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One month in, the Geekiness was already strong in me and, apparently, in Marie.  She's Batman, damn it.

Saturday, March 10, 2007



This was in the spring of 2007, not long before the final Harry Potter book was released.  Excitement was, shall we say, in the air.



In 2007, everyone and his dog was signing up for Facebook.  I...wasn't.  Click on the comic if you want to go to the relevant page and read the rest of the strips in the sequence, which I glibly named "Faceless."



I do have an urge to do this to students occasionally.  I don't really want to fall into a bottomless abyss afterwards, though.  And yes, in case you've been living under a rock for the last half century, this is a Lord of the Rings reference.



This is here for the sake of Mr. House's T-shirt, which derives from the webcomic The Adventures of Dr. McNinja and can actually be purchased here.



Yep...this was the Summer of the Potter.  I've got to say:  I spent a lot of time on that bogus cover in the title panel.  I also drew tiny versions of the cover four times, including once as a cover-within-a-cover.  Obsessed?  What, me?  Naaaah.




Any second now, someone is going to say, "Jinkies!"  I'm really not sure what's up with the "slang" in Scooby-Doo.  Is "jinkies" code for an appalling curse word?



...because I wanted to make a random reference to 28 Days Later, that's why.



At this point, I believe I was finished Buffy and had moved on to Angel, but I certainly did feel Marie's pain.



One hundred and forty-four hours.  Think about that for a minute, Buffy fans.



Mushroom!  Mushroom!

This comic makes it onto the geek page simply by virtue of the book Casey is reading, Terry Pratchett's Jingo.  I spent an awful lot of time replicating a teeny version of the cover.



Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog first appeared online between July 15 and 20, 2008.  I heard about it early on and, as you may be able to tell, liked it quite a lot.



The Dark Knight had come out earlier in the summer, and everyone was saying that...damn...line.



Admittedly, the allusion here is to It's a Wonderful Life, which came out in 1946, but it still counts as a geeky reference, or so I claim.



There are numerous comics involving Barbara dressed as Sherlock Holmes, but this one is the first of them all.



I must have been on a role.  This allusion is to The Day the Earth Stood Still, which came out in 1951.

Valentine's Day 2009



Oh, come on...you know perfectly well that it doesn't even count as a webcomic if there's not at least one Star Wars reference.



The Watchmen film was coming out, and I was galvanised to action, as I was with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.  It seems to be the way I'm made.

Saturday, May 30, 2009
 



At this point, Futurama was still technically cancelled.  I missed it.  It's possibly also worth noting that considering Weird Beard's deep-seated geekitude, it is highly probable that he is engaging in obfuscating ignorance here.



The Harry Potter reference has earned this comic a place on the geek page.

Hallowe'en 2009



This Hallowe'en banner demonstrates my undying...love...for the Twilight series.  Now have an enlightening video.



Baldwin's Dr. Horrible costume has propelled this comic onto the geek page.



It's not exactly a pop-culture reference, but it is a reference to Nietzsche.  Random bonus:  Casey is dressed as Mr. Incredible, who could conceivably be regarded as an example of the Übermensch.  It's Nietzsche references all around.  Hurrah!



Casey and Marie are dressed as Mr. Incredible and Alice in Wonderland throughout the Hallowe'en plotline this year, but it's fun to see them in their full glory in this strip, which ends the sequence.



Here West of Bathurst has a reference to TV Tropes, which has a reference to West of Bathurst, which has a reference to TV Tropes, which has a...



I actually associated much of my Ph.D. with Frodo's trip to Mordor.



I staunchly maintain that Die Hard counts as a Christmas movie.  I tend to have a hard time convincing people who believe that Christmas is a magical wish-fulfilment fantasy, but ah well.



I was apparently in a reference-happy mood in December of 2009.  It does amuse me to picture a giant prize nigiri.



This comic begins a short Alice in Wonderland / Through the Looking Glass sequence.  Click on the strip to get at the rest of it.



I believe I was watching Stargate SG-1 at the time myself.  For some mysterious reason, it made it into the strip.

Valentine's Day 2010



If the Blue Screen of Death can make it onto this page, the Rube Goldberg Valentine's Day Thingy deserves a place as well.



What took you so long, obligatory Douglas Adams reference?



What took you so long, obligatory Firefly reference?



I drew this one after my first ever trip to the SF convention Ad Astra.  I even cameo in the comic; I'm the one with the yellow bag and the oddly complex tights.  With the exception of Barbara and the Victorian silhouette, everyone in that panel is a real person; the steampunk couple are acquaintances of mine, while the tiny Batman was running all over the hotel on the convention's second day.  The swordsmith in the third panel is real as well, as are all the posters on the walls.



I said this page wouldn't include the Doctor Who comics, but I've provided the first one so that you can click on it if you want to go to the Doctor Who page and see the rest of the geekiness.



This is sort of a companion comic to the Blue Screen of Death strip, so I've included it here just for kicks.  The whole "core dump" thing does happen to me a teeny bit too frequently.

October 2010



I drew this for the 2010 SpecFic Colloquium.  It referenced lots and lots of genre categories.




Mark Reads Harry Potter is exactly what it says on the tin.  I find it quite, quite amusing.




Mark Reads Twilight is awesome as well in an entirely different way.




This comic references two distinct types of detective fiction and can thus be used as a teaching tool.  As well, it contains funny hats.




This comic appeared not long after the death of Diana Wynne Jones, one of my favourite authors.  The title panel is drawn in the style of the cover designs of several of DWJ's recent novels (as well as some reissues of old ones).  If you look closely, you can see many WoB plot and character references in this panel.  The book being alluded to here is Howl's Moving Castle, which is pretty fantastic.




Marie is here reading Diane Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard, a great YA fantasy that deserves to be more widely known, as do its sequels.  And yes, the series predates Harry Potter by something like a decade and a half.  I believe Duane has lately been working on reissuing the earlier books in the series with updated references and technology, a practice of which I do not particularly approve.  Perhaps I am simply reacting negatively to my students' baffling resistance to reading anything written before 1995.  There's no reason young readers can't enjoy books set when their parents were children.  I mean, I did.  Okay, continuity is a little off in the series, as Nita and company are apparently aging at the rate of about a year per decade, but I'm sure kids are capable of figuring out what's going on.  I shall stop ranting now.  Read DD.  She's awesome.




Here's the second DD comic, which is also on the Doctor Who page, but ah well.  Sometimes, geekeries overlap.

Friday, July 15, 2011



This panel contains references not only to the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 but to A Very Potter Musical, a Very Potter Sequel, and Potter Puppet Pals.




The College could also count as Wonderland or the land through the looking glass or Hogwarts or maybe even Oz.  Perhaps it's all the Other Worlds of kids' lit bundled up into one.