Geek Out

This past weekend brought the annual Comicon to San Diego. What was once primarily a comic book convention has grown into a hot opportunity for the industry to trot out genre product.

This year seems from the coverage to have been especially Hollywood-centric with some high-profile panels and exclusive video footage. There's a video bouncing around the web of the Iron Man presentation (heretofore to be referred to in my house as Big Metal Asskicker) that looks like money bait, and JJ Abrams debuted (officially, it had been leaked online by an unscrupulous poster dealer a few days before) the teaser one-sheet for his still-untitled monster movie (pictured above).

Back in 1982, at my last convention here in New York, the most we got were used book dealers, some free posters and buttons and random geek celeb sightings (a nice older man asked me with a shoulder-tap at a stack of paperbacks if I'd mind letting him take a look and I stepped aside without looking, only to find a moment later that it was Isaac Asimov) and the last of the free autograph signings (I wonder if my mother still has the Jimmy Doohan autograph I scored for her).

Those days, genre was hot, but not cool. These days, if you're hip, you've seen Transformers more than twice, you've put your name on a wait list for a Wii at six or seven area stores, you've got 4300 'friends' on your MySpace page that you'll likely never meet. It's cool to be a geek, and there's so much geek media out there that even a genre fan like myself can't keep up (Case in point: Battlestar Galactica? Never saw one episode).

As we enter August, I can't help but think back to the summer of 1982 again, the
last time I remember this much nerd overload. By this point in the summer, I had seen these movies in the theater, some more than once.

E.T. The Extraterrestrial
The Thing
Blade Runner
Poltergeist
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
The Road Warrior
Conan The Barbarian


There's not one movie on that list that wouldn't have me pinned to the couch in seconds should they appear on the tube. If they're playing in HD, just say goodbye and meet me in two hours.

I have a feeling any member of today's target audience would love or has loved these films too, and as a writer that was inspired to write in reaction to the the depth of my appreciation for these movies, finding that writing in genre is not a limiting move is good news indeed.