NOTE: I wrote this last year for an independent comics-themed website that was just starting out. I only worked there for the grand total of about one month because the site's editor/creator and I did not see eye to eye (some differences you can work though, some you cannot - this was the latter). Still, the site was a lot of fun to work for. We were a small cluster of eager fans and future pros, most of whom were pretty young. As far as I know, I was the only one with any professional writing experience under my belt, but our collective enthusiasm more than made up for our limited level of aggregate experience. The site amassed a small, but friendly, user base and I was actually quite sad when I quit (but sometimes a bully needs a punch on the nose). Anyway, this piece got quite a positive reaction when it was hosted on that site, so I'll re-print it here for anybody who's interested. - CQ
As ‘Geek Culture’ Takes Over the Entirety of the Known Universe...Why Am I Still Not Considered ‘Cool’?
In this extended rant-a-thon, I take an affectionate look at the rise of so-called ‘geek culture’ and ask; ‘if everybody is a self-professed ‘geek’ nowadays, why do I still feel like an outsider?’
Like the word ‘Geek’, the word ‘Punk’ was once a derisive term. It was an insult that its intended targets eventually took as a compliment. The latest example of this co-opting of an offensive moniker by the mainstream media is the funky ‘catch-all’ term ‘Geek’.
As you all know, a geek (in the traditional sense) is a carnival or circus freak that eats weird things (most famously the heads of live chickens). You can see a classic geek in the ‘X-Files’ episode ‘Humbug’ – that’s what they are calling you when someone refers to you as a ‘geek’. The word actually originates from the archaic German word ‘geck’, which denotes a fool or a freak.
Nice.
Anybody else feel like ‘Darkman’ now?
“Take the f*cking elephant!”
However, the rise of comic book movies, video games and nostalgic cartoon/gaming/comics merchandise has led to ‘geek culture’ becoming mainstream, or at least, a watered-down version of it.
MTV, ever the paragon of youthful folly and vacant trend following, even had its own comics-themed website called (appropriately enough) ‘MTV Geek’. There are others, too, trendy offshoots of famous publications/entertainment organizations looking for their piece of the geeky pie. However, for all their “its cool to be a geek” rhetoric, they’ll still review Watchmen in its own grubby little section, like a porno or a dirty secret, whilst glorified fanfic like 50-Shades of Grey can be reviewed alongside literary greats like Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment. Does that seem right to you? Is ‘geek culture’ really getting its due?
Really?
My girlfriend and I have been re-watching Frasier in recent weeks, (it is one of my all-time favourite TV shows) and, in one scene (I think the episode originally aired in 2000 or 2001), Frasier is forced to go to a comic book convention. The con is presented as a small auditorium, filled with overly excited fat guys and grown men dressed as Klingons. My first thought was to sarcastically say “oh, yeah, because this is a Comic-Con!” ...Until I realized that, yes, it was a Comic-Con. In fact, until the comic-based movies started spewing forth at the rate of 1-a-day in the mid-2000s, that was a pretty accurate portrayal of a circa 2000’s comic book convention.
Go back and re-watch Kevin Smith’s ‘Chasing Amy’ – That’s a Comic-Con too. That’s how they were. Smith lived that sh!t. He wasn’t some Hollywood brown-noser who’d never read a comic a day in his life: he was a legitimate nerd and his fans loved him for it (and we still do). The point is that he portrayed the conventions of the time warmly and accurately.
Things have certainly changed, whatever the reasons may be.
Looking back on it, those small sports halls, hotel lobbies and auditoriums are how I remember comic-cons, too. Living in the UK (specifically the West Country), I never had any chance to see San Diego (the movie Paul is as close as I’ll likely get in my current tax-bracket), so we made do with Bristol, or Milton Keynes, or (shudder) Swindon.
Shabby little buildings, filled with hastily-erected stalls full of over-priced memorabilia, haphazardly alphabetized long-boxes and a potentially volatile mixture of excitable kids and borderline-apoplectic fanboys, that’s how I remember comic-cons, how things have changed.
