Writer/Artist: Evan Dorkin Sometimes, you need to take a good, long look in the mirror.  Writer/artist Evan Dorkin is a master of grabbing that mirror and shoving it in your face, but also maybe helping you have a laugh after reflecting on how ugly you are.  And that's where The Eltingville Club comes in.  If your aspirations in life don't go beyond a) buying that one action figure from 1983 that you could never have; b) being a master of useless trivia; or c) criticizing other people's fun while never creating anything yourself, then this comic is the self-reflective catharsis that you need to have.

Dorkin’s The Eltingville Club is a series of comics about four…well, let’s be honest…nerds and geeks who hang out in comic shops and do very little beyond fan-things.  They collect comics, they debate fan trivia, and they pooh-pooh people who aren’t as wise as they are in the ways of pop culture and trivia.  The humor, of course, comes in their complete obliviousness to their sad existences: they only live and breathe pop culture while never making anything productive themselves.  We get a good laugh out of seeing two of the four grown men fighting over a rare Boba Fett doll, because while most of us would realize that there’s more important things in life than an old action figure, as pop culturists, there’s still a small part of us that’d like to join in that fight.  Dorkin is very talented at making a joke out of the worst parts of fandom while still reminding us that fandom is who we are.

The Eltingville Club has a spotty publication history over the last two decades, having appeared as a series of short strips in various comics.  It even made a valiant effort at becoming a series on Cartoon Network, though sadly, it wasn’t picked up as a regular series.  The show may have been about 10 years ahead of its time, given how geekdom has gone mainstream only recently.

Despite the fact that the strip goes back many years, and despite the fact that this book is the second of two issues (the first of which came out a year ago), The Eltingville Club is pleasantly accessible.  You don’t need to be up on Dorkin’s history of the four nerds.  You can pretty much walk into this story understanding that it’s about four guys who used to meet up to talk about comics, bumping into each other for the first time in 10 years at the San Diego Comic-Con.  If you enjoy the fandom of being a fan or consider yourself a part of convention culture

It also looks at the ugly question of what happens to young geeks who, after a decade, are still full-time geeks.  For most of us, fandom is a side aspect of our lives.  We have conventional jobs, we’ve settled down and have spouses and children.  We live for fandom, but it’s not the only thing we live for.  (I do have one friend who grew up a wrestling fan and now works for the WWE full time, the lucky bastard.)  Dorkin’s characters have grown into adults and do nothing except work in subsets of the pop culture industry with little aspiration (beyond that in their own minds) of moving into something better.  After ten years, only one of the characters has grown into something resembling adulthood and, much like Frodo Baggins after his quest to destroy the rings, he discovers that you can’t grow up and still fit in to where you came from.

Beyond the dark introspection, The Eltingville Club #2 is a humorous visual treat.  If you’ve ever been to a convention, you’ll delight in Dorkin’s full page spreads of elbow-to-elbow fans trying to squeeze into a con.  There’s plenty of Easter eggs in the various dialogue balloons in the convention scenes (you’ve probably heard many of them yourself) and the various cosplays that he’s squeezed into the page.  The pages are a little busy, particularly since Dorkin apparently likes to work in black-and-white rather than color, but it’s not so bad that you can’t adjust.  Dorkin impressively manages to squeeze a great deal of detail and dialogue into a traditional-sized comic page, something we don’t really see anymore.

With San Diego Comic Con having wrapped up, and the New York and Baltimore Comic Cons on the way, this is the right time of year for this comic to come out.  If your brain needs a break from DCYou and Secret Wars and you just want to have a laugh about fandom, The Eltingville Club is right for you.

Rating: Four and a half trips to your mom’s basement out of five.

The Eltingville Club #2 will be released on August 8, 2015.