Indulge me in a half-baked theory, won’t you?…

Despite how it may feel as you scroll through some web forums, I was thinking this weekend that comic books may actually bring out the best in us.

If you’re in our target demographic around here, it has probably not escaped your notice that the Star Wars movies came out on Blu Ray at the end of last week, and if you know there’s been a Star Wars rerelease then you know there has been tinkering. Until the day when his neck heft grows so unwieldy that it finally plunges him into the earth’s core, George Lucas will be going back under the hood and fiddling with his movies every time the opportunity presents itself. He’s like your dad puttering around with his models down in his workshop, only every time he puts a ship in a bottle he makes a billion dollars. A new special effect here, another minute of footage there, a musical number that will start to seem dated even while it is happening to you… all these decades later, the man seems obsessed with the idea of making these films better and, oh my God, do his fans hate him for that.

Relatively early in my iFanboy tenure (after the honeymoon was over) I defined the word “fan” as “someone who hates something so much it’s all he can talk about,” and whenever Star Wars makes the news I end up thinking of that definition. Lucas gave shape and direction to millions of childhoods– continues to, actually– and those children have grown up to resent him bitterly because he went back and made the Ewoks blink. Right before the new discs hit the streets, some tweaked footage leaked online and thousands of people lost their marbles because Darth Vader says one more word now. I got a couple dozen more chances to read the #1 phrase that makes me want to shake someone until he sustains a brain injury, “they have raped my childhood,” thanks to these three seconds of video.

Meanwhile, somewhere nearby, a Batgirl fan is reading about this controversy and chuckling ruefully. “They changed two lines of dialogue and a millisecond of Greedo’s death. I see. Must be nice.”

Can you imagine how the public would react if it were announced that Lucasfilm was going to try to appeal to a new generation of potential audience members by starting the entire saga from scratch? And, I don’t know, Luke and Leia aren’t related and Obi-Wan lives and Han dies? (You’d better be able to imagine it, by the way, because this is going to happen within your lifetime. Possibly twice. Might as well start battening down the hatches now, emotionally speaking.)

I guess we don’t have to imagine all that hard. Remember how bonkers people went last year when it was announced that they were rebooting Buffy the Vampire Slayer without so much as offering Joss Whedon the traditional Stan Lee Cameo? (You’ll notice that after the initial press release you never heard about that project again, by the way.) Trekkies seem to have survived the Star Trek reboot without too much tumult, but by that point I imagine Trekkies would have gladly settled for anything that wasn’t Enterprise.

It’s apples and oranges, of course. Whenever a comic book universe gets thrown in the wood chipper, we always sigh and say, “We’ll always have the stories we loved. They can’t take the classics away from us,” and a case could be made that George Lucas has found a way to do that. Still, after the initial nervous breakdown/conniption fit, you’ve got to admit that the comic reading community as a whole has reacted a hell of a lot better to the death, erasure, and upheaval of entire characters and sagas than Star Warriors have to the fate of the Yub Nub Song.

I almost cannot believe these words are coming out of me, but you know…? In the grand scheme of things, comic book fans are pretty laid back (once you allow us our initial reactionary tantrum and a half). By making crisis and change and cataclysm the status quo, superhero comics have trained us to be utterly Zen. You love Captain America? We just shot Captain America through the heart; how d’ya like them apples, hotshot? Your favorite character is dead. What’s that? You’re okay with it? Everything is cyclical and he’ll be back eventually? Well, then, guess what: your favorite book is canceled.… What? You’ll buy something else by the same writer until they inevitably relaunch it in a couple of years? Curses! You are an unshakable rock.

Meanwhile, over at Star Wars: Hey, guess what? When Obi-Wan roars to scare the Sand People away now, his roar sounds a little different than the roar the last time you saw the movie oh my God he has returned from the kitchen plunging a carving knife through his own sternum.

We still freak out. We freak out over pants and collars and whether the webs come out of a device or he… produces them. But generally speaking, we don’t nurse that freakout like a bum on a barstool. Collectively, we shriek “Agh, change!” but unless Mephisto was involved we shake it off and keep right on reading. If Mephisto was involved, we protest-drop the book for a couple of months until it makes us feel impotent and then we slink back and keep right on reading. And when they put out the same story in another format, we don’t act like stormtroopers came for our wallets at gunpoint, either. If we liked it in issues, we can’t wait for the trade. We ask the clerk if they’ve announced the Absolute Edition while we’re in line with the trade. We’re enjoying ourselves. It’s all going to be okay.

So yes, sometimes the internet brings out the worst in us. It does that to everyone. The internet is a cesspool where people who’ve had too much coffee are trapped with people who haven’t had enough coffee. It’s too late to do anything about that; the dynamic has been established. But I submit to you that, while you are reading the message boards and comment threads this week, think back to all the tempests in teapots you’ve witnessed over the years and realize how few of them became actual grudges or causes or vendettas. Feel good about yourselves this week, o comicdom. You may actually be well adjusted. May the Force be with you.

Jim Mroczkowski was interviewed on the local news about the cart full of Phantom Menace figures he was buying the day they came out. He had not seen the movie yet. Should this newscast ever appear online, you will know he was unable to pay the blackmail.