Hello! My name is Dante and if you didn’t have to Google the reference in my article title, then I want to be your friend.
I’ve been interested in geeky stuff my whole life, and love talking about it to practically anyone who has ears. I grew up playing Super Mario Bros and Sonic the Hedgehog because everyone was playing them, but the real turning point in my life came from a fateful trip to the local Pizza Hut; this marks the only time you’ll ever hear me say that I am glad that I ate at Pizza Hut. They were sponsoring X-Men: The Animated Series at the time and some promotion got me the VHS copy of the first two episodes. I cannot tell you how many times I watched those episodes, but I was hooked and I’ve gone full-on nerd ever since.
I love to read (and I’m a librarian by trade, which basically means I’m a professional nerd) so I gravitated towards comics, and I still watch superhero cartoons because I’m an adult and I can make my own choices. My current reads are Paper Girls, Sex Criminals, Saga, and Daredevil in singles and Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, and Green Lantern by trade. Comics are a giant passion of mine; they’ve taught me more about modern mythology than I ever learned in school, taught me how to recognize a piece of art, and inspire me to be heroic. I’m a firm advocate of comics in libraries because they are important to the shape of modern mythology and literary history. I love a great story above all else, but I will always love my X-Men, Green Lantern, Superman, Carol Danvers, and Daredevil.
I’ve dabbled in a bunch of other nerdy hobbies, including Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, LARPing, RenFaires, Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, The Dresden Files, Buffy/Angel, Doctor Who, comic cosplay, Shadowrun, my all-time favorite video game series Diablo (shut up I know it’s not the greatest thing ever created, but look at my name), Sentinels of the Multiverse (both card and console versions), and my most recently-acquired hobby: roller derby. I don’t play, because I love the feeling of Not Being Hurt way too much. I referee for the 2015 world champions Wheels of Justice in Portland, OR. It’s an active and entirely geeky hobby wherein I regularly have conversations eerily similar to all those hours poring over D&D manuals figuring out just what THAC0 meant and how my GM was violating the spirit of the rule. It’s a lot of fun and I almost love it more than I love comic books. But not quite. Because roller derby doesn’t regularly feature Green Lantern punching something into space.
Author’s note: the black ring also has a GL logo on it, because of course it does.
