Geek Prom. That’s what we used to call Comic-Con in the late 90s –– self-mockingly, because we (or, at least, I) weren’t actually cool enough to go to real prom. That was before there was an actual Geek Prom every year in Duluth, and before Comic-Con itself became less a comic convention than an 100 hour press conference, where Hollywood studios are (for the most part) able to bypass the pesky press and sell next year’s product line directly to their most desired demographic.
As you’re reading this, I’m en route to San Diego for my fourth Comic-Con, my first in a couple of years. Kevin and Kevin will be joining me, and starting with tomorrow night’s preview, we’ll be live blogging all the major panels, and some of the not-so-major panels (Lloyd Kaufman, I love you), so plan to refresh the page roughly every 30 seconds from Wednesday night through late Sunday.
But whilst spoilers on the dreaded Wolfman remake are one thing, I’m also interested in how the Con has changed in the ten years since I comfortably fit within its target demo, especially for the fans and kids who––I assume––still make pilgrimages to attend. I have all these half-baked theories about how nerd culture has essentially become the new frat culture; if you’ve ever been bullied on a fanboy blog comment thread, maybe you’ll agree, or maybe I’m just talking out of my ass. Regardless: with the former totems of high school rejects long since transformed into the bread and butter of the mainstream culture industry, will there be any real geeks left at the old Geek Prom?
Whether you’re a long-time Con attendee or if this will be your first time, let me know if you have any thoughts. And if you spot an old lady wandering around the Convention Center in granny glasses, fumbling for her arthritis medicine and her inhaler, come say hi!
An exhibit called Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy opens today at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and runs through the end of the summer. From the Met’s website:
Fashion not only shares the superhero’s metaphoric malleability, but actually embraces and responds to the particular metaphors that the superhero represents, notably that of the power of transformation. Fashion celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self. Through fashion and the superhero, we gain the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian. The fashionable body and the superhero body are sites upon which we can project our fantasies, offering a virtuosic transcendence beyond the moribund and utilitarian.
I complain a lot about how the rise of the comic book blockbuster (which I’m not knocking out of hand––obviously, when they’re good they’re really, really good), has made the typical connoisseur of comic book mythology less likely to be an introspective smarty and more likely to resemble your typical aggro frat boy; like just about everything, geek culture becomes duller and less potent as it becomes more mainstream. By tying it the body/identity politics (thus adding the complications of sex) and making it completely intellectually obtuse in the process, the Met’s show takes back comic book love and restores a bit of its lost nerdiness. Sign me up!
The Met’s site has a lot of small pictures from the show and much, much more information; the above photo is excerpted from the Jaman blog.
UPDATE: There are many, many more photos from inside the exhibit on Flickr.
The Spout team went to Billy the Kid (2007) last night and really loved it. Paul interviews director Jennifer Venditti before the premier about her new documentary. By the end of the interview, we were sold and the doc definitely lives up to Venditti’s hype.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Geek Prom. That’s what we used to call Comic-Con in the late 90s –– self-mockingly, because we (or, at least, I) weren’t actually cool enough to go to real prom. That was before there was 
