Some Cool News

Hey all,

So my big news is that I will be self-publishing a new comic next year, it's the first issue of what I hope to be a series, called Lunatic Fringe. It will be drawn by Sloane Leong, who I highly recommend you check out (also here). Bar fighting and space battling and punk rock and all that nonsense. Barring any catastrophes in the next five or so months I should have it ready for next year's convention season, so keep an eye out!

Also next year I should have a feature in The Leaf, not much I can say about that at the moment. I'll be finishing up the script this week, and then I'll probably try to get a few short scripts to post up here. Probably just touch up some stuff from my Deviantart, we'll see.

Anyway, there's my exciting news! Later!

Faking it vs. Making it

I just wanted to post my thoughts on this whole “fake geek” debate that’s going around. Just in case anyone was interested in my opinion. I thought I’d address it with a helpful comparison.

While I have held geekery in my heart for as long as I can remember, there was a period, mostly in high school, when I dabbled in a few other subcultures. This was back in the late 90’s-early 00’s, back before geek-dom had the organization and legitimacy it has now as a subculture. I tasted the offerings of the standard rebellious teenager fads. I tried to be goth, but that didn’t work out. I went to, I think 3 raves in late ’99, but found that crowd to be beyond exclusionary. I had a number of skater friends, but could barely keep upright on a skateboard.

The punk subculture I found to be interesting. I think mostly because at the time I was discovering it, so were most of America’s youth. If the first decade of this century belonged to any subculture, it was punk. And one thing I noticed was that every punk had a different idea of what made something punk. Sure, pretty much everyone agreed that Avril Lavigne wasn’t punk, but what about Green Day? What about Blink 182? Could you call yourself punk if you didn’t know who Pennywise was? Did you have to own a Dead Kennedys album on vinyl to really call yourself punk?

There were people that would argue that any band on a label bigger than Epitaph was a sell-out. I remember watching an Against Me! DVD in which a kid explains that whenever a band signs to Fat Wreck Chords, they suddenly start playing mainstream music. There were people that claimed that the very act of making money off your music made you a sell-out. That the only way to really be punk is to refuse to get a job and Molotov the local Wal-Mart. And anyone who considered themselves a punk claimed that everyone who became punk after they did was just a poser trying to be cool.

A lot of the same things are happening in geek culture now, and I think it’s for a lot of the same reasons. If punk was the definitive subculture of the 00’s, nerd culture is set to be the definitive subculture of the 10’s. Which means a lot of the same arguments. “You can’t be a nerd because you don’t know who the original five X-Men were.” “I’m more of a geek than you because I’ve read every Dune/Ender/Discworld/etc book!” “I’m more of a nerd because I’m in a weekly LARP group!” And so forth.

And of course, everyone who’s reading comics, or genre fiction, or playing WOW, or whatever the case may be, for any length of time is immediately going to accuse people who are just getting into these things of being posers

The fact is this, plain and simple: Culture does not belong to anyone. Just because you were a fan of Doctor Who before Russell T. Davies, doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be allowed to just like Matt Smith, any more than you liking Bad Religion in the 80’s means that people shouldn’t be allowed to like Rise Against. You don’t get to decide how/when/why someone else’s fandom manifests.

Even if, for the sake of argument, there are people just going to conventions because they enjoy dressing up, and that’s the extent of their interest in any of it, that’s still a form of fandom, that’s still a form of geekery, and it’s not your place to give or deny permission.

That’s about all I have to say about that.

Overtime

I decided to take some overtime this weekend, because I'm super-broke, and I'm finally done (still have my regular work-week to go, but whatever). I probably could've done some writing this weekend, but I decided to be lazy and pig-out on discount Halloween candy instead. It tastes a little better when it's half-off. Also my wife stole like four candy bars from a little kid. Full-size.

I'm working on something for a Canadian super-hero called the Leaf, http://www.redleafcomics.com/, still in the early stages. Not much to say there. I have some other short things I want to work on. Maybe I'll have another script to post here at some point.

Anyway, I'm hungry. Time to make spaghetti.