by Gib van Ert
Marvel Star Wars comics were perhaps the only aspect of the Star Wars phenomenon that had not reached me by the time Jedi was released. I was too young for comic books in 1977, Star Wars or otherwise. It was not until late 1984 that I discovered Marvel Star Wars and comic books in general. I was milling about the 7-Eleven, killing time as I waited for my mother to finish work at the Base. I blithely spun the store’s three-sided, wire comic book rack, not looking for anything in particular. And there was Marvel Star Wars number 90, “THE CHOICE!” The asking price was 60 cents US, 75 cents Canadian, 30 pence UK. The titular choice was Princess Leia’s: don a gown and tackle matters of state with the likes of Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar, or don a flight suit and blaster to gallivant around the universe brandishing arms with her brother Luke and lover Han? This sartorial dilemma did not much move me, but there was precious little Star Wars about anymore. I took what I could get. At a cost of three rounds of Atari Star Wars, I bought the book. As with any first-time comic book reading experience, I found the story somewhat bewildering. It assumed I had read the previous issue, and a few more previous to that, which I had not. It assumed I was familiar with characters not found in the movies, which I was not. But it was sufficiently entertaining that I bought the next issue, “Wookie World”, in which Han and Chewbacca travel to the Wookie homeworld “Kazhyyyk” (as Marvel spelled it) and Chewie’s son Lumpy, of Holiday Special infamy, makes another appearance.
Only days after buying this issue, I was wandering up Martin Street one afternoon when I came across something I had never seen before. In a narrow storefront retail space connected from the inside to the Penticton Inn hotel was a shop displaying comic books in the window. I went in. The shop was dark, small and silent. There was no one there but a tall, red-haired, red-moustachioed, slightly-pudgy-around-the-middle, thirty-something man seated behind a glass display-case to my left. To my right was a wall of shelves displaying nothing but comic books. Straight ahead was a simple, wooden, rectangular case, about chest-high on me, full of more comic books, these ones sorted alphabetically and individually stored in clear plastic bags. I had never seen, or even heard of, anything like this place, and I was not entirely sure what it was.
“Hello,” said the man behind the counter with mild sarcasm intended more to break my slack-jawed silence than to welcome me.
“Is this a…comic book shop?” I stammered, ignoring his greeting. He confirmed that it was. I told him that I had never seen one before, which must have been obvious. He replied that there was one in Kelowna. He might as well have said Kampala; other than visits to Dallas, I had hardly ever left town. I asked him if he had Star Wars, although I had no intention of buying as I had just picked up what I believed to be the latest issue from 7-Eleven. He directed me to the S section of the shelves to my right. And there was Marvel Star Wars number 92, “The Dream”, a special double-sized issue featuring gorgeous cover art by Cynthia Martin and Bill Sienkiewicz. 7-Eleven didn’t even have this yet. I was amazed. I grabbed it, spun around, advanced three paces and presented the book at the counter to pay. The man rang me through an outmoded, yellowed till and said, “You know I’m not actually open yet”.
This was Bob, and that was Bob’s Comics. I was Bob’s first customer. For the next six years, until I graduated from high school and left town, Bob was a central figure in my life. When Bob and I met, I had all the prerequisites of a consummate nerd: I was a bright, self-conscious, uncoordinated, bookishly-inclined eleven year old boy with an unshakeable interest in three movies which, taken together, I had probably seen fifty times. But I was not a nerd yet. To reach true nerdiness, to attain Nerdvana, I needed Bob.
It was not the mere reading of comic books that made a boy a nerd. Nor was Star-Wars-mania enough—it had been, after all, nearly universal amongst the boys of my age until about 1984, and was common enough amongst the girls, too. The difference between me pre-Bob and the existential status of nerdiness I attained through Bob was an obsession with trivial and (in many cases) wholly imaginary details about subjects which ordinary people either ignored entirely or regarded as inconsequential diversions. A typical book enthusiast will read Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings novels and take great pleasure in them, perhaps even re-reading them several times. A nerd will read the books, commit to memory as much detail about the characters, the story, the settings and the action as the author himself provided, amplify this detail with his own speculations and fantasies, then regale his listeners with this minutiae at every opportunity as if it were actual knowledge of something useful. The mastery of insignificant or even purely fabricated information, the achievement of professorial erudition about things that do not in fact exist or, if they do exist, barely matter, is the true hallmark of a nerd.
