INTERVIEW & PREVIEW: Nostalgia rules in ‘Planet of the Nerds’

When a comic book has a title like Planet of the Nerds, there’s not much explanation needed. But here goes …

Nostalgia fans should rejoice because the newest comic from Ahoy Comics celebrates nerd culture and envisions a time when nerds take on jocks, all in good fun.

The dream team behind the title consists of writer Paul Constant, artist Alan Robinson, colorist Felipe Sobreiro and David Nakayama, responsible for the cover. Randy Elliott also worked on the project.

The time-travel story deal with three jocks from the 1980s who are cryogenically frozen and emerge in 2019, a time period ruled by nerds. Social commentary ensues.

Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Constant, co-founder of The Seattle Review of Books. He is a longtime alumnus of the book industry and has seen his work appear in a number of alternative weeklies and daily newspapers. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.

What do you love about the classic ‘nerd’ films of the 1980s?

I think maybe in retrospect what I love most about those movies is the scale of them. The universe doesn’t hang in the balance. The kids in movies like The Breakfast Club are worried about the kind of things that affect all of us in our day-to-day lives: our status, our happiness, our friends. 

There’s a universality to that struggle — it’s why people still read and obsess over Jane Austen’s novels. Ultimately, all of us want to be liked, and we don’t want to be harassed. And we want to carve out our own little piece of the world. I’ve never punched anyone in the face like Batman, but I have for sure spent a dismal weekend trying to figure out how to become more popular like the two nerds in Weird Science.

It’s just a very human scale, one where the details matter. That’s one of the reasons I was so thrilled that Alan Robinson joined me as the artist on Planet of the Nerds. Alan is more than just a great artist — he’s a brilliant actor. He gave each of the characters in Nerds their own interior life. Their facial expressions and body language are so subtle but so profound on the page that they’re instantly relatable. Even if you don’t agree with these characters, you’ll be able to understand where they’re coming from.

Did some of those early films serve as inspiration for Planet of the Nerds?

Oh, absolutely! Obviously, there are some similarities with Back to the Future. The direction of the time-travel and the method in which the main characters travel through time is different. Planet of the Nerds is about three jocks from 1988 who are accidentally frozen and thawed out in the modern day — but the amount of time that these three jocks travel is roughly the same span of time that Marty McFly traverses in Back to the Future.

And of course movies like Revenge of the Nerds were important in defining the nerd/jock divide of the 1980s, which we sort of turn on its head in this book. When they come to in modern times, our jocks are horrified to discover that everyone has a favorite superhero, computers are ubiquitous, and the richest men on the planet are nerds like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Nerds used to be the underdogs, but now they run the world.

And the book is packed with little homages to those 1980s movies. We’ve got raunchy sex comedy moments that feel like scenes from Porky’s, and we’ve got wild adventure set-pieces like in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and of course some wistful retrospective moments like in Peggy Sue Got Married. We’re praising those movies and also arguing with them and satirizing them throughout the series.

Because the characters time travel to 2019, were you able to offer commentary and some in-jokes about our current times?

Yeah, and that was a big part of the fun of writing Planet of the Nerds. While I was writing, I was looking at everyday life through the eyes of the three time-traveling jocks, and I was surprised by how much has changed over those three decades.

Obviously, cellphones have disrupted everything — try explaining land lines to a 10-year-old kid, and watch them gawk at you like you’re a Neanderthal — but to a time-traveler’s eyes, just about everything in America has changed. We get to watch our jocks respond to cultural shifts in law enforcement and politics and gender dynamics and so much more. 

‘Nerd’ culture has been well documented and kind of taken a 180 since the 1980s. Now so-called ‘nerds’ are cool and bring in big business at conventions, on TV and at the box office. Why do you think American culture has shifted so dramatically toward superheroes, video games and fantasy series like Game of Thrones?

Well, a lot of it, I think, has to do with the internet. When I was in high school in 1994, for instance, there were 1,200 students in the building, but maybe only 10 of us were really ardent comics fans. And if you didn’t happen to like the comics that those other comics fans liked, you were pretty much out of luck.

For instance, I loved fun superhero comics like Peter David’s run on The Incredible Hulk, but one of my best friends really liked grim and mean-spirited stuff like The Punisher. Even though we were both comics nerds, we had virtually nothing to talk about.

If I had access to the internet back then, I could’ve met literally tens of thousands of kids who were just like me around the world — kids with exactly my taste in comics. I wouldn’t have felt so alone, and that would’ve eliminated much of the stigma and shame of being a nerd that was prevalent back then.

It’s hard to explain to young nerds now how shameful and embarrassing it felt to be into nerdy stuff in the 1980s and 1990s. Even the adults who were OK with your reading comics would just assume that you’d grow out of it one day. But the visibility of the internet, and the ability to easily and enthusiastically geek out with thousands of other people who share your interests, kind of revealed the fact that we’re all nerds about something. The stigma went away, and the public embrace of nerdy material like Game of Thrones went mainstream.

Looking at your biography, one sees so many important literary accomplishments and thoughtful commentary. Is there a secret ‘nerd’ side as well? What are some of your cultural guilty pleasures?

Oh, not ‘secret’ at all! I learned how to read at age 3 on comic books, and I’ve been a huge comics fan ever since. I read it all — superheroes, sci-fi, romance, non-fiction. At the time, concerned adults assumed I’d grow out of comics and graduate to ‘real books,’ but the happy truth is that I didn’t have to choose. I can and do read both ‘serious literature’ and comics. I’m proof that it’s possible to love Jack Kirby and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the same time!

So I don’t really have guilty pleasures, but I guess there are cultural touchstones that people would be surprised to hear that I love, as a 42-year-old straight white guy. Musically, I’m a big fan of pop musicians like Kesha, Sia and Carly Rae Jepsen. I’m in movie theaters on opening night for a Fast and the Furious movie, or really anything starring Jason Statham. And I still go to the comics shop every Wednesday for new comic book day — some of my current favorites include Saga, Paper Girls, Man Eaters, Giant Days, Invisible Kingdom, LaGuardia, and anything that my fellow creators at AHOY Comics put out. 

But none of those are guilty pleasures — I like what I like, and I’m OK with that. My high school days are way behind me. Who has time for guilt? Not me!

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Planet of the Nerds is now available from Ahoy Comics. Click here for more information.