Geekanerd Spotter: The Storm Troopers Rock Poster

Saw this in my new home base of San Francisco. August 19th? What a tease. And this band doesn't appear to exist on the internet. WHAT THE HELL. I know Star Wars took place in the past, but this is ridiculous. Clones need to get their shit together and post some MP3s.

If you didn't read the small print at the top, you're missing some brilliant stupid puns.

Obama With A Lightsaber

Jeez, Obama. Why are you such a nerd all the time? You're talking to Spider-Man, you give DVD Box sets to visiting world leaders, you're hanging out with John Hodgman....and now you're waving a lightsabre around on the White House lawn?!

For the first time in my life as an American, I truly believe one day I could be President.

Boring Context: Chicago wants to host the 2016 Olympic Games, so Chi-Guy Obama did some photo ops with a few Olympians, including some fencers. But where did he get a lightsaber? Did some Olympic PR intern bring it along for LOLs, or does Obama carry one at all times for his own personal protection? I need an answer.

More Anakin Skywaker Redux

Hey! Regular readers may be wondering where we've been...well, occasionally real life intrudes on one's commitment to fandom, but things are settling back down and we should be back to a regular posting schedule by next week.

Anakin Skywalker: The Fan Dub

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a fevered analysis on the shared and disperate qualties of Luke and Anakin Skywalker. The conclusion was Anakin is a horrible, horrible person but also a victim of circumstance, because his formative years were a trauma-inducing roller coaster of highs, lows, and constant dehumanization.

This Star Wars Flash Drive Just Blew My Mind

As noted previously, Geekanerd occasionally gets mail from the good folks at Mimobot, purveyors of adorably anthropomorphic flash drives and occasional gross misinformation. But their latest ad email utterly blew this Star Wars fan's mind, without even trying.


Take a quick glance at the new Mimobot in the center of this picture. Why, it's that evil jerk Anakin Skywalker, looking all mean and angry like he always does. Kid killer. He's clearly just been placed in his full body prison, the technological terror that is the Darth Vader armor. Neat.

But things are not always as they seem. Learn the eye opening truth about this figure, after the jump...


That's not the father, but the son! The jagged remains of the faceplate tip the savvy viewer that this is not in fact Anakin, but Luke's horrible vision in the Dagobah Mystery Cave. What threw me was the evil smirk - that's like the Anti-Luke face! I don't think Luke is even capable of making that expression.

The fact that I mistook Luke's little cartoon face for Anakin's really got me thinking about how scene at the Dagobah cave fits into the Star Wars saga, now that we've got the Prequels. If watch Empire without the Prequels, this scene comes off as a pretty typical "you will become what you fear most" sort of dream. However, if you watch the series from I to VI (and like it or not, that is how future generations will watch these films), the Cave dream takes on a new sense of dread and horror. With the events of the prequels in mind, there is no mystery about Luke's parentage by the time you get to Empire. So while we lose the "I AM YOUR FATHER" jawdropper, we gain a terrible ocean of dramatic irony. When we see Luke's face in the Vader mask, he may not understand the symbolism, but the audience certainly does. Luke is approximately the same age as Anakin was when he was turned, and the visual of Luke's face in the Vader mask now directly recalls the "earlier" visual of Anakin being sealed inside. These are the real stakes of the film; the possibility of two Evil Skywalkers running around the galaxy, being just awful.

But how similar ARE Luke and Anakin? Their personalities are very different, but much of that can be chalked up to nurture; Luke spent his entire life on remote farm with a caring family and Anakin spent the first half his life as a slave and the second half as a fanatically revered demigod. When you take this into account, Anakin's personality really isn't so bad. The only thing he and Luke really share is an easily confusable one-track mind, and it's this quality that played a big part in Anakin's fall. In the earlier scenes on Dagobah, we've seen that it's Luke's short-sightedness that's holding back his Jedi training, so the Cave dream is especially urgent. While Anakin was never a particularly likable character, Luke is thoroughly decent and kind, and prospect of his fall to the Dark Side is a lot more upsetting than Anakin's.

So yeah, flash drives! The Vader Unmasked Luke Variant is only available at this year's Comic Con, so if you're unlike us and have a ticket, stop by the Mimobot booth to see it with your own eyes.

Photos: MoCCA 2009 Star-Studded Explosion!

