Martha Thomases: Where Are Our New Nerds?
In last Monday’s New York Times Media Watch columns, they ran a list of the ten films released this year that had the highest box office ion their opening weekends. What’s amazing to me is that the top five (Marvel’s The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Hunger Games, Amazing Spider-Man and Twilight: Breaking Dawn: Part 2) can all be classified in the fantasy genre, or, as I like to call it, nerd stuff.
Of the next five (Skyfall, Brave, Ted, Madagascar 3 and Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax), three are aimed primarily at children, and one is a James Bond film, which has its own separate but overlapping geek audience. Only Ted could be considered a movie aimed at what was once the wide, mainstream audience, and even then, because it is an R-rated comedy, that limits the wideness.
When did our beloved nerd culture become so dominant? I was certainly the only girl in my high school (which was all girls) who read superhero comics, and if anyone else read science fiction or fantasy, they were in the closet about it.
Even in the 1980s, when Frank Miller and Alan Moore and Art Spiegelman were publishing work that attracted mainstream media attention, there wasn’t much spillover to the medium of graphic storytelling.
When I first went to work for DC, the most common reaction I encountered when people learned what I did was, “Do they still publish those?”
For that matter, even today, the success of the movies listed above doesn’t do much for comics. There’s a history of tie-in films boosting the sale of books (for example, Gone With the Wind), but that doesn’t always overlap to your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, or comic book store.
Still, I don’t think fans like us can claim to be outsiders anymore. We might not be the cool kids, but we aren’t unwanted loners, either. What are today’s nerds about?
Is it Steampunk? Is it libertarian politics? Are there still obscure rock bands to follow, or has everything been American Idol’d to a bland pap. What distinguishes the kids getting beat up and/or ostracized today?
Besides being queer, I mean.
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman and This Week’s New DC
Now that Quantum of Solace is open, all eyes are turning to next week’s release of Twilight. Summit Entertainment has begun putting the pieces in motion to adapt the second of Stephenie Meyer’s novels, New Moon. No final decision will be made until the dollars hit the box office but the worldwide reaction is expected to be intense and profitable.
Even for an established and award winning television writer like Steven Moffat, taking command of a 45 year old universe is a little daunting. In the first part of our exclusive ComicMix interviews with the top BBC talents, he tells us his outlook for the future, plus:
or 
On 44th Street in New York City today, right down the street from where Daniel Radcliffe is shedding Harry Potter’s robes (literally) in Equus, 
is preparing to take over the mantle with her 
