Evan Dorkin is ruthlessly funny, and sometimes just ruthless, in this interview with Paste magazine. The occasion is the release of the second and final issue of Dorkin’s The Eltingville Club, but it’s an opportunity for Dorkin to share his typically snarky thoughts about the state of the comics industry and the dark side of fandom.
Dorkin’s been drawing the Eltingville Club—four geeky frenemies who embody all the worst aspects of hardcore fandom—since the 1990s. They even had their own short-lived Adult Swim cartoon. The Eltingville Club #2 brings an end to their adventures while satirizing the modern state of fan culture, with the finale taking the guys on a Heart of Darkness-style voyage through the San Diego Comic-Con. In Dorkin’s opinion, the ugly aspects of fandom have gotten uglier since the Eltingville Club’s first meeting: “A lot of it’s based on things I’ve seen, and a lot of it’s exaggeration... It’s scary when I do something that I think is really horrible and then I read about something that’s even worse.”
You can spend hours poring over the crowd scenes in the preview pages and picking out the dozens of geeky references. They’re like “Where’s Waldo,” but with Sergio Aragones and the Hate-Monger.