The calm before the storm...the first day of MoCCA 2009 got off to a late start, so I got to snap a picture of the floor mostly free of attendees. Since MoCCA's usual space caught on fire last year, this year's Art Festival took place at the Regiment Armory in Murray Hill, a gigantic high ceiling auditorium space that made the show feel less like a small press fair, and more like a major convention.

That's not to say there weren't plenty of indie creators and publishers at the show, but I was particularly struck by how many big name creators were there as well. It seems MoCCA has continued to gain traction as a place where indie creators come to be discovered as well as a way for more major presses to promote their new, more artsy releases.

Comic stars, fresh talent, awesome sketches, and neat tablecloths, after the jump...


PART 1: Big Names

Adrian Tomine signing at the The Drawn & Quarterly booth. Growing up in Berkeley, I was a fan of local sensation Tomine since I was a teenager, and Shortcomings was my favorite book of 2007. He was taking meticulous care in his autograph dedications, it was awesome just to watch him do the lettering!


Seth, creator of Palookaville, was looking very dapper during his Drawn and Quarterly signing.

Writer Joe Kelly and artist Rodney Ramos were giving away and signing copies of Bang! Tango at the Vertigo booth. I mentioned that I loved the Free Comic Book Day edition of Four Eyes, another of Kelly's books, and he pulled out the second issue and gave me an autographed copy of that as well. Sweetness.

Brian Wood with DMZ aplenty at the Vertigo Booth.

David Mack had Kabuki titles and original art for sale, as well as his recent kids book, The Shy Creatures.

I am of course a huge fan of the Act-i-Vate gang, represented at their booth by Molly Crabapple and Dean Haspiel.

Becky Cloonan was selling advance copies of Pixu (review coming soon!) and promoting her webcomic KGB with co-author/artist Hwan Cho.

Evan Dorkin was promoting Beast of Burden, his upcoming book with Jill Thompson.

Tara McPherson was signing her illustration work as well as her awesome line of Kid Robot toys.

Action Philosphers artist Ryan Dunlavey was just about dwarfed by his booth's immense signage!

Part 2: Webcomics

The boys of Dumbrella.

Oh. Man. Randall Munroe of xkcd had the most consistently big crowd I saw all day. This dude must be like, a millionaire!

Ryan North! I had no idea he'd done these amazing instructions for time travel that have been making the internet rounds. He was selling poster versions that you can put you and post inside your time machine in case of emergencies.

Ben Rosen of White Cat, with his neon killer sign.

These buttons feature "Admiral Snackbar", a fastfood mascot featured in The Rack by Kevin Church and Benjamin Birdie. I'm a big fan of puns, particularly Star Wars puns, and apparently so is Benjamin Birdie. Suffice to say, I bought one of these.


Part 3: Art and Stuff!

Cute overload....Mice doing martial arts by Stephanie Yue.

Some pretty brilliant t-shirt designs by Joanna Mulder (talk about an awesome geek name).

Okay; this is the best thing I saw all day. I'm sorry. I love creator-owned work, I love innovative, experimental comics that push boundaries, but I will always have Star Wars deeply implanted in my heart and soul, and these mini-anthologies of Star Wars comics are freakin' OUT OF CONTROL. I bought the first one, Harvest Is When I Need You Most. Just think about that title. That is beautiful. Each story is a wonderfully thoughtful and funny take on the Star Wars universe, and I may have to go buy the other two tomorrow. These are edited by Shelli Paroline, who autographed my copy along with a little picture of an Ewok.

This is a mural by Michael DiMotta, the colorist of my new favorite DC title, Ink. Turns out DiMotta is an extraordinarily talented penciller as well, and this double tryptic of animals was actually painted as mural for a school. Lucky kids!

More Michael DiMotta. Man, this is good stuff. Be sure to check out his homepage for high-res images of this print and much more.


Artist Jerry Ma was sketching at the booth for Secret Identities, the first ever Asian Superhero Anthology (which I recently covered for Midtown comics). This was just his "warm-up" sketch, so I think we can safely assume his sketches throughout the day were pretty badass.

This print by Lucy Knisley caught my eye, for obvious reasons. I asked when she did it, wondering if she drew it before or after the zombie explosion of the last few years, and it turns out she did it specifically for the convention, and turned it out just two days before the show! I should probably go back and buy this.

