Meet the Geeks

When it comes to playing music, I have a fair amount of insecurity. It still feels like a fallacy when I say that I am a musician. I see musicians as true royalty. They create emotions and feelings, or more properly, turn our own emotions and feelings on. They concisely shape stories, crafted in small dense time capsules of 2½ to 5 minutes long. Each of these songs have the ability to take you back in time, to key moments in our lives, awakening all our senses in pure recollection: your first crush, your first rebellion, your first adult moment, your first win, your first loss. The pure craft of creating all of those moving parts and making them fit together into that perfect song that can purely capture a single moment in your life, is pure genius and pure madness. Am I a musician? I sure hope so, but those are lofty heights. (And please don’t get this confused with the other “musicians” out there that are created, packaged, produced and put out there, that have all of their pa...

During the year 1983 something was happening. This guitar player named Eddie Van Halen had been making headlines all over the world with his band Van Halen. However, in our neck of the woods, stuck with AM radio, we’d never heard of Van Halen. Glen Campbell, Anne Murray, and Gordon Lightfoot were all the radio would give us. When Van Halen’s 1984 came out, it revolutionized the music industry. Seriously. In our neck of the woods, the album broke open what we could listen to the radio. I mean Kiss never got radio play. But Van Halen was getting a lot of radio airplay. And a lot of other bands were getting airplay too. All of a sudden, hard rock was now being made available to the masses. Music with searing guitars, monster drums, pounding bass, and wailing vocals was now on the radio and I couldn’t be happier. Kiss had been my only island amidst all that AOR (Adult Oriented Rock) that saturated the airwaves. Now I could take my pick. It was my brother who glomed on Van Hal...

“I’ve got a job, I explore I follow every little whiff And I want my life to smell like this” I remember listening to the radio when that song, “Looking for a Place to Happen” by the Tragically Hip came on. As I listened I realized that it summed up everything I’ve ever wanted for and from the Geeks. For me Meet the Geeks has been a journey towards the savage heart of my dream: The idea of one day becoming a cartoonist of note, joining the ranks of the likes of Berkley Breathed, Jim Davis, Bill Watterson and the new crop of web cartoonists such as Jennie Breeden and Lar DeSousa. The thought of traveling down an unknown road and finding fortune at its end. Exploration and discovery. The two works I come back to on a regular basis during this journey is that song, sung to perfection by the late and great Gord Downey, held with reverence in my heart, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. That book/comic/movie explores the search ...

Very strong language. Sorry about that gang. SeanGeek, CoreyGeek and ToddFastFretFingers assemble! With special guests Clayton T Stewart and Mary, and James Remnant himself El Tigre, and Veronica. -           Meet The Geeks – history and where it is going – what happened to Matt and who is Thomas -           Clayton T Stewart’s Star Wars The Evil Within and the alumni panel at Keycon -           Shill, shill, shill for seanmcginity.ca, Kraken Rum, Rum Powered Reviews (10:22) -           Shane’s arrival (Sorry for the weak audio) -           CoreyGeek’s cancer scare and the real truths of depression -           The definition of Geek and our Largod ( http://www.lartist.com) and his little comic with Sohmergo...

Imagine this: Ronnie and Jeanne's house, some time in the 70's. A bunch of the cousins are playing along in the main area. The adults are chatting in the kitchen, having tea and coffee. The half-and-half French/English hybrid sing-song (and loud) chatter in the kitchen of the adults. The older cousin Randy was rarely seen. He would be in his bedroom, door closed. Kids are playing, laughing, playing, and carrying on. Then, a low rumble from Randy's room, slowly building, and then the music. Despite the door being closed, and all of the noise in the house, that sound cut through everything to me. What was it? What was that sound. I had been raised on a hell of a lot of Beatles and Ventures thanks to dad. Dad had an old tube amp record player stereo. He would plug in his bass to it and play along to those records for hours on end. I love the Beatles still to this day, and in later years would jam out more than my share of Ventures music. But this sound--- I reco...

Colour me excited Geeks! I finally got out to see Deadpool 2 last night with the WifeGeek! Here lies my somewhat biased review of the film. A lot of reviews have complained that Deadpool 2 is simply more of the same which, while true, isn't really a bad thing. Yes it's more jokey than the first movie and breaks the fourth wall a lot more: "so dark... You're sure you're not from the DC universe?" our hero groans while fighting the time traveling cyborg soldier Cable, played to perfection by Josh Brolin. And yes they do make a Goonies joke. The movie contains everything else the first movie leads you to expect. It's a love story. It touches on family, both genetic and the family you choose. It has an uncomfortably awkward regeneration scene. It also has a big bad that I didn't know was going to be in there. I won't spoil it for you. It's not this characters first appearance in the MCU films but the character is finally getting it's due...

Of the Comic Con strips this one probably ranks as my favorite, and not just because it features me. The Duras sisters, recurring villains from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Generations,  played by the talented and beautiful Gwyneth Walsh and Barbara March as B'Etor and Lursa respectively, were two of the celebrities featured at that convention. They were kind. They were receptive and they took the time to look at the comic I drew and pose for a picture with me.  In the comic I imagined my alter ego going to their table and reading poetry to them in Klingon and Gwyneth trying to fend him off not realizing that she was only encouraging him in the Klingon mating ritual.  The Klingon love poem that Corey is reading was found online by a Klingon poet named Ke'reth. I wish I knew more about the author and if anybody has information about him, I've long since lost the link, please send me an e-mail. ~CoreyGeek

How things have changed. When I started collecting comics as a very young wee lad, part of the joy of it was re-reading my collection. There was this glee to searching through the long boxes and pulling out an entire series and diving back into it. After a while, as the collection grew larger and larger, finding a particular run became more difficult. I started cataloging my collection, keeping like-minded series in the same longbox until that series grew too large and I would need to rejig the storage of what series was kept where. I have a complex coding system to finding my comics, estimating their value and keeping track of my collection. Trades changed that. As sales of trades (collected editions of story arc in paperbook or hardcover format) grew, so did the number of them being put out. At a certain point, most of my favorite runs I had collected were being represented in tradebook format. And here is where collecting comics changed for me. In the old days, I wo...