Rasheed’s introduction

Hello everyone. My name is Rasheed Alarabi. I’m a sophomore here at GVSU, and majoring in Ad and PR. I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, but my mother’s side of the family is American, so I’m a Saudi America hybrid. Kinda like those cars, but a lot less fancy. Being a hybrid grants me many advantages, such as making unfunny jokes in other languages and laughing at them myself because no one else understood them.

To be completely honest, reading comic books is far from my favorite hobby, though I’ve grown more interested in it recently. When I was much younger, I was very interested in comic book superheroes, but never actually read any comics. I mostly knew of these super heroes from TV shows, games, toys, coloring books, and film. For some reason, I found comics to be intimidating at a young age, and would pretty much always avoid them. Eventually, I became more interested in comics when I discovered the large line of Transformers titles by IDW (I was a huge Transformers fan at the time, and I’m still a fan, though I utterly despise the Michael Bay movies). Not long after, I became interested in reading Frank Miller’s Batman comics (As Batman is my favorite superhero, as horribly cliched as that sounds at this point), and soon after that, I became a lot more interested in the comics industry, with a specific interest in the now classic graphic novels that emerged during the mid to late 80s. I managed to learn a lot more about comics over the past year or so thanks to Linkara, a internet comics critic who does humorous review videos. His videos manage to be both funny and informative for those who aren’t very familiar with the comics industry. You could even say that watching his videos is what made me interested in signing up for this class. Another factor in that decision was my recently growing interest in manga. I’ve been a very big fan of anime since early 2011, and have read a few manga issues, but I almost always prefer watching anime instead. Recently, however, I’ve become interested in watching certain classic animes like Dragon Ball and Mazinger Z. Many of these animes are very slow and, in the case of Mazinger Z, impossible to find outside of bad English dubs (For the record, I’m not a “subs only” anime guy. I will watch the dub if I think it’s as good as the original Japanese voice tracks, but I have my limits, and 70 anime dubs are the worst). With these, I decided to read the manga instead, for ease of access and less time consumed.

As for hobbies that are my favorite, I love watching anime, as I already mentioned, and I absolutely love video games. A little too much, perhaps. I’ve reached the point where I talk about games a lot more than I actually play them, and I’ve become gradually pickier with what I play over the past two or so years. I spend way too much time complaining about what’s wrong with the industry, and have grown to hate most of “gaming culture” itself. That’s right: I’m starting to hate the very thing that I love. Hopefully some of this negativity will go away when Nintendo FINALLY announces a new Metroid game (A new F-Zero and Zone of The Enders would also be nice).

For any of you who are still reading this past the third paragraph, I would like to commend you for your patience, and tell you that I am excited to spend these next six weeks with you all. I look forward to spoiling Age of Ultron for everyone in class. Excelsior!”

Sincerely,

Rasheed Alarabi