Bob’s Comics was a standing invitation to the children of Penticton to become nerds. I accepted—although not by becoming a devotee of the Marvel or DC universes, like most of the teenage and quasi-adult nerds I got to know through Bob. My nerdiness took a related, but somewhat milder form. I was not obsessed with the fantasy worlds related in comic books; my interest in the stories was real but moderate. Instead, I became infatuated with the burgeoning world of comic book collecting. Before Bob, I read one comic book for entertainment. After Bob, I hoarded hundreds of comic books out of infatuation, cupidity and speculation. Bob ushered me (and cashiered me) into a world of Mylar sleeves, acid-free backing boards, Overstreet price guides, comic book grading schemes and speculative trading. Marvel Star Wars was the gateway. When I first entered Bob’s Comics I only wanted the latest issue, but once I discovered the possibility of buying back issues I had to have the entire run. Next I had to have the entire run in mint or near-mint condition. After that I began collecting other comic book titles, less out of interest in the stories themselves as the narcissism of collecting for its own sake. When, in the summer of 1986, Marvel abruptly cancelled Star Wars only a few months after cutting the book back to bi-monthly publication in response to falling sales, I was disappointed. But by then I was a nerd. I kept collecting comics.
*
I picked up another prototypically nerdy pastime at about this time. My mother had a work associate of some kind whose son Dean was no more than two years older than me but seemed to me to be practically a grown man. It was the difference between pre-pubescence and full-on puberty—he talked dirty, read dirty books when he could find them, was at least a head taller than me, and lacked the doe-eyed innocence that still marked me as a child. Dean’s mother was a single mum with little money (as my own mother was soon to become) and their home bore similarities to our motel house: it was cheap, run down, near the beach (Skaha Beach—the southernmost of Penticton’s two glorious beaches), and formed part of a slightly seedy housing complex. Dean had friends in the complex who, like him, were older than me and, like the surroundings, were a bit shabby. They all had acne in varying degrees of horribleness, and a few had thin man-boy moustaches which their parents allowed them to cultivate when any aesthetically sensitive mother or father would have insisted on immediate removal. All these boys were keenly interested in sex, violence and other forms of luridness. One of them shocked me soon after we met with a large, well-drawn pencil sketch of the comic strip character Garfield the Cat sporting an enormous erection. These boys, none of whose names I remember apart from Dean, were wholly unlike Nathan Barlow or any of the other boys I had ever known. They were crude, racy, low and nasty. I thought they were great. And it was through them that I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons.
Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons have some striking similarities. They are near-perfect contemporaries: in the early 1970s, as George Lucas was dreaming up the plot to his space fantasy film in California, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax were writing the rules for their mediaeval fantasy game in Wisconsin. Both phenomena were met with near-fatal scepticism from existing outlets: Lucas repeatedly failed to interest studios in a film they did not understand, while Gygax and Arneson ultimately resorted to self-pub
lishing a game traditional publishers rejected because there appeared to be no way to win it. Despite these initial set-backs, both Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons quickly became massively successful and near-universally known, even amongst people who took no interest in them. The success of both creations depended in large part on their ability to captivate people’s imaginations and persuade their audiences to believe in implausible, even faintly ridiculous fantasy worlds.
The clear leader of Dean’s gang of pubescent lowlifes was the Garfield pornographer—a short, chunky, hairy, Varigray-bespectacled bugbear of a boy who, naturally, discharged the duties of Dungeon Master. All the rulebooks, modules, dice, painted lead figurines and other paraphernalia we needed to play the game belonged to him, although he did not pay much attention to any of it. Instead of memorizing and fussing over the rules, as most nerds did, Garfield concerned himself only with the roleplaying element of the game—the creation of fantastic worlds and adventures for his players. Playing Dungeons and Dragons with Garfield was like interviewing a schizophrenic. He loved voices, which he performed with deranged zeal. He loved characters and drama, but knew to temper these aspects of the game with an appreciation of his audience, meaning four or five 13- to 15-year-old boys who would quickly lose patience with an overly drawn out or subtle story. Garfield was an excellent Dungeon Master because he was a natural performer. The game gave him a stage.