Nathan Stapley and Scott C at the Doublefine booth. I have to say I had no idea Doublefine, a studio I know best for creating the brilliant Psychonauts videogame and the upcoming Brutal Legend, did comics as well. But they do! Like I didn't have enough stuff to check out...JEEZ. Also they gave out free stickers.

Here's JoeGP, creator of the Talking Guinea Pigs webcomic. I'd never read it before, but I liked the art and writing so much on my initial flip-through, I had to buy one of the hard copies. He also drew me a sketch which I will post tomorrow at a more reasonable hour.

These two creators win best tablecloths of the day...

Martina Fugazzotto, recipient of last year's Friends of Lulu Kim Yale award, was displaying her awesome sex-positive sex-ed comics on an equally awesome psychadelic tablecloth.

Box Brown, author of Love Is A Peculiar Type of Thing which came out last week and looks great, had this exquisite 1970s Disco Peanuts tablecloth. Every Charlie Brown is happy when he's dancing to disco music! I asked Brown if he had a particular affinity for Peanuts, and he responded with an enthusiastic yes, adding that any comic featuring a character with a perfectly round head is a big draw.

That's just Day 1, folks! And there's even more on Geekanerd's Flickr.

Stormtroopers Are Part of a Balanced Breakfast or: The Horrible Truth About Ewoks

No, this is not a real cereal, and yes, those are plastic Lego Star Wars stormtrooper heads. But if you put this in front of me on a Saturday morning, yes, I would still try to eat it.

On a related note, the sight of disembodied stormtrooper heads has made me realize something disturbing about the original trilogy:

I'm sure you recall the shot from the Return of the Jedi finale/Ewok Party Montage where an ewok is playing xylophone with a row of empty(?) stormtrooper helmets. While funny, I've always found this to be a discordantly morbid joke for this scene. I mean, it's all well and good to celebrate the defeat of your enemy, but defiling their corpses in such a zany way should probably fall under the New Republic's definition of war crimes.

Of course, it's not like our humanoid heroes who are responsible for this breach of the rules of engagement, it's those damn ewoks. This is what lifted the scales from my eyes and made me realize the horrible truth about what happened to the Imperial soldiers captured on Endor. For what did the ewoks do with Luke and Co when they captured them? They tied them up and got ready to cook them. I say, to cook them. Do you see where I'm going with this? The ewoks feast upon the flesh of their enemies. THEY EAT. PEOPLE. Jesus Christ. Those helmets are empty because the ewoks ate, THEY ATE, their P.O.W's! Look at that picture of the Stormtrooper Cereal again, and realize this is probably not far from what the ewoks were eating for several weeks after the Battle of Endor.

Thanks to Gnerd reader and food blogger Lena for the tip!
Via SeriousEats via Unique Daily.

Final Answer on the Most Controversial Nerd Debate: Trek vs. Wars!

Ok, technically I promised "no more youtube videos"... so I think I'm still holding true to that promise... besides... WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND COULD SKIP SOMETHING LIKE THIS?!?

Anyway, here's what the Galactic Empire thinks about J.J. Abram's Star Trek relaunch. And let's be honest, this is what we've all been thinking this whole time...

Photos: Lightsaber Battle in Washington Square Park

Newmindspace, the nutty funsters behind the recent Wall Street Pillow Fight, were the brains behind Saturday's free-for-all cardboard lightsaber battle. They provided 3,000 florescent tubes to the crowd, plus a bunch of black lights to get the glow action started.

The effect was...okay. The blacklights didn't cover much of the crowd, so you really had to use the unlimited powers of your imagination to believe the cardboard tubes were elegant Jedi weapons. I didn't hear many people making "VMM VMM KSS" sounds effects, so I'm not sure if the whole lightsaber theme really held up.

Still, it's not every day you get to hit strangers with cardboard tubes. More pix after the jump.


Some masochistic individuals (probably siths) got into cardboard boxes and allowed people to go totally apeshit on them. Good times!

Discarded lightsabers.

More pics at Geekanerd's Flickr page.

See The Galaxy! New Posters Mix Star Wars Planets with Depression Era Advertisng

There are few things I enjoy more than mash-ups that combine old timey Americana with geekanerd iconography. First it was comic cover artists copping from Norman Rockwell, now it's WPA Posters meets Star Wars. Zazzle has produced a line of officially licensed Star Wars posters based on the WPA's "See America" poster campaign. What's that? You've never heard of the WPA, the jewel of FDR's New Deal? Here's the original poster that the Hoth version was based on...


