The Eltingville Club and the early nerd internet

There is a lot of hate and spite raging on the surface in Evan Dorkin's Eltingville comics, and that's what makes them so fucking funny, because they are getting so worked up about the dumbest shit in the world. But they can also be extraordinarily sad comics sometimes, especially when you see the spark of love for pop culture that curdled for these poor little bastards. 

There's a page, just after the club has properly broken up for good, when you see them set up the whole thing. And they just want to talk about the cool stuff they like, and about how much fun it is to talk with somebody - anybody- about role playing games and comics and horror movies and all that wonderful nonsense.

Every time I see that page, it weirdly remind me of the earliest days when I went online, in the mid-90s, and there was so much enthusiasm and glee about geek stuff. Just sheer unbridled passion for all the nerd stuff, and actual happiness that there are others who you can talk to about it. 

It very quickly became poisoned, even by the time the first message boards started to become a thing, the snark had set in permanently. It would be nice to think that after three decades we were over this shit, but it keeps coming back in the form of fuckwits like those Comicsgate clowns.

Of course it has always been there, plenty of comics mags in the 70s and 80s were full of shit-talking, with loads of arguments about things that literally nobody cares about anymore. And all those early rec.arts things were full of toxic behaviour.

But for a second there, the internet felt like a place which somebody could say what their favourite episode of the original Battlestar Galactica was, and didn't need to defend that opinion to the death. It was nice while it lasted, before it all got too Eltingville.