Why the Past 20 Years Have Witnessed the Triumph of Geek Culture

When I started writing my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture, I wanted to make an argument about aesthetics. Namely, I wanted to argue that when it comes to art, geeks tend to like works of realist fantasy, which puts the lie to the widespread belief that realism and fantasy are opposites. (They’re not: realism is a mode, or way of making art, while fantasy is a genre; any genre can be done in any mode.)

As I worked on the book, however, I realized that people were just as interested, if not more interested, in the history of geek culture. Whenever I told people what I was doing, they said that they hoped the book would explain why geeky stuff is everywhere these days—why it’s taken over the culture. Why are all the movies at the Cineplex superhero movies? Why is everyone talking about Game of Thrones? Why is it now considered OK, or mostly OK, for adults to read Harry Potter novels and comic books? So I knew I needed to write about that, too.

As it turned out, this wasn’t a problem, because the two topics are intimately intertwined. Indeed, you can’t understand the history of geek culture without also grasping its aesthetics.

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The Evolution of Wolverine, Part 1

Uncanny X-Men #141, cover (detail)

Like many, I became an avid fan of the X-Men in the late 1980s / early 1990s. I can’t remember the first issue that I read—my best friend Philip shared his copies with me on the school bus—but I remember the first one I bought: Uncanny X-Men #270, Part 1 of the “X-Tinction Agenda,” published in November 1990. Wanting more, the following month I picked up Wolverine #34, at which point I was hooked (at least for a while).

I also started purchasing back issues as best I could. But the high price of those comics prevented me from making it back past the mid-1980s. So I took for granted the way the characters were at the time that I was reading. As far as I was concerned, the Wolverine of 1990 was the same as the Wolverine of 1980, or ’75.

But one interesting aspect of serial narratives, whether they’re comic books or television series, is that they rarely start out fully formed. Rather, their concepts and characters develop over time, as the people making them figure out what does and doesn’t work. The Wolverine that I met c. 1990 was a significantly different character than the one that older readers were introduced to in 1974. And although I didn’t know it at the time, 1991 would prove another turning point in the character’s nature, as different creators brought different ideas to Wolverine, revising both his present and past.

In this series of posts, I want to delve into that history, demonstrating how the writers, artists, and editors behind the scenes created and refined Wolverine as a character over the first twenty years of his existence. Broadly speaking, there are three distinct periods:

1. 1974–1982: Wolverine comes together as a character. Initially a short-tempered man with claws, animal senses, and a tendency to fly into berserker rages, Wolverine later gets his unbreakable adamantium skeleton and his fast-healing factor, as well as his fondness for smoking and drinking, plus his catchphrase.
2. 1982–1991: Wolverine’s history as a secret agent gets fleshed out. He thinks and speaks frequently about his past, from the time he spent living in Japan, to his team-ups with fellow military officer Carol Danvers.
3. 1991-onward: In a major retcon, Wolverine is reinvented as an amnesiac, as well as a victim of the nefarious Weapon X program. In order to accommodate these new ideas, much of his past life is rewritten.

In this first post, I’ll tackle the initial period, 1974–82, showing how it took around eight years for the people behind the scenes to get the basic character down.

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Defining the superhero genre

Some people say that Superman is boring because he’s too powerful. Who could beat him in a fight? No one. He’s stronger and faster than everybody else, on top of which he can fly, see through walls, hear people whisper from halfway around the world, fire laser beams from his eyes, freeze things with his breath—plus he’s nigh indestructible, to boot. There’s practically nothing he can’t do. He can survive direct hits from nukes, and bathe in the sun without breaking a sweat. And since no one can beat him, the thinking goes, Superman, the Man of Steel, is never really in any danger, which means his stories lack peril, tension, suspense. There aren’t any stakes. There’s no thrill.

But to think about Superman this way misunderstands not only the character, but the superhero genre as a whole—what makes it unique, and what type of stories it’s best suited to tell. Worse still, this misunderstanding obscures the genre’s historical limitations, as well as how artists might transcend those limitations in the future.

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What Should Be Done with the Mutant Menace?

Nearly five years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on the X-Men for Seqart, entitled “What Should Be Done with the Mutant Menace?” Today I realized that I’ve never linked to those posts from this blog! So in case you haven’t seen those posts, here they are:

• Part 1: “The Lack of an Ending”
• Part 2: “The Need for Self-Control”
• Part 3: “Losing (and Regaining) Control”
• Part 4: “The Evolution of Iceman”
• Part 5: “The Special Case of Professor X”

If nothing else, check them out for the illustrations, taken from over fifty years of X-Men comics. And if you want more of my writing about the Merry Mutants, and superhero comics in general, be sure to check out my most recent book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture.

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My book on Star Wars and Geek Culture is now available

Five years ago, I started writing a book on geek culture, trying to explain why geeky properties like Star Wars and Harry Potter and the X-Men blew up around the turn of the millennium, and haven’t gone away since. In writing the book, I came to believe that a lot of the stories that we tell ourselves about geeks and Star Wars are wrong, and that the rise of geek culture can teach us a great deal about how movies and TV have changed over the past forty years. My goal became to write a book that would explain these changes to both geeks and non-geeks, as well as to explain what it is that geeks are looking for, and why.

That book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture, is finally out, available both electronically and in print. An audiobook version is also in the works, if you prefer that. (You can listen to an excerpt here.)

I’ve pasted more information about the book below, and in the coming days I’ll post links to reviews and interviews. In the meantime, thank you for your interest! If you check the book out, I’d love to hear what you think!

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Two New Short Pieces Are Up at This May Get Awkward

“Indifference” and “The Merrie Mutants,” both here, and both pieces from my third prose collection (in progress), entitled “Symbolism.” (Another one, “The Names,” is forthcoming from decomP.) Thanks to JD Adamski for the request!

“The Merrie Mutants” is my first official foray into writing an X-Men fiction…

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