year, I could rapidly rattle off the full card, results, and the storylines/circumstances building up to each match.

Professional wrestling came onto my radar in early 1992 in a predictably toy-driven fashion. The Hasbro WWF line of 4” action figures was hitting its stride and starting to have more and more shelf space devoted to it in stores, and memorable characters like morbidly-obese Earthquake and the crown-wearing “Macho King” Randy Savage quickly drew my eye and a few of my dollars. Most of Hasbro’s figures featured some sort of spring-loaded punch or throw “signature move” action feature (which arbitrarily sometimes were or were not actual moves the superstars performed in real life).

Not knowing exactly how to properly play with these action figures since I wasn’t an existing wrestling fan, I started to bring home 99 cent VHS rentals of past WWF Pay-Per-View events to learn the histories and backstories of these colorful characters appearing on toy store shelves. One or two VHS rentals multiplied into dozens, and soon I’d consumed all of the locally available WWF videotapes—some multiple times!

Although I have a love of–and knack for–memorizing stats and numbers, I’ve never been at all able to get into any kind of “traditional” sports (with one exception as an adult that I’ll talk about later). “Real” sports just didn’t have enough of a narrative for me to sink my teeth into. I needed athletes who were larger than life, with a wide spectrum of personalities, backstories and alignments! As I delved into professional wrestling fandom, I discovered that it delivered all these and more, adding an overlay of good vs. evil onto a competitive athletics backdrop.

Before I knew it, I had memorized the stats and histories of every even somewhat notable wrestler in the WWF, and then turned my sights to the “lesser” major wrestling promotion at the time, WCW. (I knew it was a “ lesser” company since their action figures were non-poseable plastic chunks with many less characters produced, primarily being sold at discount stores near me instead of bigger toy retailers.)

There were far fewer easily-accessible video tapes of WCW around, so I had to learn about this company’s competitors by reading magazines at the grocery store and paying close attention to when WCW Saturday Night aired on TV each week.

Historically, people have been surprised if not openly disgusted when they discover that I’m a pro wrestling fan. Prior to wrestling briefly being “cool” in the late 90s, it was vocally regarded by many in my peer group as being a sort of “fake”, cartoony carnival sideshow. Once it became edgy and trendy during the “Attitude Era”, it temporarily became more socially acceptable to be a wrestling fan. But not for me, as my peers couldn’t reconcile that my Lawful Good, rule-abiding character could enjoy shows filled with copious swearing, raunchy themes and sometimes extreme violence.

On a side note, I cannot fathom why wrestling haters gleefully declare that “wrestling is fake!” with such frequency, thinking that such an argument should automatically invalidate others’ fandom.

I’ve never heard anyone say “Comic books are fake!” or “Game of Thrones is fake!” In attempts to suck the joy out of fans of those stories, and it’s a bit baffling to me why wrestling seems to be such an almost universally natural target for bullies.

Art is art, and wrestling is an art form that trained athletes participate in. Even if individual wrestling matches, shows and TV segments are oftentimes tawdry and poorly-conceived, as a whole, wrestling is still in the genre of arts and entertainment.

One goal I had in my life was to see someone win a wrestling world championship in-person. I’ve attended a fair number of wrestling PPVs with my wife and/or best friend, but I always came up short.

I was actually at the inaugural New Year’s Revolution PPV in Albany In 2006 where Edge cashed in the first-ever Money in the Bank briefcase to win the world championship from a weakened John who had just survived a grueling Elimination Chamber main event six-way match, but we left during the main event in an effort to beat the crowds out (and not anticipating the then-unprecedented cash-in). I was bitter about missing that historic event for a long time. (At least I got to watch the legendary “Live Sex Celebration” for Edge on TV the next night.)

Eventually, I did see a world championship win in June 2014, when my best friend and I watched John Cena ascend to the top of a ladder to win the WWE Title in Boston.

