As others are wont to do, I thought I’d stop and say hello, and let you know just who I am. Hopefully the name Lucas Siegel is somewhat familiar if you’re a regular visitor to Newsarama. I have been writing as part of Best Shots for a couple years, and after initially working on interviews, I began going into other styles of stories.

Along with Troy, I’ve read every single tie-in to Secret Invasion and written the “Damn Dirty Skrulls” recaps. Along with that and Flashback Friday, my focus has been the Games section since its inception in June.

There, I’ve worked on Reviews, Hands-On Previews, Interviews, and News pieces about that other love of mine, video games.

I’ve been a gamer pretty much my entire life, starting with the Apple IIe and my brother’s Colecovision. I game on all three current systems and PC, but if I had to choose I’d say the PS3 is my current favorite, purely for the controller. LIVE is the best online gaming, though, and the Wii is a lot of fun to play with friends and family, including those who wouldn’t touch other systems.

As for comics, I was into Marvel and Marvel alone in my early years, getting in through the gateway drug of X-Men: The Animated Series. I stopped reading in 1996, though I stopped back a few times to check in, and still held onto my old books. In 2002, my then girlfriend/now wife and I were talking about how much we used to love comics, and decided to go to a local shop just for fun. I bought the first issue of the Chamber mini-series by Brian K. Vaughan, having been a big fan of the character back in the day, and I was instantly re-hooked. That spun into multiple directions, with me checking out other X-Men Books, and Y: The Last Man, then taking reccomendations from my shop runner on what else to check out. Before I knew it, I was collecting and reading nearly every book Marvel put out, along with a smattering of Vertigo offerings. Then, as Troy noted, I was off to go overseas and spent about 15 months on Active Duty with the Army. It was while there that I discovered Newsarama, posting frequently as ArmyMonkey and forging some great, lasting friendships, including one with J.K. Parkin. I even guest-contributed a couple of times to The Great Curve while it was under his purview. Eventually I got into several indy and DC books, and now I read pretty much any comics I can get my hands on. I was once dubbed the “Marvel Care Bear” of Best Shots, and call myself simply a “Non-jaded Comics Fan.” As you can see, this year I even dressed as Hush for Halloween, carrying my Catwoman-wife’s heart in my hands all night (See recent events in Detective Comics for explanation).

I digress. I’m thrilled to be a part of the new team. My focus here will be video games, specifically comic-based ones. I’ll also try to let people know that it’s ok to just plain love comics, be they superhero or otherwise. You can find audio and video of me in the currently-on-hiatus Shots in the Dark podcast if you just can’t get enough Lucas (it’s been known to happen), and I look forward to bringing you up-to-date info through this Blog as well as my continuing coverage on the main site.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.