I spent much of that summer playing D&D with Dean and his gang. It was a terrific introduction to the most important part of the game, namely the roleplaying. But it was a lousy introduction to the rules. Being a novice player who did not own any of the rulebooks, I was mostly ignorant of how the game was supposed to work. I just rolled dice when I was told to. But I was taken with Dungeons and Dragons. Later that year my mother took my sister and me with her on a business trip to the States where I stumbled across a toy store that sold D&D books. I begged mum for the US$12 needed to buy a copy of the Players Handbook. For the next two months I spent every spare waking moment poring over it. Garfield had simplified things, even got things wildly wrong. Just because you’re a sixth level magic user didn’t mean you could cast sixth level spells! And so on. I was grateful to Garfield for introducing me to the game, but now I wanted to play it right.
Perhaps the greater revelation I took from the Players Handbook was Gary Gygax’s writing. Looking back now, his prose frequently strikes me as overwrought, pretentious, even silly. But I cannot hold it against him because at thirteen years old I loved it. I had never read anything like it. Where else could I have found passages like, “Loyalty Base simply shows the subtraction from or addition to the henchman’s and other servitors’ loyalty (q.v.) scores”, or “The Astral Plane radiates from the Prime Material to a non-space where endless vortices spiral to the parallel Prime Material Planes and to the Outer Planes as well”? Often I had to read and re-read, and sometimes I still did not understand. But I was not deterred. Gygax’s writing style conveyed a sense of initiation into mystery that perfectly matched what I imagined Dungeons and Dragons to be—a sort of secret society of erudite fantasists. Of course you had to work at it. And there was more to Gygax’s style than its not-infrequent florid passages, its self-seriousness, its patina of hackneyed historical and political insights. Gygax also wrote with conspicuous, infectious enthusiasm for his topic. “This game lets all of your fantasies come true”, he proclaimed. “This is a world where monsters, dragons, good and evil high priests, fierce demons, and even the gods themselves may enter your character’s life. Enjoy, for this game is what dreams are made of!!” Wonderful.
Finally, after some nine years of single-minded devotion to one pastime, I was developing new interests: comic books and Dungeons and Dragons. These were not particularly constructive or socially commendable hobbies. My interest in them certainly did not improve my fitness or contribute to my community in any fashion, though I am convinced that D&D broadened my mind in lasting ways. But whether these nerdy pursuits were good or bad when measured on their own, there was at least one positive thing to be said for them: they were not Star Wars. I was, at last, moving on.
*
In September 1986, aged thirteen, I began grade eight at Penticton Senior Secondary School, known to all as Pen Hi. My entrance into adolescence was complete: I was officially a teenager. That the decline, indeed the near disappearance, of Star Wars as a pop culture phenomenon coincided so perfectly with the onset of my adolescence was not, I think, coincidence. It was simple demographics: the mainstay of Star Wars’s fan base was evaporating. Every surviving three to five year old boy in the world who loved Star Wars in 1977 was now a teenager. All those little action-figure-fanciers and trading-card-collectors were now turning their attentions to teenage boy concerns: being cool, attracting girls and attracting girls.
(Some of these boys must have been interested in attracting other boys, not girls, but I never heard a word of it. This was the 1980s after all. A Pen Hi friend of mine who, years later, came out as gay told me that throughout high school he thought homosexuals were men who wore women’s clothing. My notion was more ridiculous still—I used to fear that maybe I was gay because I sometimes preferred to sit rather than stand when urinating.)
