Better late then never. The Moderator contacted me some time ago to try out this nifty “Comic Fencing” format, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t ready to contribute until now. But beware, webcomic creators! El Santo is coming with his Shaolin shadowboxing and his Wu-Tang sword style to engage in a little comic fencing brouhaha.

Geeks Next Door is a humor strip featuring a two characters based on the comic’s creators, Jessi Bavolack and Matt Pascal. If the comic is accurate, the starry-eyed Jessi and Brillo-haired Matt are self-professed geeks, very much in love, and engaged. They also come across as incredibly pleasant and laid-back people, the kind I wouldn’t mind hanging out with if I ever came ran into them at a comic convention. My best wishes to them. Sympathies, too, since I know first hand that wedding preparations are a whole new Canto in Dante’s Inferno.

The comic follows the couple, their hare-brained roomie, and their friends on their everyday geek-ified adventures. While there are some soft jabs at self-deprecation, geeks are presented in what is intended as a mostly positive light. “Geekdom isn’t just about technology and stuff, right?” one of the characters says. “It’s a love for weird and fun things, the unconventional, the obscure!” Wait … seriously? Jessi and Matt spend a good amount of time harping happy they are that they’re not “normal.” Yet their primary obsessions are D&D, video games, comic books, and anime. That’s basically the Hot Topic sampler pack of geekdom. It’s hard to play the “unconventional” and “obscure” cards when they indulge in hobbies that garner more fans than, say, the NHL or Miss America pageants.

As you may expect, the geek lifestyle — which inherently requires you spend most of your waking life in a seated position — is not very engrossing material to dramatize in a webcomic. Geeks Next Door does nothing to dispel that notion. Have you ever exchanged jokes with a close friend/significant other that set you in huddled paroxysms of laughter, but when you try to recall the joke to someone else you realize that the joke dies uncomfortably to the point you squeak out, “Well, you had to be there”? The initial joke relies a lot on the intimate knowledge of the peculiar, one-of-a-kind hot buttons that make a person laugh or smile. It doesn’t necessarily translate to a broader audience. These personal in-jokes describe pretty much every joke in Geeks Next Door.

In one strip, for example, while engaged in a normal tête-à-tête, Matt suddenly morphs into a demon-like creature with pointy teeth and glowing eyes, declaring to everyone that he’s “Totally evil!” or something. Then he snaps back to normal. (Wacky!) This may seem absolutely charming and spontaneous to their close friends, and mainly his fiancée. To me, though, this sort of uncomfortable non sequitur is the reason the internet invented the phrase “purple monkey dishwasher.” That is, the harder your try to be random, the more your effort becomes painfully obvious and embarrassing.

In another failed gag (which I suspect was built upon a stray observation among friends, who then went off to giggle and snort and suggest that was indeed a great idea for a webcomic while pawing through a bowl of Tabasco-flavored Cheez-Its), the couple comes to the conclusion that drunken fratboys are ZOMBIES! (Wow! How zany!) For this joke to work, you have to buy in to the notion that the original concept is inherently funny. And trust me, speaking as a militant GDI through and through: it’s not. If you don’t find spastic nerds barricading themselves in their apartment like they were a throwaway gag rejected from ABC’s spectacularly tedious sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” then get ready to clutch your stomach because you’ll be groaning a lot as the flimsy joke gets stretched out to ten pages or so.

Now, there were a couple of things I did like about Geeks Next Door. A couple of times, the gags do work and feel fluid and natural, like when Dr. Doom inexplicably shows up as Matt’s conscience. Ms. Bavolack’s art is quite nice, too, with mad props going to her pleasing character designs and the trendy colored word balloons. A part of me appreciates, too, that for once geekdom is represented by a loving couple (even if they do get sickly saccharin at times) rather than yet another basement dwelling, sexually repressed misanthrope. To tell you truth, there are just too many webcomics out there already that espouse the gospel of all things geek. As in, most of them. It makes me want to assault the nearest nimrod, put him in a sleeper hold, and steal his lunch money. But, to be honest, that’s me on most days.

Rating:

Geeks Next Door
by Jessi Bavolack and Matt Pascal
http://www.geeksnextcomic.com/
review by Larry “El Santo” Cruz
(6 votes, average: 3.83 out of 5)

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