ZLM_Garfield

At least you're not lining up for Hall H. Now THAT's geeky.
Zero Like Me #162:
Garfield

Easter Eggs: "Yale" in panel 3. FB01, 30E, and Southwest. Shoutout to Richard Garfield, Ph.D. (congratulations Penn, you're FINALLY a credit to the Ivy League!). Today's setting is still Bradley Airport, which has seats just like San Diego's airport.

Fun Facts: I apparently had a reputation for being anti-athlete during college (tee hee), but one morning I saw a bunch of footballistas huddled over my comic in the school paper, trying to decipher which Magic cards I drew into a comic. I waddled over to their table and settled their debate with definitive answers from the source, and then they confessed they were ashamed of their Magic roots because it was apparently an extremely nerdy secret hobby from their respective pasts. Yes, this gigantic jock was telling me, a "normie," that Magic is nerdy. At Yale. Thus, we're gonna be doing some comics explicitly about Magic. Deal with it.

Baa: My very last night at Yale as a freshman, I convinced some fellow lingering classmates to draft Magic with me using some booster packs I'd won in a bunch of SoCal Friday Night Magic tournaments (the only reason to leave the house was for school or Magic). While we played long into the night, people would wander through the suite, and this one girl passed by, saw us calculating our combat damage, and laughed at us. The other guys instantly looked like they'd just got pantsed on a high school blacktop during gym. After she left, they dropped the knowledge on me that Magic was actually considered nerdy since middle school. This had honestly never occurred to me before I got to Yale, and I still don't see it as any more nerdy than watching TV. But even if it is geeky, this is Yale, not some party school for idiots. This isn't Cornell.

Speaking of which, I'm sick of people trying to act like just because they go to see Batman movies that they're geeks despite not having actually read comics in years, if ever. Or insisting that they're geeks because they watched Beast Wars when they were kids and can still vaguely remember a pink, flying robot screaming "TERRORIZE" at a robo-cheetah. Or that they're geeks for wearing a retro-faded picture of Count Chocula on their shirt, fresh off a Hot Topic clothesrack, meanwhile they're making out with someone who also looks like they're straight out of a Michael Bay movie. The glazed-over tools lining Hall H at Comic-Con are not geeks, they're fad-sucking sheep who decided that what certain people truly, passionately love is now worthy of their haughty, momentary attention.

A geek is someone on the fringe of society due to their intense, largely anti-social interests; they're shunned, socially-stunted experts in niche horizons. Seeing the blockbuster movie with your bros isn't the same as burrowing into the prose with yourself. Knowing who Alpha Five is doesn't make you a geek, that just makes you a 90s kid like any other. Knowing who Richard Horvitz is, that's more like it. Geeks and nerds are not prettyboys wearing ironic logos, they're on the outside waiting to demolish a popular kid for acting like he knows and likes what legitimately consumes the geek's imagination.

Geeks know what they love, and they love it to death and unironically so. They don't care what anyone else thinks about their multiverse. Unless everyone else starts loving it. Then we have a problem.

Reuxben