As Metropolis Turns

Today after lunch when my coworker Jason and I were heading back to the office, I asked if he minded making a pit-stop at Newbury Comics.

"So you can get your stories," he said, putting an inflection on "stories" that was subtle but that nonetheless separated it from every other piece of fiction in the universe. Stories, as in what every grand-mammy in America calls her soap operas.

As I thought about it, I realized how much my grandmother's stories and my stories have in common. Besides the obvious fact that comic books and soap operas are both long-running, rather old-fashioned, serialized fiction invented to sell soap to housewives and BB guns to boys, they're also similarly outlandish. A bullet-proof man isn't any more ridiculous than the antics Reba and Victor got up to on a regular basis on Guiding Light.

"Yes," I said to Jason, "so I can get my stories."