Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett looks at the Big Two's simultaneous move "toward the light," and another Marvel character Disney should take a look at.

Just under two weeks ago I promised to write about what The Bleeding Cool website referred to as The Marvel/DC Confluence, Heroic Age vs. Brightest Day, the simultaneous, supposedly coincidental, almost inexplicable decision to make a left turn towards the light that's expected to take place in both their universes.  Given some of the things I've written here you would think nothing would please me more but I'm afraid I have doubts, because even if this change does what it says on the tin I'm not convinced they actually mean it.

I'd like to believe them but given the number of times Marvel and DC have flat out lied to us you'll forgive me if I anticipate some kind of last minute bait and switch on their part.  And even if they do mean it there's the matter of whether their core audience, our customers, will go along with it.  Marvel likes to trumpet Siege as the "epic seven years in the making;" by my calendar this means there's an entire generation of comic book readers who have never known anything other than The Bendis Version of The Marvel Universe.

Even if they do have the political will to make this big a change in direction when the status quo is doing just fine for them financially, you have to wonder whether they have the full throated support of their creators seeing as how it will likely make them lose the creative freedom that allows them to produce comics like Siege #2.  I would call it "shocking" if Erik Larsen and Robert Kirkman hadn't been doing this sort of thing in the pages of Savage Dragon and Invincible for years.

But I suppose they have no choice really, seeing as how they've reached the outermost marker buoy of what characters that are meant to market movies and move merchandise are allowed to do.  Because if they don't DC's next logical move would have to be to find some way of integrating the Black Lanterns into the status quo--I mean, Blackest Night has been selling so why shouldn't there be a Black Lantern #1 in our immediate future (not to mention the spin-off Black Lantern Dead Infant Corps).

As to where I've been keeping myself for almost two weeks at least this time I have a good excuse.   Last Monday night the screen of my two year old laptop went dark and, long story short, I just got it back Wednesday afternoon.  To appreciate my suffering you need to know it was not only my sole provider of music, movies and games, but also increasingly how I watch television, my only access to radio and the Internet and how I write and like reading comics.  Consolidating 90% of my various electronic media devices into one single unit sure seemed like a good idea.until it broke.

Almost as bad was the Soviet style method the place I went to used to repair it; drop it off then wait five to seven days for them to do a job that will take twenty minutes.  And when I complained that waiting a week for a part to arrive seemed a tad excessive in a world where most things depend on a just in time delivery system I was told sometimes it took two weeks.

Besides just my innate need to complain I'm telling you all of this because we've finally gotten a chance to see Apple's iPad and gosh, it looks cool.  There is of course the whole you-can't-watch-TV-shows-via-Hulu on it thing and of course I won't be able to tell you how it works as a comic book e-reader until I take one out for a test drive, but I really want to.  I can definitely see how it could make my life a whole lot easier.

Until it breaks that is.

The next obscure Marvel character I'd like to introduce to Disney is Harvey, an Archie imitator from 1972.  I'm always pleased when I discover another of these titles Marvel put out during the great superhero slump, mostly because though I sometimes saw ads for them in other Marvel comics I never once saw copies of either Homer the Happy Ghost or Wyatt Earp on my local drug store's comic book spinner (and believe me, I looked).  Most of them were 50's reprints with new covers but everything about Harvey (the hip fashions, black supporting characters, etc.) screams "all-new."  The stories are about what you'd expect and drawn by Stuart Schwartzberg and Henry Scarpelli in an ugly style that was less direct Archie clone and more raw bigfoot.  And as you can see Harvey is a dead-ringer for Eric Forman from That 70's Show.

I enjoy these things a lot more than I probably should.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.