For more of the art of Paul Williams, visit his Deviant Art gallery, and stay tuned for next week’s installment in The Great Geek Webcomic.

Thanks for this week’s strip go once again to Paul Williams!

I honestly hope that I’m not the only here to regularly encounter thee moments. You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones in which, two turns into a perfectly adult conversation that began with you critiquing the emerging literary motifs of BattleStar Galactica as if the latest episode were a Toni Morrison novel, you find yourself slipping into the awkward straights of childhood nostalgia and uncomfortable revelations.

Fantasy has hit the big-time, even if you’re a thirty year-old reading a book written for an eight year old. So us Tolkien fans who braved the ridicule of our peers to bask in the tales of Middle Earth during recess actually come off as a bit hip… to our un-ending shame. Dungeons & Dragons and Larping have never seemed so mainstream. Even pulp sci-fi seems to be on its way in, no matter how campy.

Smurfs are so lame that they’ve passed into retro chic, visa vi Robot Chicken, as have Transformers and most of the Saturday morning line-up of the eighties. G.I. Joe references might still be a bit jarring (Go Joe!), but that’ll only last until the big screen rehash. Even Anime, which seems to have just hit its stride, is only about two year away from being the latest conversation starter. “Oh, man. Do you remember that series about the pervvy school teacher, Great Teacher Onizuka? I used to download that off Suprnova before anime was even cool!”

Still, there remain narrow shoals of obscure fandoms that, brought into conversation in the wrong company, are certain to earn you a classification normally reserved for the middle-aged Japanese business men who dress as Sailor Moon and insist on flashing their panties at Gaijin with cameras… It’s all a bit of a minefield with our generation. We want to be good sheep, as were our parents and their parents before them, but the information age has provided us with far too many shepherds.

For those of you out there, who, like myself, find it difficult to navigate these rocky waters, I offer you this consolation.

1.) The words “donkey porn” will ensure that your Unico, your Labyrinth, and your She-Ra will go undiscovered and uncommented upon, because, as certain as those who find the disks are to disbelieve the label, they will be equally terrified of discovering that the labels were not in jest.

2.) You are not alone. Your pseudo-fandoms of one, scattered far and wide and hidden in shame, will one day pass into the mainstream like fantasy, pulp sci-fi, d&d, manga, and every other dark secret of our kind that came before. Stay strong, in anticipation of the day that Micheal Bay is locked out of the Little Pony franchise and forced to come searching for alternatives…

/End Rant

Note: If you’re going to hotlink this image to your own website, please use the image on my Flickr account. Thanks.

Last summer’s Transformer film sparked a lot of talk in the blogsphere. Every was belly-aching about the fact that we don’t have flying cars or human-like AI’s yet, despite the fact that we’re living in a new millennium. I, however, took the opportunity to count my blessings. The fact is robotic cars spell trouble!

Thanks to artist Paul Williams for this amazing strip! If you’d like to see more of Paul’s work, you can check out his gallery over at Deviant Art.

Note: If you’re going to hotlink this image to your own website, please use the image on my Flickr account. Thanks.

We’re back from our hiatus and better than ever. With this strip, I’m proud to welcome artist Paul Williams aboard! You can check out more Paul’s amazing artwork, including a gnarly zombie Jesus that I’m personally using as a desktop, over at his Deviant Art account. You can look forward to seeing The Great Geek Manual webcomic in the weeks to come thanks to Paul, and if you’re looking for an artist to work with yourself, Paul is currently taking commissions. Drop him a line through his account at Deviant Art to ask about prices.

Note: If you’re going to hotlink this image to your own website, please use the image on my Flickr account. Thanks.

Welcome to the fifth installment in my little comic series, drawn by Kristoffer Condes, of “Fantasy Bites!.” As always, stay tuned next week for more Geeky humor!

Note: If you’re going to hotlink this image to your own website, please use the image on my Flickr account. Thanks.

This week, we offer up a valuable warning for our Geek brethren in colleges around the world who, new to drinking, may be tempted to confuse reality with the game.

I owe thanks, as always, to Kristoffer Condes, of “Fantasy Bites!” for providing the illustrations that actually make my snarky remarks funny. Drop by his site and check out his other work.

Note: If you’re going to hotlink this image to your own website, please use the image on my Flickr account. Thanks.

So here is the third installment in our new weekly webcomic series, and I’m happy to report that, over the course of the past two week, comic number one, “The Value of a Mentor,” has drawn 8,500 hits! Evidently, you all think that Elf Chicks being easy is really hilarious. It’s actually a little irritating to discover after all of the time I’ve spent researching computer history, thinking that I was cultivating an intellectual audience, to discover that all you really wanted was sex jokes. Still, the second comic, “Health Trends” has drawn 800 hits and counting, so maybe you’re not all Philistines.

But I’m warning you, by God! If this installment doesn’t drawn down some heavy traffic, it’s going to be cheap boob jokes for the next year!

As always, thanks go out to Kristoffer Condes, of “Fantasy Bites!“, who, though not participating in this week’s aesthetic abomination, has been instrumental in creating this series. While I may have to hate Kristoffer on general principal for living in a tropical climate while I’m wading through knee-deep snow in Michigan, I am eternally grateful for his on-going assistance.

You saw it here first folks, I have officially kept a New Years resolution! I have posted a second comic, officially making this a series. Which means that I can now go chow down on the pint of Ben & Jerry’s I tucked away at Christmas in anticipation of breaking my other resolutions in good conscience.

This comic was once again made possible by the artistic talents of Kristoffer Condes, of “Fantasy Bites!” fame, who has most generously agreed to bring my scripts to life. Unfortunately, all the mad Photoshop skillz in the world may not save the series from this punchline. I’ve pitched this line to five different people, and all of them immediately asked for an explanation. I think what I’m dealing with here is a consequence of having dated a Veterinary student for too long, because it’s a FDA joke, people!

Honestly, if I were posting this in a food industry blog, the audience would be rolling in the aisles…

Yes, imaginary ladies and geeks, it’s the first weekly installment in yet another ultra-stereotypical webcomic series! The first installment of many, I hope. TGGM is a collaboration between myself and the very talented, very patient artist Kristoffer Condes, of “Fantasy Bites!” fame!

Yes, the title needs a little work. We considered a long list of titles, everything from the obvious, “Weekly Witty Geek Repartee“, to our test audience’s initial reaction, “Not another Webcomic!“, to the brutally honest “Trafficwhoring to Nowhere“. We even considered using something like “!xkcd” (yes, that’s xkcd with a tongue click) to Ninja loot us some traffic, but nothing seemed to stick. So, we’ve defaulted to the blog’s acronym, TGGM. We figure that it’ll at least be easy to discuss via text message. OMG! did uc la5t w33ks tggm?!! LMAO! Still, feel free to throw out any other suggestions you might have. We’re still considering possibilities.

We sincerely hope that you enjoy our comic, subscribe to our RSS, and come back frequently. We honestly aren’t sure what we’re doing and we aren’t sure where we’re going, but we both agree that the pure synergy that results from the collaboration of an obscure blog author and an obscure webcomic artist is certain to be the obscure success no one is talking about when we finally get there!

Thanks and have a Happy New Year!