Morgan Spurlock takes us inside Comic-Con's nerd orgy with Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope

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      Comic-book sniffers. They exist. As do the more well-known tribes of gamers, collectors, LARPers, movie geeks, and aspiring artists who religiously descend on San Diego each year to indulge in the orgy of nerditude known as Comic-Con International—a phenomenon that exerts an almost March of the Penguins–like fascination in Morgan Spurlock's Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope.

      This is relatively light fare for the popular documentarian. Not ignoring that there are grown men who look right into his camera and say things like, “My priority this year is the 18-inch Galactus,” it's not as if Spurlock is standing in the AfPak border region—like he did in 2008's Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?—wondering if he'll take a bullet.

      But his new film is, nonetheless, a very personal project.

      “I grew up reading a lot of comics,” Spurlock tells the Georgia Straight in a call from New York. “Plastic Man was probably my favourite comic as a kid. And then it was horror films. I started getting turned on to horror films at a very young age. Like, my parents took me to see shit you would never take kids to see, like Jaws, The Exorcist. When Michael Ironside made that guy's head explode in Scanners, it changed my life forever. All these things that kind of make up geek culture today were the things that really shaped me into who I am.”

      Let's back that up just a little bit. Spurlock's parents took him to see The Exorcist?

      “How fucked up is that?” he replies with a hoarse laugh. “But that's the '70s! It was the '70s and parents were, like, ‘Meh, it's fine; it's a movie.' ”

      So was Deep Throat. Anyway, early trauma aside, the 41-year-old filmmaker is well aware that his generation, in particular, was like an ongoing focus group for the way-cool shit that dominates the entertainment landscape today. “I remember when the Atari 2600 came out and it was like a revolution in my house,” he recalls, but the revolution didn't stop there. At some point, the combined manifestations of geekdom blew up into an incredible cultural force—something that's reflected in the growth of Comic-Con itself, from the 145 people who attended its debut in 1970 to the roughly 130,000 who show up these days.

      “Today, frat guys wear Green Lantern T-shirts, you know?” Spurlock says. “When I was a kid and you read comics and you had action figures, you were like that weirdo kid, whereas now everybody has them. And not only does everybody have them, but these people who were nerds with computers, or those geeks with video games and toys, are now the people who run everything.”

      That'd seem to be the case in the film world. Spurlock's production partners on A Fan's Hope include Joss Whedon, Harry Knowles of the Internet's Ain't it Cool News, and the Geekfather himself, Stan Lee, while the testimony he gathers on-camera from people like Eli Roth, comic-book genius Grant Morrison, and a hilarious Jon Schnepp (writer-director of Metalocalypse) underlines the strong feedback loop between consuming and creating.

      Which brings us to the major content of the movie itself, in which Spurlock's camera follows the fortunes of six of the Comic-Con's attendees in 2010: an amateur costume maker, two aspiring illustrators, a couple of lovebirds, and, perhaps most poignantly, Mile High Comics founder Chuck Rozanski.

      “Chuck doesn't pull any punches, which is why I love Chuck,” Spurlock says of the ponytailed Rozanski, who's fretting over declining sales when we first meet him. Looking for an especially big payday, he ships his ultrarare, pristine copy of Marvel's Red Racer #1 to San Diego accompanied by a couple of beefy security guards. Rozanski figures it might fetch half a million bucks, at one point hoping out loud that a certain Hollywood man-child might bite.

      “Nic Cage sold his entire collection when the lady he was hanging around with told him to grow up, as if he ever could,” Rozanski explains to his assistant as they drive to San Diego with the rest of his stock. “That's God's way of telling you to get a new woman. There's seven-billion women in the world, and only so many comics. It's an easy choice.”

      “I love that line; it's amazing,” Spurlock says with a chuckle, noting that Rozanski's very presence in the film succeeds in giving a wider context for viewers to ponder. “He's older and he's been in the business forever,” he says. “Here's a guy who has seen comics explode, has seen them become something that now aren't just for kids, and at the same time has seen people stop buying actual paper comics. His story is really lovely, I think.”

      To bring this full circle, it's through Rozanski that we get to see the curious ritual of comic-book sniffing. But it's in the widening gap between his small antiquarian world of dead trees and the blinding flash of Hollywood that the film finds its purpose. All airiness aside, Spurlock sounds like a crusader when he talks about the hijacking of Comic-Con by the entertainment giants.

      “I love when people say, ‘Well, Comic-Con's being taken over by Hollywood movies,' ” he begins. “And I say, ‘The only thing that's being taken over by Hollywood movies is your coverage of Comic-Con,' 'cause that's what we've turned into being important in the media. You know, the artist who's struggling to sell his comic and make his story, nobody gives a shit about that because we've bought into this celebrity culture so much that it's, ‘Look at those weirdos in the costumes,' and, ‘Oh, look! There's Will Ferrell!' you know?”

      Avoiding that trend, Lee advised Spurlock to capture the professional opportunities that Comic-Con offers to young artists—in this case represented by a bartender, Skip, and an air force pilot by the name of Eric. “The fact that there are portfolio reviews happening at Comic-Con, nobody knows that,” Spurlock tuts. “Nobody knows that there's, like, this job fair going on where if you wanna break into this business, you can go there with your work and you have a chance of somebody actually wanting to hire you for a job out of that.”

      Spurlock even manages to throw a little romance at the screen with the tale of James Darling and Se-Young Kang. They aren't looking for jobs, recognition, or even Ferrell's autograph, but James is bent on getting Se-Young's hand in marriage. He manages to pull Kevin Smith into his nerve-racking proposal caper—but we won't give away the ending.

      Spurlock could be talking about the couple or he could just mean his bright and affectionate film as a whole when he says, “There is nothing more powerful than geek love.”


      Watch the trailer for Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope.

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