The arrival of snow in the mountains in my neck of the woods means that summer really is on the way out. It seems like it was only yesterday that we were discussing what would be the hits and misses of the season. Now the talk is going to turn to Oscar buzz and Halloween horror. Are you freaked by how quickly time has flown by yet?

Anyway, seeing as school is already in session, I've decided to pay homage to my Geek Beat predecessor, Mark Beall, and do a list of things we learned during the summer season. For no good numerical reason, I stopped at 15. From there, it's your turn to share what important lessons you will carry from your time in the multiplex. (And a special thanks goes out to Jarrette and Matt, who bantered back and forth with me in this study session.)

1. You can use a snake as a rope and its fragile skeletal system won't pull apart. They won't even bite you if it does! (Indiana Jones)

2. All it really takes to be Batman? A really strong jaw, and nice lips.

3. When faced with Tony Stark, all your hard-hitting journalism training goes out the window. (Iron Man)

4. You can get a custom Joker suit made and no one will ever connect you or its purchase to the psychopath terrorizing Gotham. (The Dark Knight)

5. Fridges preserve not only food, but life. In the event of a nuclear blast or poisonous air, they will save humans and plants alike. Who knew? Not I. My watercress goes bad after a week. (Wall-E and Indiana Jones)

With the end of summer drawing near, it's now time to begin the season's autopsy on the Beat. If you're totally burned out on discussing or reading anything to do with summer blockbusters, you may want to skip the next few columns – though I'd be terribly hurt if you did.

This week, I want to discuss the girls of summer geekdom. At the beginning of the season, I complained about the lack of superheroines in film, a trend that not even the summer flicks seem to be reversing. (Unless it's a Top Cow property – it looks as though we will get Witchblade and Magdalena before we ever see Wonder Woman or Black Widow.) Nevertheless, women weren't a complete nonentity in the franchises this year -- some were quite interesting, some were merely bland, and a few were complete failures. I think it's important that we recognize the good and the bad, and with that, let's tally up the scorecard and hand out the prizes.

Nevertheless, I'm still not sure where the Dark Knight mania came from. A similar excitement preceded last year's 300, but I think that was largely due to the glut of advertising, TV spots and MySpace banners in the weeks beforehand. This year, Iron Man had a similar effect, but it was practically overnight, and driven largely by the shockingly good reviews. And even so, I have friends and family who still haven't gotten around to seeing Iron Man or 300 despite the buzz – but they've had Dark Knight earmarked for months.

Happy day! Today, we get to talk about the Master of Magnetism and his origin movie! Or, at least, we get to discuss it via the script reviews, as two have popped up online, courtesy of Sal's Scripts and the Coventry Telegraph. A special thanks goes out to io9 for alerting me, and for their ever interesting commenters who spurred me into writing.

You see, without getting into the spoilery aspects of the script reviews, a few people took issue with X-Men's archvillain being made sympathetic. To make a long review short and spoiler-free, Magneto's origin story will center on his time in Auschwitz. Once free, he spends his adulthood hunting down the Nazis who tortured and experimented on him. The movie will be less about Magneto's issues with homo sapiens, and more about his quest for justice. Professor Xavier pops up in it as a friend, but it doesn't look like this film will delve into their break or diverging philosophies.

It's almost a rule of comic-book adaptations: with each great superhero movie there must follow great amounts of bitching. With each 2008 summer release, there's a new editorial from some frayed writer, tired of the whole POW-SMASH-BOOM of it all. io9 is eagerly anticipating the end of the trend, while Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty bravely declared his hatred of all things superhero. I can understand their frustrations; I even share a little of the weariness. Try as I might, I can't wind myself up for Thor or Ant-Man.

But I still find myself defending the genre, albeit lamely, as my mom exclaims "Not another comic book movie!" every time she reads one of my stories. I champion it because there is one boon of the superhero surge that goes largely unnoticed: it's becoming the A-list springboard for male actors. Is your career languishing? Land a comic book lead! Think about it. Some of the most avidly buzzed-about names of late owe their status to a two-dimensional illustration.

I fear this may be another weak installment, due to external suffering. As I mentioned in last Tuesday's column, this past weekend was the start of our Renaissance Faire. It is a punishing affair here in Colorado due to our heat and elevation, and there were many moments where I wished I was watching The Incredible Hulk instead of hiking mountainous terrain in a very small corset. And I didn't even particularly want to see Hulk, but felt compelled. After all, my job here is to write about movies, and every week I am given a platform to chatter about geeky topics. The Incredible Hulk is like a midterm exam for me, a requirement to keep my geek credibility. And that became a perfect subject for this week's column.

Oh, geek cred! Speak it aloud and it vanishes, it is so fragile. My geek cred is, at the moment, more valuable than my college degree. I am delighted when someone salutes it. (By the way, thanks again Rick Marshall.) Few people will ever care whether I remember the events leading to the 100 Years War, but my entire online life could unravel if I don't go see The Incredible Hulk. You don't know how I live in terror that, someday, I will be asked something Green Arrow related and not know the answer. My reputation will be in tatters. I had a chill of this earlier, when I Googled Cowboys and Aliens and discovered everyone had read it but me. (Which is easy – the entire thing is available online. I am horrified I missed even that.).

My thoughts are regrettably circling around one genre this month, as I'm in the middle of last minute Renaissance Faire scrambling. I swear, this happens every single year – I realize it's June, and that I have a week to procure buccaneer boots, or a new bodice. (Other girls need swimsuits for summer, I need pirate boots. Go figure.) In between (and inspired by) the fabric and hat shopping, I finally cracked open Children of Hurin for the first time. Revisiting Middle Earth made me nostalgic, not just for the recent years when we were eagerly awaiting each Lord of the Rings installment, but for fantasy in general. Specifically, '80s fantasy.

Someday, there will be a cultural study that reveals why there was a renewed fascination with dragons and chicks in chainmail in the '80s. I have always suspected it was the debut of Dungeons and Dragons, but an RPG played in basements could hardly inspire Hollywood to tackle the genre so eagerly. Perhaps it was the medieval styling of Star Wars, which led movie directors to declare "Jedi knights? Hey, let's do a movie with real knights!" Maybe it was all spawned by the gigantic Excalibur, or it was a delayed reaction to the hippies' rediscovery of Tolkien.