Aside from my glasses and an occasional Thor T-shirt, my nerd markers aren’t too visible most of the time.
I may look bookish, but I’m tall and on the stocky-athletic side.
And out in the world, I don’t talk much nerd stuff unless someone engages me.
But at home, there’s no mistaking my geek chic.
It’s all over the walls. We’ve got superheroes in comic book and pop art styles when you walk in the door. A gaggle of pin-up drawings and photos, including a framed collection of 1940s billing slips from hardware manufacturers with pin-up girls painted on them. Kids in the Hall and Conan O’Brien tour posters are up, and the fiancee has ones from This American Life and the Mütter Museum – an old medical college in Philadelphia housing a giant collection of medical curiosities, aka freaks – to be framed and hung.
I wish I could tell you this is a new way of life for me, but it ain’t. It all began at age 10, when I discovered the neighborhood comic book store.
As a young nerd, there was no better way to get nerd art than to be friends with the someone who runs a comic book store. I’d get to take home promo art and posters for comics and movies once it was time for them to be thrown out. (I’m sure FOG! EIC Stefan Blitz indulged me in this way once or twice, in our past chapters.) And I covered every inch of my bedroom walls with these posters; Superman trading cards lived next to Batman Forever and Batman Returns, Tank Girl palled around with Death (oh, Sandman …!) and Starman flew with Wonder Woman.
My bedroom looked like four-color vomit.
My top prize was a Catwoman promo door poster, which I later got signed by artist Jim Balent and writer Jo Duffy.
One of my teachers even laminated it for me. Yeah, I was cool. (Side story: I met Balent when I wrote to him for a school paper about being a comic book artist. I thought he’d just send a nice letter, if anything at all, but instead he called my house and invited me to hang behind the table with him at a nearby convention. Also, he showed me this saucy drawing for breast cancer awareness. Yeah.)
And how the hell did I get a door-length Vampirella poster past my parents? In the mid-’90s she was porny at first glance, though I had the far more tasteful ’70s Jose Gonzalez poster rather than the porned-out Luis Small Jr., Michael Bair and Buzz stuff of the time. My mom still asked me, “Who’s the naked woman in the wall?” I told her who Vampi was, and the poster never came down. It’s rolled up in the basement now, signed in 1994 by Vampi model Cathy Christian. (Though Julie Strain or Sascha Knopf would have been more my cup of tea.)
I’ve kept many of these posters, but fewer of them go up over time.
The older I get, the more I think, “What use do I have for all this stuff?” I have quite a collection, and still pick up something here and there, but compare it to everything I’ve turned down, and I have nothing. The giant wall canvases from the ’89 Batman movie that I got 13 years ago? They’re still wrapped in plastic, and they probably never will be opened or see the light of day unless I eBay or Craigslist ’em.
These days, pop art is the way to go for geek chic: sleek enough to show off to non-believers but satisfying to the real crowd, such as this Shadow piece by Scott Derby, the Humanzee from Paul Swartz’s monster alphabet series, Dave Perillo illustrating freedom philosophers, or the graffiti-hero stuff by Joshua Luke Heckert.
But the crown jewel in our place was the fiancee’s idea: a custom portrait of us as zombies painted by Mike Esparza of Wonder Brothers, which she commissioned as a surprise (based on this photo by partner-in-geek Jillian Ferrell).
The fiancee likes zombies way more than I do, and I am not big on surprises, so she thought I didn’t like it since I didn’t plotz upon the sight of it. But dammit, I do like it! The painting now hangs in a silver frame in the foyer, next to a custom magic mirror by Karlatta Muffelatta that is outfitted in a genie’s lamp, dice, Buddha elephants and other magic-lucky items.
I’ve drawn a line on geek art in the living room, though, so it’s still bare-walled for now. Looking for something large and abstract, which might not lend itself to geeky. Well, maybe a Sol LeWitt landscape on one entire wall, or a pattern made out of photos of sleeping dogs. We’ll see.
But maybe you have some ideas. Geeks and nerds out in Internet-space: What’s on your walls?
