New Nexus Graphica, Comic con coverage: If the Geeks Have Won, How Come I don't Feel Better?

[villager]

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Though perhaps this is where the two decades of Comic Con going finally got to me. Walking in, again on preview night, one of the first things I spotted was Alex Ross' "Super Obama" t-shirt from last year, with our now-Pres ripping off his business shirt to reveal a superhero-y, I-hail-from-Krypton-like "O" underneath.

I wrote about that shirt last year, and how one could sense the palpable sense of, well, hope and tentative optimism in the air, in those weeks before the election.

Now, of course, Obama's won -- himself the occasional reader of comics. And if you'd told me, back when I was first con-going in the 70s & 80s, that when geek/comics/comix/sf culture went mainstream -- when they -- we -- "took over" mainstream culture, and the production appariti of Hollywood, and when a geek-sympatico President sat in the Oval Office at the same time, well, I woulda thought: What a mellow place America's gonna be! Full of interesting conversations, yet kind of like a big Ren Faire!

On the same weekend of the Con, the President, for all his putative "super powers," was busy being backstabbed by conservative members of his own party on the issue of health care reform, the notion of impeding insurance company profits apparently being another thing "off the table" in D.C. And of course, the biosphere was still cracking up, from a drought/weather perspective, with no one in power anywhere -- in spite of the triumph of formerly "fringe" culture -- with the vision to profoundly, fundamentally change things.

Whether it's change we can believe in, or not.

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