The defining film of teenage life in the mid-1980s was not, of course, Star Wars or its sequels. It was The Breakfast Club. That film’s easy stereotypes of adolescent forms—the jock, the nerd, the headbanger, the princess, the outcast—seemed to me to reflect reality, although in truth they probably shaped it. If the film’s message was that these socially-accepted constructions of adolescent existence were artificial, that message did not get through to the teenagers of Pen Hi. Instead, we all agreed, in an unspoken way, to try to fit ourselves into these categories. I was no athlete, and I did not smoke or drink or break things, so jock and headbanger were out. That left nerd and outcast. I probably would have preferred outcast, which at least had a bit of romance to it, but I was a rotten skateboarder. Meanwhile my grades were good, I was an avid comic book collector, and Dungeons and Dragons was spurring me on to read books about history and mythology. Nerd it was.
Bob wanted to attend a comic book convention in Penticton. The difficulty was that there were no comic book conventions in Penticton. Bob’s solution was that I should organize one. Somehow he talked me into it, and before long I found myself in the lobby of the Sandman Hotel asking the receptionist how to book a conference room. I drew posters by hand, made copies on the photocopier at my mother’s office, and hung them around town. Bob spread the word to comic shop owners and private collectors he knew in the surrounding towns, and before long I was selling tables and collecting admission ($1) at the door. I made a little money and thought it was pretty neat. More importantly, I met Scott Barillaro. He stopped me in the hallway outside Pen Hi’s library about a week or so before the event. “You’re the guy running the convention, right?” Right. “Bob told me about you. You play D&D?”
That was all it took. Scott no doubt saw in me what I saw in him: a fellow nerd. I was mildly taken aback, in the three or four interactions that followed this brief encounter, by how Scott seemed to regard me as a firm friend, or at least a dependable ally, when we barely knew each other. But Scott was right. There was no foreplay in this relationship; our nerd-love was consummated in the time it took to cast a Fireball spell: three segments. Twenty-two years later he had my fiancée’s wedding band in his pocket as I tied my necktie, fastened my cufflinks and otherwise prepared myself to walk down an improvised aisle in an Okanagan orchard and take marriage vows. All because Bob was too lazy, or too clever, to organize his own comic book convention.
Scott and I made our way through high school together. The things that first attracted us to each other, comic books and Dungeons and Dragons, occupied a lot of our time. There were dozens of Friday and Saturday nights spent playing D&D from 5 p.m. until 2 in the morning or later: me, Scott, Sissy Bobo, and one or two others sitting around the dining room table at our house rol
ling dice and making believe until one of us—nearly always me—fell asleep. When, in 1987, West End Games published Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, I immediately instructed Bob to order a copy of every book, supplement and boxed miniatures set the company made. (Bob had added roleplaying games to his shop, at my urging, not long before. He knew nothing about them.) Scott, Sissy and I all liked the game and played it often. It was well-designed, its lead miniatures were strangely small but very attractive, and the Star Wars story readily lent itself to tabletop roleplaying. But this was the only bit of Star Wars that regularly impinged upon my consciousness in the late 1980s. Literally and figuratively, I had put the rest of it away.
As Scott and I got older, our friendship expanded into areas outside the nerdosphere: our schoolwork, troubles with our parents (mine had finally divorced, his were heading that way), plans for the future, and girls. Against all odds, we both found ourselves with fairly serious girlfriends by age seventeen. We were crazy about them, but finding time for all-night roleplaying sessions became increasingly difficult when confronted with our girlfriends’ expectations and, more to the point, our own libidos. The problem went beyond scheduling, for me at least. I started to feel self-conscious about my nerdy pastimes. I do not remember my girlfriend, Emma, ever expressly discouraging them. But she was a brilliant, very serious-minded girl whose own spare time was spent obtaining her grade ten piano certificate from the Royal Conservatory of Music, playing bassoon in the local orchestra, and visiting the campuses of famous universities. I assumed that she must disapprove of my comic book collecting and my all-night cheese-puff-and-root-beer-fuelled giant-slaying sessions with Scott and Sissy. I still liked these things, but I also liked her and wanted her to like me. So I played down my geeky side and played up my quite genuine interest in the things she exposed me to: the high school debating club, literature, and choosing a university. (Scott never felt any such diffidence. His girlfriend knew very well what a geek he was. What kept Scott away from D&D at my house on Friday nights was that, unlike me, he was actually getting laid.)
