The Intro to My Exit
...in which Ashley promotes another book, in which Ashley attempts to retire from nerd culture.
As you regular loiterers may have noticed, there’s yet another edition in my Thrdgll Vest Pocket Library series, Dorkness Visible. Herein are thirteen essays from the last twelve years or so, collectively chronicling my lifetime of (comparatively limited, I’ll grant you) confrontation with nerd culture, from failed cosplay to halfhearted toy collecting to minimal effort in comic book retail. It’s a wrestling match with the ghost of my dorky boyhood, an angry screed condemning an adolescent culture, a Dear John letter to the lover I can never really leave.
As a means to better outline my questionable aims in publishing these tirades, I am reproducing below the introduction to the book, where I plead guilty to bullying the long-boxing manbabies and throw myself on the mercy of the dorks.
Please note that, even though I am in Germany, you English readers all over the world interested in obtaining this sacred text will have the book delivered in your native region, meaning the shipping charges are merely "Wendy's Value Meal" expensive and not "triple bypass because of the Wendy's Value Meal" expensive.
And now, the introduction to Dorkness Visible, which I’d like for you to imagine being read by a drunken Sydney Greenstreet:
In 1984 – the year, not the book – South Carolina public schools instituted a new policy concerning the federally-mandated Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (the CTBS), which we students were required to take every year to measure our stupidity against schoolkids in Alabama. The new policy required that any student who failed a particular section of the test must attend remedial classes in that subject. This was intended to punish those apathetic high schoolers who, like me, knew that the test was not going to affect our grade average and penciled in the multiple-choice answers randomly, thereby bringing down South Carolina’s national ranking even lower than its podunk education system already did all by itself.
And so, having flunked the math section of the CTBS with my Duchampian testing method, I found myself placed in a classroom of shame, surrounded by kids in helmets, thumbing through flash cards. I tried to point out that a mistake had been made. It’s true my algebra skills will never be prizeworthy, I protested, but look at Edgar over there. He’s eating his pencil. Becky can’t figure out what five fuzzy bunnies plus two fuzzy bunnies makes, but I assure you, I can manage such an equation. I know it sometimes appears otherwise, but really, there’s a difference between dosing microdots and having microcephaly.
I may be dim, but I’m not like them. It’s a song I got used to singing through a lifetime of minimal effort and maximum arrogance. And that little ditty is also, I’m ashamed to say, the obvious theme of this book, a collection of essays and outbursts that both confess my crimes of pop culture indulgence and defend myself as less criminal than the real criminals. Sure, I may have read a few Iron Man comic books in my day, but I’m not like those cosplayers on parade in San Diego. I’m not wearing a helmet!
This is partly my knee-jerk resistance to conformity in play. While the herd gobbles up every manufactured craze, from Pacman to pickleball, I have nursed a lifelong allergy to mainstream tastes. For one thing, I am rightly terrified of the viral infection known as fandom, particularly the geekish strain. I’ve watched as others dabbled in a healthy nostalgia for Mego action figures, for example, only to succumb to deep levels of nerdish radicalization. Soon, they’re yammering endlessly about fist-fighter body variations and butterfly peg holes, spending the kid’s tuition money on Logan’s Run prototypes, and waging You Tube flame wars with @megomatt227 over the validity of his Kresge-carded Dr. Zaius. Not that I would know anything about that stuff.
These nerd obsessives, hoarding their bagged and boarded hologram editions and Funko rarities in vinyl-sided bungalows, are no longer the dateless manbabies of the classic Trekkie era; now they run the world. Marvel has eaten Hollywood, bringing the who’s-stronger-Superman-or-the-Hulk philosophical conundrum from mom’s basement to the world stage. Sotheby’s has shifted their attention from hustling Lichtensteins to auctioning the comic book pages they copied. Today’s billionaire class eschews Chateau Cheval Blanc and Brâncușis in favor of rare Ghostbusters Twinkies and Star Wars lobby cards. Representative Robert Garcia of California was sworn into Congress on a copy of Superman #1, an act celebrated by American voters for reasons they don’t seem able to explain.
The more Nerdworld grows in magnitude, the more I have felt compelled to draw a line in the sandbox to distinguish myself from these other children. Yes, I spend a little time arguing about Jack Kirby’s inkers on Facebook. Yes, I still have my 1976 King Kong lunchbox and Dick Tracy soaky displayed on the shelf. Yes, I saw the Doctor Strange movie in 3-D. But I’m not like them. I dabble in select nostalgia for the Pez and Power Records of my Seventies boyhood, but you won’t see me rushing to the Marvel trough every time Big Daddy Diz turns on the hose. This is where my anti-establishment principles conflict with my fondness for Space Ghost: I do not want my childhood exploitation exploited. What disturbs me most in today’s kidult culture is the authoritarian bent in the fantasy prone. “We’re getting a new Supergirl movie,” they will squeal, as if Warner Media is a benevolent parent, bringing home the Fudgie the Whale from Carvel he promised for their birthday. They’ve all been such good little children, after all.
Well, maybe they can’t add up the fuzzy bunnies of corporate media enslavement, but I sure can. And I would savagely condemn these stunted, middle-aged toddlers, marching in lockstep with the Imperial Stormtroopers, were they not such disgustingly pleasant people. They really are, from my personal experience, good little children, gathering happily at their dork conventions in their Wonder Twins and Sailor Moon costumes, exuding all the woke positivity and communal love of dancefloor ravers on ecstasy. Who can stay mad at these real-life Super Friends?*
I can’t. And so my attempts herein to define my limited involvement with fan culture are a study in tolerance. Because, whereas true brotherly love may require a cult level of unified cosplay and catchphrases, tolerance might be the best we rebellious malcontents can hope for. In that respect, though the essays here may constitute judgmental shit-slingings, they are not without a measure of empathy. Boba Fett. I get it. He really is, at the end of the day, a pretty bitchin’ action figure.
Cool helmet.
-A.H.
*But I can warn you from my con-going experience that anyone dressed as the Joker or Harley Quinn will invariably act the part, and you would do well to avoid their painfully annoying antics. Make no mistake, many among the cosplaying comicscenti are working through some issues.
Not to mention, with the lascivious displays of hot-bod enticements parading in Aquaman and Scarlet Witch skimpies, there raises the disturbing phenomenon of having sexual desire for one’s own childhood nostalgia, a topic I will leave for more professional minds to ponder.
Dorkness Visible is available at Lulu.com. Ten dollars. What, you ain’t got ten lousy bucks?
https://www.lulu.com/shop/ashley-holt/dorkness-visible/paperback/product-ym8vkv.html?q=dorkness+visible&page=1&pageSize=4
(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)