John Cena is easily one of the greats of all-time in my book, and this would be his 15th and penultimate world title reign. He would lose the WE World Heavyweight championship soon after at Summerslam 2014. In one of the most memorable matches I’ve ever seen in my life, Cena was absolutely destroyed by Brock Lesnar, eating 16 duplexes after being near-killed by an F-5 in the first 30 seconds. To me, this is the night that John Cena made Brock Lesnar’s career.

Around this time, Cena became a full part-timer and WWE Owner Vince McMahon became utterly obsessed with making a guy named Roman Reigns the next big mega-star on the same level as Cena, The Rock, Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold Steve Austin. (Reigns torpedoed the company for years being booed out of arena after arena as an insufferable “good guy”, but eventually reached his potential once a global pandemic allowed him to develop his skillls and character in empty arenas without a crowd).

Having achieved my goal of seeing a world championship victory already and having a burning hatred for Roman Reigns from 2015-2020, I lost a lot of my zeal for the company and didn’t attend a live show for over half a decade after TLC 2015 in Boston.

I would eventually see one more Pay-Per-View live in Las Vegas in 2021 right before my stroke quadrilogy, but that’s a story for another entry.

Summer DAYS (or: “Comic Books, Soap Operas & Dabid’s Faux-Italian Grandmother)

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My parents tried sending me to a children’s’ day camp or some such during the summer when I was a younger pre-teen, but it didn’t work out so well. I didn’t play or socialize well with other children, and being forced to participate in physical games and activities like “dodgeball” and “swimming” with other kids for hours every day was something akin to Hell for me. Trying to be forced to imbibe something called “Bug Juice” (I think a euphemism for Gatorade) made me cry.

This experiment was mercifully short, but my parents didn’t want me around the house for months when school was out of session, so I was instead shipped off to spend my summer days with my elderly grandmother in her subsidized senior living apartment.

Her apartment complex, Franciscan Village, was built inside a historic Franciscan Monastery, so everything was rather brown and tan and dull. Quiet, no other youngsters around, TV, nobody to bother me but an 80-something year-old woman who slept most of the day—yep, this was the life.

My grandmother—Mama Ricco, as she generally referred to herself in the third person (she began all phone calls the same way every time, whether calling someone or answering: “This is Mama Ricco…”)—spoke with a pronounced Italian accent and would frequently go off on tangents about her youthful days in Italy. It wasn’t until I was almost an adult that I found out she had, in truth, never even been to Italy or outside the United States at all and that her thick accent was entirely fabricated. She was an eccentric, hefty old lady and I loved her dearly.

Days passed leisurely with Mama Ricco, as she had a walker and wasn’t especially mobile, moving at a speed of about a quarter mile per hour. She didn’t drive and never left the apartment complex unless it was for a medical appointment or family event. Occasionally I’d escort her over to the complex’s chapel for prayer, but that happened more and more seldom as time passed.

With little other stimulation and no social trivialities to distract me, it’s during my years of summers with Mama Ricco that two of my most enduring lifelong interests developed.

The first was my initial exposure to one of Mama Ricco’s “stories”, a soap opera titled “Days of our Lives”. Mama Ricco preferred the show after DAYS (as I learned to abbreviate it, in the manner it was truncated by soap fans), “Another World”. I thought that “AW” was a little bland and boring, and never really got into it.

DAYS, however, I have no shame in admitting I watched literally thousands of hours of throughout my childhood, teenage years, college years and into adulthood. When I had to be at school during the show, I taped it on VHS tapes I set recording before leaving in the morning. I consumed soap opera books and weekly magazines to catch up on the decades of history that were before my time.

Who killed who and why, who was related to who, who had a checkered past as a drug dealer or had been possessed By the devil, who had banged their spouse’s Mom—I knew it all and was mesmerized by this no-doubt-realistic portrayal of what the world outside my own antisocial existence was really like.

I even did a presentation in high school discussing the soap opera, and it turned out to be a rare commonality I could have conversations about with other students who were fans (though I suspect not to the same obsessive extent as myself).

The other interest that developed during the era spent at Mama Ricco’s abode was a fateful one that would someday blossom into the work I’m most famous for: comic books.