An ageing (yet always very friendly) Woman who was dressed as Xena: Warrior Princess (seriously, she was at every single one of these things), mingled with the actors who played minor characters in Star Wars and faded TV stars (all of whom, being veterans of the stage, were never anything less than infallibly polite and generous with their time) as they, in turn, rubbed shoulders with jobbing comics professionals (and in one instance, I shit you not, Jim Lee).
To me, that was a Comic-Con. I didn’t live anywhere near a comics shop, the newsagents only sold ‘collected edition’ comics (ask a Brit) and we didn’t yet have access to the Internet in my house, so my brother and I would cobble whatever money we had and shuttle off to some godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere in search of comics.
We’d then spend (what felt like) hours and hours wandering about looking for the venue, before gorging ourselves on comic books and fast food for the rest of the day. We’d buy six months worth of comics in one go and then read all of them over the weekend. In all my years of going to those things, I only ever saw about three girls (and one of them was perennially dressed as a middle aged warrior princess).
Did that make us geeky?
I used to think of myself simply as a comic book reader. I didn’t like the term ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’ being hoisted at me, probably because it was usually accompanied by a shove, or a clenched fist being thrown in my direction (and that sort of negative reinforcement has a long and well-documented affect on child psychology).
However, when a friend from college said that he was a geek and I protested it, he simply winked at me and said “nah, a geek is a nerd who gets laid”. It was a self-definition that I myself nerdishly adopted for a couple of years until I proudly upgraded my social standing a couple of summer’s later (by the way, ‘college’ in the UK does not mean ‘University’ like it does in the US...but you can still pity me with reasonable justification).
For a while then, I suppose I was a geek, but that still wasn’t something to admit too loudly in public back then.
However, following a more recent period of my life that I like to call ‘the Man of Steel wars’, a friend of mine angrily said that I “gave geek culture a bad name” before comparing me to ‘Comic Book Guy’ from The Simpsons as an example of the bad kind of geek.
I wasn’t aware that I was now supposed to be some sort of ambassador of geekdom, but, apparently, I was. So, being a geek was cool, but I still wasn’t cool by the same parameters. It was as if the cool kids had invaded my clubhouse...and then summarily booted me out.
The same people who once derided me for drawing Spidey in my maths book are now walking around in Primark jumpers with the word GEEK emblazoned on them, this makes them cool and yet somehow I’m still made to feel like a loser. Everything I like and consider myself an expert on is suddenly hot shit, but I’m still getting looked at like something somebody dug out of their ear. What’s wrong with this picture!?
Guys who have Avengers posters on their dorm room wall, or Green Lantern logos on their T-shirts can get laid, but I’m sure, if I was single, I’d be able to strike out no matter what I was wearing. Maybe its because I can actually recite the Green Lantern oath instead of simply wearing the shirt (I don’t, but I could). Or maybe it’s because I can actually name other Avengers beyond those featured in the movie. In one hilarious incident, I actually had to argue with a friend of a friend on Facebook who INSISTED that Beast was never, ever an Avenger. He even went as far as to patronizingly dismiss me, saying, “No, Beast was from ‘X-Men’ you idiot”.
Hurm.
Or rather, to quote Grant Morrison’s SuperGods, “Big business, media and fashion were, it seemed, so starved of inspiration, they’d reached down to the very bottom of the social barrel in an attempt to commodify even the most stubborn nonparticipants, the suicide Goths and fiercely antiestablishment nerds. The geeks were in the spotlight now, proudly accepting a derogatory label that directly compared them to degraded freak-show acts.”
So, the geek has inherited the earth. Or has he? Maybe geek is the new punk, by which I mean a genuine subculture that was co-opted and commodified by a hoard of vacuous wannabes to the extent that almost everyone alive in that era claims to have been a punk. Sound familiar?
Whatever, I’m not a geek. And I never was. If I was a geek, I’d be cool now and I’m certainly not cool now. I’m no ambassador for anyone or anything except myself. I’m an ‘individual’ and that is how I’ll consider myself (until someone finds a way to turn that into a clothing label).