* Inspired by discovering that Fred Van Lente is using the Runaways’ arch-nemeses/parents the Pride as the villains in this week’s Iron Man Legacy #10: Are the people like me who are big fans of largely abandoned superhero teams like the Runaways or the Agents of Atlas or the Seven Soldiers of Victory due to the quality of the recent runs that (re)introduced them the equivalent of die-hard devotees of largely abandoned old superhero teams like the Secret Defenders or the Champions or the Suicide Squad or the West Coast Avengers? Is it different because Runaways, Atlas, and Seven Soldiers were varying degrees of genuine critical darling while those earlier books weren’t? Or am I forever doomed to spaz out over the prospect of a Gorilla Man/Nico team-up the same way some people lose they shit any time Hercules and Angel hang out?
* Has the rise of “geek culture” as a cultural force so omnipresent that Patton Oswalt feels the need to ramble on in Wired about how in his day geeks had to walk to the Android’s Dungeon uphill both ways led to an improvement in the comfort and safety of geeky kids from bullying and ridicule? I’d really like to know the answer to that one.
Tags: comics, geek culture
It was a different world, but back in the day West Coast Avengers and Suicide Squad were definitely critical darlings. The one had Steve Englehart, the other John Ostrander, and they were certainly two of the most celebrated writers of their day.
After I posted I realized that was true of Suicide Squad. I had no idea about West Coast Avengers, though. Maybe I had it mixed up with Force Works?
Well, WCA ran for 102 issues. The second half is mostly forgettable – with some weird Byrne stories followed by some mediocre Roy Thomas stories. But the first 40 or so issues was all Englehart, producing some of the more memorable stories of the time, including a year-long time travel epic that is often discussed as one of the most complex time-travel stories ever attempted in comics. Englehart is often forgotten today, overshadowed by Steve Gerber and Jim Starlin (probably because their three thema overlapped and complemented each other in many ways, its easy to lump them together), but Englehart was unique in his dedication to thoughtful humanism and the principled commitment to communicating thematically complex ideas in the context of serial adventure stories. His run on the Silver Surfer with Marshall Rogers is arguably the best that character has ever seen – and this is coming from the world’s premier SIlver Surfer fan.
I started to feel exactly like this about halfway though my Wizard tenure, thought I couldn’t put my finger on it then. The other day my 19 year old brother in law was trying to tell his dad that “You Sexy Thing” is a great song. My father in law said. “It’s not. It’s not a good song. And you don’t like that song, either. You just THINK you like that song.” And that’s how I feel about “Geek Culture” now to some degree…people don’t geek out on something, they just THINK they want to geek out on something. That not taking an interest in Dr. Who won’t allow them to be part of the conversation, or understand the memes or something. At Wizard it was sort of a requirement, and I ended up feeling really uncomfortable about being forced to like comics, and still haven’t really gotten back into comics to this day. I think the Geek Jump the Shark moment was, for me, the first time a piece of Army of Darkness merch got produced. Remember how badly people wanted that stuff, once upon a time? Remember what an uphill battle it was just to get an Ash toy? Seems crazy now.
I just think the stereotypical Geek Shit has been strip mined. There’s still plenty of stuff my friends and I geek out about, with no huge internet cache of information. The non-ironic Road House websites aren’t out there. The First Church of Pac-Man website is in total disarray. I don’t know if there’s other people like me playing Pac-Man Championship DX, and writing down their time splits, and studying other uploaded player videos score methods. If there are, I can’t find them. That’s a hidden fortress of thought if I’ve ever had one. Trying getting into the SHMUP gaming community…that shit gets intensely nerdy.
So I understand his sentiment here, but I think it ultimately boils down to another “I listened to this band when they were cool” argument. Applying Wilco’s The Late Greats to this article: the greatest nerds? You’ll never even know what those guys are into. You’ll never, ever see them. They’ll never make a ComicCon Exclusive Kevin Tighe Road House toy. And there NEVER SHOULD BE. The nerdiness, in some ways, is in the wanting, the constant unfulfillment!
Another great AV Club feature: Better Late Than Never, for everyone that’s ever had coffee thrown in their face for saying “I’ve never seen The Big Lebowski.”
To me, geek culture has much bigger problems than the ones Oswalt talks about regarding omnipresence and degree of difficulty, both of which I think you’re absolutely right about as they strike me as scenestery/”these crazy kids and their rock and roll” complaints; namely its jockish misogyny, abhorrence of dissent, and (ironically) lack of imagination (it wants rules to follow and codes to crack, not stories and lasting mystery).
(FWIW I think this is all small beer compared to the cultural damage done by, say, football. Show me someone who got beat up in middle school for not being adequately adept at Magic The Gathering and we’ll talk, you know?)
People ought to see The Big Lebowski, though.
I read this article a while ago, so forgive me if I’m not remembering it correctly, but I thought part of Patton’s point was that geek culture has become pervasive and mainstream that the creative powers-that-be simply are regurgitating the content that the “geeks” want instead of creating new things to obsess over.
And I’m glad to see that there’s someone else out there who shudders at the lack of imagination in both geek and mainstream culture. Since when has ambiguity and mystery — when done right — become so terrible?
Frankly I find it a bit difficult to understand what his point is at all. I mean, bits of it come through clearly enough, particularly the whole “geek culture was realer and better when I was a kid” thing, but I feel like he’s tying together all sorts of disparate phenomena (cf. any time he lists examples of things he’s discussing — they’re all over the map) and ends with modest-proposal satirical hyperbole with no real policy prescription within.
Re: ambiguity and mystery: WORD UP.