The stars aligned and I was in the right place at the right time to have the perfect set of circumstances to be exposed to mainstream superhero history as it happened. The greatest decade of comic book-based cartoons was about to start (including X-Men, WildCATS, Batman: The Animated Series and more) and I was spending my days at an apartment complex a less than five minute walk from what would become one of the most beloved comic stores in existence, the then-recently-opened Carol & John’s Comic Book Shop.

I have a lot more memories of being in that comic book shop than I do most other things from growing up, but I won’t drag this entry out talking about how I eternally regret passing on the Bowen Designs Deadpool mini-bust I saw in the shop for $30 (which ultimately led to my obsession with statues and mini-busts).

I would do everything in my power to scrounge up some spare change each day so that I could spend a half hour or so raiding the back issue bins for bargain comics that would expand my knowledge in these pre-Wikipedia times. It was here at Carol & John’s that I was first exposed to and began to become well-versed in the X-Men, Spider-Man, New Mutants, Fantastic Four, New Warriors, Thor and many more comic book icons that would eventually take the mainstream world by storm.

It was a perfect scenario to grow an intense specialized interest in, as I could watch the cartoons on TV and then go buy back-stocked comics to feed my growing need to know more and more about the Marvel characters whose toys on shelves were fueling my inner fire.

Mama Ricco passed away in the summer of 2004, but I didn’t attend her funeral since I avoid the rest of my biological relatives for any reason. Even so, I think it’s apropos that I was attending my first-ever comic book convention during Mama Ricco’s funeral, as the comic book expertise developed during my tenure as her sorta-ward would go on to be a core component of my life and future.

Erased (Or: “Dabid’s Backup)

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I don’t really have any memories from the day of my strokes. It’s weird knowing that you were awake… conscious… doing stuff and having conversations… maybe having existential epiphanies about life and existence… but all memory of those things has been burned away forever.

I say “burned away” because something I do have clear memories of is a crazed hallucination I had on the first or second night I was off life support in the ICU. In my “dream”, I was sitting in a room—in my mind—and seeing a film strip of memories in front of me on fire, burning to ash. If you’ve ever seen the anime “Erased”, it’s like the opening to that, but with fire.

(In “Erased”—which should be called “The Town Where Only I Don’t Exist” in the English version, but isn’t, because of chicanery—the main character is able to time travel his adult consciousness into his younger self in order to relive and change past events in his life. the opening shows his young and adult selves sitting in an otherwise empty theater. )

After my memory strip burned up, I was floating in a void, sure that it was the end for me. Somehow, I managed to burst out from the ocean of unconsciousness, a la Naruto in the “Diver” opening to Naruto Shippuden. I was utterly petrified and probably at my maximal blindness, but I can confidently pinpoint that moment as the moment I decided I definitely wanted to—and was going to—live.

My wife and best friend, Dave, were there when I burst out of life-death, and I remember telling my wife not to worry because Dave could just back up my consciousness and install it into a new clone body if anything went bad. Dave assured me he did not have that technology, but my brain was totally scrambled and I was unconvinced that the basis for Jonathan Hickman’s “X-Men: House of X/Powers of X” was fictional.

Central to the foundation of HoX/PoX is the concept that Charles Xavier stores backups of the minds of every mutant so that mutants never die permanently—but when resurrected, they’re missing any memories from between their death and most recent backup. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering the implications of that.

Any answers I might have arrived at the day of my strokes, regarding life, the universe, or my part in either, were burned away forever (along with who knows how many billion other memories and brain cells). But if large chunks of me were utterly erased permanently, just like that, was I still really the same “me” at all? I wonder.

For those who haven’t heard me gush about it, I consider House of X/Powers of X to be the greatest and most transcendent comic book narrative of our time. It redefined and reframed decades of comic book history in a way I had never seen before and don’t expect to see again.

I tried explaining HoX/PoX to my neurology team when they came in to evaluate me—including my concern that I’d already died and been resurrected to a backup body—but they also insisted that they didn’t have that technology.

Jonathan Hickman was definitely ahead of his time.