Tatooine and Courescant after the jump....


I couldn't find the original version of Courescant...seems like it must be based on a New York poster, but no sign of it on google image search. Oh well. Why does Couruscant need a tourism campaign anyway? Ain't no recession in Courescant! If those guys want credits, they PRINT some! Or mine some. Program some? What's a credit?

UPDATE! Reader "Andrew" tipped us to yet more old timey travel posters...these set in the Firefly universe. They don't seem to be directly referencing any WPA posters, but the influence is unmistakable. Awesome stuff. You can see and purchase all five at the Quantum Mechanix store.

The Future is Coming: Ion Engines!

Just when you start to think that space nerds are good for nothin' besides predicting our doom, they go and do something cool like this: they invented the Ion Engine! That's right! The envy of the Romulans! The workhorse of the Empire! (what, you didn't know that TIE stood for Twin-ION-Engine?!? n00b) On April 6th, NASA switched on the ion propulsion engine of their Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Explorer (or the much cuter GOCE!) and reports that it's operating normally! The ion engine is perfect for keeping this cute little guy hanging in low orbit so it can do its science thing. We here at G'Nerd are less about the science, and more about the fiction-so I won't pretend to truly understand what's going on here-but long story short, GOCE is floating in low orbit using nothing more than solar power to keep it up there. That sucker is gliding at an impressive 20 milliNewtons of thrust-that's an acceleration of less than the width of a human hair per second squared.... wait, what? Hurm... rocket car pancake this is not. But all amazing science miracles have to start somewhere. I'm sure the first lightsaber was really just a warm swiss army knife.

Oh, If Only This Weren't Some Cruel April Fool's Joke

Those total D-Bags over at ThinkGeek think they have the best April Fools prank ever. Smug assholes. They had to go and taun-taunt us (a-thank-you) with this insanely awesome sleeping bag shaped like a vivisected tauntaun! You would get to sleep in its intestine-patterned innards with your brow resting gently on its adorable tauntaun pillow-head. There's even a lightsaber zipper pull so you can imagine slicing the beast open every night before you go to bed! BUT if you click the BUY NOW button (as any self respecting nerd would) you'll find a mean old "April Fools!" message awaiting you. Quit mocking us and get to work on making this thing a reality! I don't care if I'm a 26 year old urban professional with a fiance! I'd sleep in this thing every night!

Intro to the Classic 70's Sitcom, Star Wars!

Oh Internets, you never cease to amaze. Who'd ever imagine you could still come up with something new and entertaining with all that Star Wars footage you have clogging your collective harddrives. By the by, I'd totally watch this show.

Imperial March on the Tesla Coil... with Iron Man!

Who'da thunk that science and geekdom would get along so well? This guy looks like the unfortunate love child of Tony Stark and Emperor Palpatine... and we're all the better for it. Enjoy!

ITEM! Obama Makes British Prime Minister Watch Star Wars

So about a week ago, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown came to the White House to talk to Obama about, I don't know, the economy, probably? The details of their meeting do not concern us, but what does, is the contents of the world-leadery gifts they exchanged.

Brown gave Obama some a pencil holder made out of a Historically Important Boat, while Obama gave Brown a "specially ordered" AFI 25 Greatest American Movie DVD Set.

Okay, now before we all start hemming and hawing about how incredibly lame it is to give someone a freakin' DVD in this day and age, bare with me. The important thing about this gift is the movies that were included in the set, according to the Daily Mail (verifiable accuracy not included):


Please note #13 on the list...little movie called STAR WARS: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE.

THAT'S why Obama didn't give him the movies on Blu-ray! This whole "25 DVD Set" is just the first step in a plan to make all the world leaders watch Star Wars, which as we all know, is not currently available on Blu-ray.

I think basically Obama must be a closet Star Wars fan (he was fifteen when New Hope came out, nuff said?), and is surreptitiously trying to get all the other world leaders to watch the movies again so he has someone to talk about them with (his kids are probably into like Twilight or something).

How I think Gordon and Obama's next meeting might go, after the jump...



Just one question remains...was it the Special Edition?