Eisner-winning sarcastically acid-tongued cartoonist Evan Dorkin serves up your favorite hobby: absolutely skewered.
Written and illustrated by Evan Dorkin
Colors by Sarah DyerAfter twenty years, three Eisner Awards, and a smattering of hate mail, the Eltingville Comic Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Role-Playing Club is finally breaking up. When Bill’s dream job in a comic shop turns into a nightmare for the club, more than bridges and membership cards are burned in a fiery, fan-tastic finale!
Let’s make one thing absolutely clear: Evan Dorkin loves comic books. He loves comics so much that they’re an inseparable part of his human character. If you follow him on Twitter, there are certain days where you might think comics were his cruel master, unable to grant him his release. “The Eltingville Club” is an extension of the conflict between a genuine affection for the medium and all of the frustrated focus on minutia, sexism, and elitism that it has the capacity to breed.
You see, Bill Dickey finally nabbed his “dream job” – working at the local comic book dungeon. “Joe’s Fantasy World” is an amalgam of literally every bad thing you’ve ever heard about a comic book shop that results in their sometimes deserved images as impenetrable, unwelcoming places for fringe hobbyists to gather. Bill, being a charter member of the titular Eltingville Club, is one of the aforementioned fringe. His club is dedicated in spirit to the enjoyment and fun of a hobby in fantasy, science fiction, and pulp – for lack of a better work, geek culture. Naturally, this would be the sort of place that Bill would gravitate to and want to live in. But though that was the “spirit” of the club was fanhood, the practice resembles more of the sort of frustrated angst, cynicism, and displeasure that you can find Marvel Executive Editor/Vice President of Publishing Tom Breevoort absorb daily on his Formspring. These are militant comic buffs who trade off on comic book references and minutia, arguing about and calling each other names over movies that they despise yet can’t seem to stop discussing. These will turn out to be some of the more sympathetic characters in this issue.
Dorkin’s laser-like focus on exposing everything repellant about the hobby exists mostly through the influence of one character: Joe, the owner of the shop. Whether it’s through the general dinginess of the shop, his highly exclusionary tactics, or his self-interested motivation for acquiring and owning the shop itself – Joe is an unsympathetic look at everything that horrifies interested, but uninitiated shoppers. For a moment, Dorkin comes close to finding a warm spot in Joe’s history as a comic fan, until he brilliantly pulls the rug out from under that. No, Dorkin never stops the barrage of satire for a minute. Satire actually feels like entirely the wrong word. “The Eltingville Club” blows right past “satire” and straight into venomous, attacking material. I mean that as a huge compliment. For some, “The Eltingville Club” will hit uncomfortably close to home to an experience that they might have had – maybe one they’ve even participated in. Dorkin hits his mark. It should be uncomfortable.
Though Joe fancies himself the king, he’s depicted as the king of a sad lot. Anyone who will still give him the time of day and their business must have character flaws of their own. His regular customers all receive special places in his “slam book” detailing their worst, most idiosyncratic tendencies. But it isn’t until a young woman comes into the shop looking for the “Saga” that “The Eltingville Club” #1 becomes truly frightening in its acuity. I don’t know when Evan Dorkin dreamt up the plot for this issue in relation to real world events. I don’t have to know when. This sort of thing is certainly more common than even the socially aware hobbyists probably realize. The fact is that just last week the comics internet was discussing the issues that female readers/writers/creators/fans like Noelle Stevenson or Janelle Asselin have personally faced. (Our own David Harper wrote about it here, if I can get a plug in.) Dorkin doesn’t just bring this stuff out into the light as much as sets it all on fire. I hope it gets a reaction, because this behavior is very real in our community.
Continued belowDorkin’s cartooning is the key element in bridging his affection for the art form with his venomous inspection of it. He brilliantly opens on a full-page spread of Bill mimicking a famous Benjamin ‘The Thing’ Grimm pose from “Fantastic Four” #51 – the bold letters above his head announce: “This Fan…This Monster!” Jack Kirby drew that famous page in 1966. As Dorkin calls upon it, he creates a temporal link from the past to present: What have we become since then?
Or maybe he’s just making a clever reference. After all, his script features about a dozen geek references on every page, and twice as many packed within every nook and cranny of the visual presentation. Dorkin lampoons the sex-obsessed fantasy predilections of a certain type of comic enthusiast with numerous porn puns scattered into the art, as well as visual nods to just about every important piece of Marvel and DC iconography you can think of. The sheer scope and accuracy of these references lends legitimacy to the world and a wink to comic fans who have moved in and around these circles. It welcomes you in to a world that you are wholly familiar with, even while it’s tearing it down. His alt-comix approach to cartooning has always screamed satire and looks like the visual embodiment of his funny, frustrated persona. He even gets a few digs in at “Indie Comics”, which without a doubt is a mix of self-deprecation, and a stitch of frustration at the limited popularity of such books.
“The Eltingville Club” feels like a huge spotlight thrown on the hobby in a time where hot-button social issues seem to hit comic book social media at a weekly clip. As relentless as Dorkin is, an alarming amount of it rings true. Aside from getting the typically detailed and evocative humor cartooning that you expect from an Evan Dorking comic, you get something that should feel like it hits us all extremely close to where we live. This is one of the sharpest, harshest, most honest things you’ll read all year.
Final Verdict: 9.0 – Buy, if you’re self-aware enough.
