A blog is supposed to be about me. I realise I share a lot about my passions: books, music, entertainment and comic books/graphic novels, but perhaps not a whole lot about myself. So here’s my first blog post about it.

I consider myself very much a kid of the ’80s and the ’90s. Not just because obviously I grew up in that era, but that’s where a lot of the modern developments happened, which shaped a lot of who I am today.

One of those modern developments certainly was fun, colour television. From Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends (to which I attribute my love for the character Iceman) to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, to Ghostbusters, these set the stage for going forward. Once you’ve watched these shows, you want more. More action, better animation, better voice acting, etc. You tend not to want to rewind back to the ’70s and watch the Batman TV series or the Hulk. And that explains a lot about me.

In almost every medium, I don’t like checking out stuff pre-’90s. In fact, I barely like checking out stuff pre-1997, when I entered secondary school, because that’s when my preferences and tastes started solidifying.

I had to literally force myself to sit down and read “The Hobbit“, and was then disappointed by the amount of action. I tried reading “The Fellowship of the Ring”, but couldn’t even make it to the point where the hobbits meet Strider. I just couldn’t understand why Tolkien had to write “and the hobbits walked through the fields of grain and corn and mushrooms and could not help but want to eat some, for mushrooms are a hobbit’s favourite food”. And then they would break out in song.

“The hobbits crossed the field”. That’s that.

Same thing when it comes to comic books. I picked it up seriously in 1997 (see the trend?) and my collection has very little that dates pre-Onslaught, or pre-1995. Even though the supposed “great” stories like the Dark Phoenix Saga occurred in the ’80s, I could never get past that clunky writing. I only read Crisis On Infinite Earths (published in 1985) so I could see links to present-day stories.

The one area that I can stand pre-90s content, is in music, and again selectively. I grew up listening to the Carpenters, Barry Manilow, Gloria Estefan and Abba in the car and do like listening to their music, along with the Beatles.

However, in experiencing music – meaning hearing it live or at clubs – I don’t understand why people my age (and younger) go crazy over the retro stuff. We didn’t live in that era, there’s nothing to connect to! I can’t enjoy music that I don’t identify with, or is not relevant to me.

So that’s me. What about you? Which era do you identify with? When was your favourite content produced? Is there an explanation for liking retro music even though you weren’t even a fetus at the time? Let me know!