I am a huge comic geek.

I have always been riveted by the illustrations, layouts, and vast imaginations of people like Stan Lee, Bill Waterson, and even Gary Trudeau.

Aside from spending hours in a comic store, I would spend hours on Sunday mornings when we got the newspaper, reading the comic section (For those 25 and under, a newspaper was the news feed that you find on your phone, delivered on dead pieces of paper, and outdated by the time it's read).

I would observe the illustrations. I would draw, color and just eat up every ounce of creativity that those pages had to offer. Waterson's Calvin and Hobbes stood out the most. It would sometimes get the entire front page of the comics section.

The best part of the comic page when that happened, was what didn’t happen. Waterson would sometimes only have a simple line of text, or even no text at all on the comic. Genius.

He understood his base. He understood the tone of those who read his comic. He played to those people in an intelligent, almost intuitive manner.

He was genuine to his base and the comic culture.

Last week there was an article of a young African American male wearing a sweatshirt for H&M that said “coolest monkey in the jungle”. Regardless of the innocent or fun tone of the shirt, it played on a derogatory comment associated with those of color, namely African Americans.

It was on oversight by H&M. Somehow it got lost in the shuffle of approvals. At that level, people can tend to be more focused on the color and photo touch up rather than the actual content of the photo itself.

But there is something that I can almost guarantee, not a single person of color signed off on that photo. I would have laughed initially then brought it up to the person in charge saying that they "reallllllllllllly shouldn’t publish that photo." Even if it was final, it would have been easy enough to photoshop and fix...if it had been caught before it was published.

A cultural faux pas was missed in regards to a slur that has been hurled at black people for years. It doesn’t matter what was meant, it matters how it was received. It struck a negative tone to the demographic involved.

They were not genuine to their base, nor trusted their base in-house on which to build a genuine voice for their brand.

I am a huge comic geek.

I cannot wait until the arrival of Marvel’s Black Panther on February 16th. A milestone in comic movie history will be happen on that day. A mainstream black comic hero is coming to the big screen with a black director and writer, Ryan Coogler, as well as a soundtrack being produced by Kendrick Lamar...and has a predominately black cast. (please note, Undercover Brother and Black Dynamite and most blaxspotation films don't count to me in this case since a major comic label didn't produce it. Well, it wasn't Marvel, aka Disney. BTW, this soundtrack is far from family-friendly)

With the success of Deadpool and Logan (both R-rated films because they are R-rated characters) Marvel is starting to understand that their base won’t take any more bullshit when it comes to faking it.

Marvel's Dr. Strange, Dreamworks' Ghost in a Shell, and Nickelodeon/Shyamalan's The Last Airbender (all pictured above) got washed. Don’t rewrite or replace culture with people who don’t belong to that culture. Especially in my comic books. (Miles Morales as Spider-Man is not the same thing. PP is still around as the original redhead. That's all I will say about that.)

Comic book people are geeks. We are the outcast. We are the ones that got made fun of for playing D&D. And we are the ones that have the most eclectic mix of people. We hold our craft to a higher standard. We will call you out when it comes to our comics. We don’t care about race, we care about being genuine towards the comics being represented on the big screen.

Being genuine is "in."

Mad props to Marvel for “getting” it. Congratulations on listening to the culture you are addressing, and allowing those people within the culture to do their job. This was the first time that Marvel commissioned somebody to integrate multiple original recordings created specifically for a film they've made with Lamar. That awareness of culture in both film, and in life, is what makes for a successful film.

Us geeks know what we want, and we know what works. The geek will inherit the earth.

Long live the geek.

Article by Kirk Visola...who is not a writer by any means but is trying new things in 2018. Follow him on twitter and stuff if you want. He's the only Kirk Visola in the world so it's not hard to find him. And he loves speaking in the third person.