I am in love with a guy named Charlie Decker.  He is the perfect guy for me.  Sweet, and shy, a bit of a nerd. A MacHead who seems to have a penchant for cute brunettes (although I do suspect there is something going on between him and this blonde coffee barista!) A guy who has a mom much like my own, who not only is a sci-fi fan but a rom-com one too. Charlie Decker is also a comic character.

I met Charlie only a few of weeks ago, but his story started in 2009 so I had a lot to catch up on.  I poured myself a cup of medium roast, opened up my MacBook and entered into the world of Starcrossed.  It looks just like my world (in fact I’m pretty sure we have the same view from our windows) only his is drawn, impeccably, by cartoonist Joel Duggan.

I have to admit, what initially drew me to the comic was the fact that it was local.  There is something extremely appealing at the idea of my city being immortalized in ink. Once I entered into the world of Starcrossed though, it was the characters and their stories that kept me hooked.  Charlie and his roommate Sam, an alien from an undisclosed planet, try to navigate their way through the dating scene.  Sam is confident, suave – a real ladies, (um, alien), who freely gives Charlie all of the advice he needs to be better with women.  Advice that Charlie doesn’t always feel comfortable following.  Charlie seems to try and embrace the highs and lows of online dating, and playing the game despite frustrations and set backs, yet all the while longing for the woman who is right in front of him every day, that super cute coffee barista.

Each week readers get to take a look into their lives, and be a part of their misadventures.

Imagine my surprise, as I clicked from strip to strip, to find myself getting attached to this man drawn in black and white (especially a couple of weeks ago when I saw him dressed as Wesley from “The Princess Bride”) yet attached I really am.

There was a tv show when I was a kid called “Dinosaurs” about an average family living in prehistoric times, a family of, well, dinosaurs.  The teenage son on this sitcom, Robbie Sinclair, very quickly rivaled Jordan Knight for my heart.  How crazy! To have a crush on a dinosaur?  Years later, when this show came up in conversation I laughed at my love for Robbie, chalking it up to hormones, and YouTube’d the show to prove my point.  It didn’t.  In fact watching scenes of the show again only reignited my crush on the hypsilophodon and showed that, for us girls, who, a man is, outweighs, what, he is.

Such is the case with Charlie Decker.  Charlie isn’t real.  The situations he finds himself in are made up, yet he and Sam feel like they are my friends.  Each week I root for Charlie in his quest to find love. I sit with eager anticipation that he will find the nerve to speak to the barista and that she’ll be able to see beyond his quiet, and sometimes awkward, demeanor.  On January 3, the strip ‘Midnight Stare’ shows Charlie and the barista counting down to new year, both alone, yet so close to each other.  Who knew a  comic could invoke so much angst?

Hang out with Charlie, Sam and the cute barista every Monday at starcrossedonline.com