La Zona Muerta

Boy, I hope you like a loose sense of grammar, a poor use of punctuation, an over reliance on ellipses and especially run-on sentences.

Hi, there. My name is DJ_Convoy. Well, no, it isn’t; my name is Justin. DJ_Convoy is my long-used internet moniker. I’m DJ_Convoy in nearly every forum I hang out at (if you see me, feel free to say hi). It’s kind of my guarantee of, well, not quality per se, but my guarantee that I’m the same guy everywhere. I don’t, for instance, act like a know it all dick at the wrestling forum, then dash off to Newsarama where I’m a nice guy, then go to the board where I’m a mod and tyrannize people, etc. I’m on a fairly even keel… I don’t change up my “internet persona” too much… I really am that cynical and pessimistic. Ha ha.

So, hence and therefore. What’s up with this blog?

I hope that it’s a clearing house; a place to rant about junk, to share cool things with you, and to provide warnings when warranted. I hope to talk to you about toys, comics, movies, books, wrestling, games, music and whatever else tickles my fancy. As you can see; I write informally and fairly conversationally. Sometimes, that’s going to mean a long, rambling review… sometimes it’ll mean a short, pithy comment. It’s wide open. We have no mission statement here, other than to have fun and have a bit of a chat about, well, stuff.

The emphasis on toys, comics and etc. may lead you to think “Gee, this guy is still a kid!” or “Let go of your childhood, ya jerk!” or something else along those lines. I dunno… I think my nostalgia for times past stems from being an American child in the 1980’s. I never learned that it wasn’t okay to play with my toys or video games or what have you. Discovering girls as a teen didn’t supplant my need to read comics or buy action figures, and adulthood didn’t automatically make me part with my childhood. You like what you like… hopefully you like the same kind of stuff we do. I promise, while I am the kind of dork who has a bunch of toys pinned to his walls, I don’t have a Funko Pop display, so I’ve got that going for me.

I guess that covers the “Who I Am” bit. How, exactly did I “Come to Be?”

My mommy met my daddy… *rim shot*

And, for a time, they were pretty cool, supportive people. They (almost) always approved of my obsession with books, comics and toys as a young boy. They watched cartoons with me, they played video games with me (hell, even without me!)… they let me watch R-rated movies sometimes when I was probably too young to do so… all of the typical stuff cool parents do.

I was very much a bookworm but I often struck an odd mix between being the class clown and the class nerd. Little did I know that, one day, this strange nerd/clown combination would be semi-acceptable! Not that I cared much, one way or the other; my road to nerddom was assured from very early on.

As a wee bairn, my brain blazed with Autobots fighting alongside the Murray family, while Spider-Man clashed with evil, threatening Tripods. Harrison Ford hunted androids whilst searching for relics whilst being a grumpy smuggler. Soldiers fought for identity in worlds paved by Bradbury and Heinlein. Evil Skeletor was foiled every weekday afternoon (while learning an important lesson, of course). Laura Ingels Wilder carved out a home for herself and her family while the Avengers united to fight the threats that no super hero could stand alone against. A magic wardrobe led to a mystical place where children were the next in line to royalty. Rick Hunter learned to be a man (and how to pick the right goddamn girlfriend), while Bugs and Daffy and Tom and Donald and Woody and whomever else taught me about wacky zaniness and outdated cultural references. These were the things that I escaped to, that lit my imagination and formed a rich tapestry to grow up against.

I may be biased, but the eighties may have been the best time ever to be a little kid. My life was permanently changed by stuff like Transformers and (to a lesser extent) He-Man, the beginnings of early anime hitting our shores (early for us, anyway), new wave music and the beginnings of rap, music videos becoming prominent, comics you could actually go to a newsstand and buy (I think Avengers 221 was my first comic, even if I didn’t follow up on buying comics for years), cold war paranoia (for better or worse)… it was a tremendous time for kids. I would have never guessed that, over 35 years later, I’d still be buying Transformers from the department store, you know? Of course, you could make the argument that it was the consumerism and the excess fueled by the eighties that transformed kids into buying machines that needed every tie-in, every toy, etc. but that’s another diatribe altogether.

Needless to say, I still love a lot of the stuff us 80’s kids grew up with, and I never grew out of it. Books, toys, comics, cartoons, video games, wrestling… they all impacted my point of view and informed my tastes… I hope that your tastes and my tastes meet somewhere and I’ll blab about stuff you dig.