LIFE IN THE GEEK LANE: Because there’s more to life than lolcats and spoof inspirational posters.
Well, geek season is here again, and there’s a ton of cool stuff making fanboys and girls grin from ear to ear. We’ve already had Iron man, The Incredible Hulk and Wanted, and here comes The Dark Knight to make you all wish you had a Batcave of your own. Personally I’m okay with pretty much all of Batman’s gear, as long as there are no rubber nipples, mmkay? The big non-Batman related thing to hit this past week has undoubtedly been the Watchmen trailer. At long last we can stop worrying if it’s going to be any good and instead we can worry about whether it’s going to be as good as the trailer suggests!
Other than that there’s been the unveiling of those new Star Trek promo images, The Dark Knight doing mucho business Stateside and Jedi geeks gearing up for some animated Star wars action with The Clone Wars movie. It is a good time to be of the geek persuasion. Actually, it has been a good time for geekery for the entire decade thus far. There’s been a slew of movies that have proven that geek subjects can be covered with respect and dignity, and still bring in the box office cash. We’ve had an upsurge in book buying and comics popularity, anime and manga becoming more respected due to some high profile releases such as Death Note and Naruto bringing in droves of new readers and viewers. On TV there’s been Doctor Who’s return, Torchwood, Heroes, Lost, and countless others keeping the faith in people’s homes.
It has also been something of an era of change in the way that fans are perceived by the world at large. There’s still the Star Wars Kid stigma sometimes, but on the whole people are finally starting to ‘get it’ much more, and for that we have people like Russell T Davies, Steven Moffatt, Bryan Singer, Sam Raimi, Zack Snyder and Mr Christopher Nolan to thank. Here’s hoping the next decade is as cool as this one has been.
In fiction there’s been the phenomenon of geeks taking control of their own creative careers, and the big example of this would have to be Infected, by Scott Sigler. Genre fans such as Sigler have been making their own way into fan’s hearts via podcasting and print on demand avenues, and this is paying off with big book releases like that one and smaller publishers bringing us book events like Matthew Selznick’s recent Brave Men Run
It really is a fantastic time to be a nerd, geek, dork, Trekker, Whovian, Jedite or whatever you marvellous people wish to categorize yourself as. I’ll even give a shout-out to the Cosplayers, just because. Now, go on you lot, get out there and conquer the media and bring the rest of us the stuff we’ve always wanted. Here’s to being odd.