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After 15 years it may finally be time for me to watch the Marvel movies, here’s why:
Superhero media was always a tough sell for me. Growing up in the 80s and 90s I did not read comic books. I kind of envied my friends who loved them but for some reason the part of my brain that takes in images and the part that reads words on a page don’t play well together. So comics always just sat completely inert in my hands as though two competing kinds of gibberish had been spilled together onto a page. I could focus on one or the other but I couldn’t get them to equal anything when combined.
That did not make me unreachable by superhero media though. I was very excited when, around the time I left high school for college, superhero movies started coming into their own. This high energy iconography I had always been curious about was spilling over into an area I deeply loved.
Movies were something I instinctively understood and I was ready for the X-men and the Sam Raimi Spiderman films. In fact the second movies in both franchises completely blew me away. The Spiderman film in particular combined innovative action and pathos more skillfully than I…