Loathing at the Comic Book Shop

"Most offensive. Update. Ever."

Listen:

You all may sit in your ivory tower of not having played Dungeons and Dragons or not knowing the difference between a corps style and a pageantry style marching band and label all us nerds alike, but that is simply not true. There are layers of nerddom, dear readers, just as there are layers in a 7 Layer Burrito at Taco Bell. My level of nerddom is, while seemingly high to all of you, not that bad – probably only at about the cheese level in this particular analogy. However, my attempts to pursue my interests are frequently hampered by nerds at the deepest layer of nerddom, to the tune of the rice or beans, even.

I’m not a huge reader of comic books (sorry, graphic novels) but I have a passing, albeit shameful, interest in them in the same way that Republican Senator Larry Craig has a passing interest in anonymous airport dudes.* One graphic novel in particular that interests me is called The Walking Dead, which, according to Wikipedia, is an epic account of several people trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, which happens to be one of my primary interests. Hoping to find this book, I went to a local comic book shop near my apartment.

*Yes, it’s still funny, and it always will be.

As much as I try to be open minded, I’ll make no bones about the fact that I absolutely hate anime with every fiber of my being. No, I’m not just saying this because of anime’s propensity for schoolgirl tentacle rape porn – I understand that this trend is not wholly representative of the medium as it only affects some 95% of all anime. Also, I’m not saying this because of some sort of bias against animation in general - King of the Hill is one of my favorite shows in spite of their propensity for the words “narrow urethra.” Simply put, I hate every single element of anime equally. I hate the overblown emotions, I hate the huge eyes, I hate the rapid speech, I hate the gigantic drops of sweat, I hate the cute shrieks of glee or displeasure that the characters make – I hate every single aspect of the medium, and yes, I have sat down and watched a few episodes of anime shows that my friends tell me are “the best.” Basically, my hatred for anime is roughly equal to my hatred of Southern California, El Paso, Sarah Palin, Sex and the City, and the “University” of Washington.

So anyway, my day took a real turn for the worse when I walked into the comic book shop to see massive anime posters adorning the walls and a video of some anime show poisoning a perfectly good television perched on top of one of the bookcases. Out of the entire inventory in this shop, I’d say about 50% of it was anime. This was a jarring start to my search, but, unwilling to have walked two blocks in vain, I pressed on.

I entered the shop as one would enter a public restroom near Larry Craig’s office – carefully. I tried to keep my eyes off of the anime, but there was no clear divide in the store between the anime shelves and the shelves that stocked things that don’t make me grind my teeth. No matter where I looked there was at least one cheery-faced, sword-wielding vixen whose eyes were only dwarfed by her breasts. This was problematic for me because I feared that at any point someone could snap a picture of me looking in the general direction of anime and then label it “Truman looking at anime,” which would be a PR disaster of Larry Craig proportions.

Eventually, I figured out that the honest-to-goodness graphic novels were stored on a shelf that, much to my chagrin, was pretty much directly under the TV displaying the anime show. I would have loved to have walked over and examined the entire shelf, but I couldn’t as an overweight male individual had pulled up a chair right to the edge of the shelf and was sitting there reading one of the graphic novels, page by page, his considerable girth completely blocking access to the shelf for all other customers. No, it wasn’t enough that this guy refused to dip into his Pocky fund to actually buy the book he seemed so interested in, he made a point of freeloading in such a way that nobody else could freeload either. I feel like that level of disregard for one’s surroundings ought to be punished by sterilization or something, but then again, from the look of the guy I got the idea that we wouldn’t have to worry about his continued presence in the gene pool anyway.

The two other customers in the store weren’t doing much better – one of them, standing in front of a rack of comic books, was softly singing the theme song to some TV show and was quick to mutter “Hello” to me every time I walked past him. The other, another overweight fellow in an overcoat and bowler hat, was engaging the guy behind the counter in a long and, forgive my pun, ‘animated’ discussion about manga comics that rendered him unable to answer my question about the location of the graphic novel that I’d shown up for in the first place.

At this point, I may have alienated a good deal of my readership (many of whom have a distinctive history of marching band and science fiction enthusiasm) and would like to pull back and remind everyone that I’ve spent many a Sunday afternoon in my best friend’s living room in the company of character sheets and dice, and that I own a T-shirt identifying me as a member of a fictitious rebel science fiction army. I’m not trying to judge the other people in the store based on the fact that they weigh more than I do or even because they have a somewhat more enthusiastic opinion toward anime.

What I am trying to say is that if we nerds ever want to shed our stereotype as socially awkward and unhygienic, well, maybe it would do if some of us started getting a little less socially awkward and unhygienic. I doubt that Christians feel embarrassed when they go to Christian bookstores, nor do NRA members feel embarrassed when they visit gun shops. So why is it that when I go to a comic book shop, which sells some products I have a passing interest in, that I feel like I have to look over my shoulder all the time in case somebody cool sees me hanging out with TV Theme Singer or Captain Mooching Obstruction? I mean, I feel more self-conscious than Larry Craig when he goes to adult shops to buy gay porn.

In the end, afraid that prolonged exposure to the comic book shop would drive me to grab a chair of my own or start singing TV themes, I left and went to the bookstore next door, in search of a more socially acceptable form of literature to spend money on.

It was there that I spent a very pleasant afternoon among the countless thousands of paperback science fiction novels they had on sale.

While Truman Capps’ stance against anime is similar to Larry Craig’s stance against gay people, Truman would like to assure you that he doesn’t solicit anime in public restrooms.