I would like to take the opportunity of  our six month celebration to take you on a brief tour behind the creation of The World According to Geek.

This whole thing started about two decades ago when I was in fourth grade.

Really.

I’m not kidding.

I was a quiet, studious kid with little time for social endeavors.

Well, actually I was a nerd. A mega-nerd.

On the first day of fourth grade, I arrived at my school to find a gaunt, pale kid, with a funky punk haircut, staring blankly at the home room lists in a hallway. I knew the kid was new and was probably completely lost so I decided to walk up to him and introduce myself. His name was Germán and the poor kid never had a chance.

We became fast friends and spent all of fourth grade together, an eternity for a nine-year-old. The next year, we were forcefully separated when we were assigned different home rooms. I had lost my best friend and spent the whole of fifth grade alone.

Then, the next year, during a class field trip, we were having lunch at a burger joint. Having nowhere to sit, I sat next to a painfully thin boy with a rogue smirk, a quick laugh and a squeaky voice. I had seen the kid before, but I had barely talked to him. Within minutes, this strange kid was making me squirt my soda out my nose and our tummies hurt from all the hysterical laughter. From then on, Berto and I were inseparable. Be it sitting next to each other in the classroom, playing with our linked Game Boys during recess or talking about cute girls. We shared an obsession with the exact same things, from comic books to Sega games.

A couple of years passed until we hit middle school. Then, something magical happened. While in elementary school, for some reason it was frowned upon to socialize with kids in a different home room, as teenagers we didn’t have such limitations. Hence, I got my friend German back.

I remember the first day of eighth grade like it was yesterday. I walked up to the main hallway and there was another new kid staring at the class lists. Politely, I asked if I could help. I checked the list and discovered he was in my same class. “Come with me,” I told him. And that was the day I met Ricardo and the day our family became complete. The poor bastard didn’t know what awaited him.

And thus it was from that day forward that it was the four of us against the world. You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all of this since you probably started reading thinking I was going to talk about a goddamned comic. Well, there is a point, I promise.

It was damned hard growing up a geek during the nineties. Back then (I feel Old Snake old by writing those words) geek wasn’t chick like it is now. Playing Dungeons and Dragons at school wasn’t particularly cool and having an unhealthy obsession with comic books wasn’t as popular as it is now. The four of us had to band together and form a really strong bond to be geeks with pride in a world that barely acknowledged our existence. That bond has remained untouched as the years have come and gone. Even though we’ve grown up, gotten married and finally gotten actual, real lives, we remain the same group of geeks that met once a week to play Marvel Super-Heroes RPG by the principal’s office.

And that is the very essence of The World According to Geek. It is a comic that chronicles all the nuances of geek life, which is unlike any other lifestyle there is. Nobody else obsesses, or remotely cares about, that new laptop that is coming out with the gagillions of bytes of RAM and the sexy aluminum alloy case like a geek does. Nobody else salivates buckets of drool when that awesome new Japanese import model kit finally makes its way to the western hemisphere. Even today, with geek being so mainstream, nobody really “gets” us geeks. Even though we are finally everywhere and popular culture is finally filled with obscure Monty Python references (as it should be, Ni!), mainstream doesn’t really get us. You have to be a geek to get geeks.

Hence, The World According to Geek.

So, about the actual creation of the comic. Here it goes.

Almost a year ago, Ricardo, who has always been an awesome cartoonist and artist, told me he wanted to do something creative. Since I’ve always been the resident writer of our little band of misfits, we thought we could come up with something cool. We spent some weeks working on a few ideas, doing some character designs and writing a spec script, but all of it felt damned forced. It was like we were trying desperately to give birth when we weren’t even pregnant.

We abandoned that project and looked for something else to do. We also brought in help, in the persona of our brother German. The three of us decided to take up the old writer’s mantra, and write about what we knew, ourselves and our lives. And thus it was that Charlie, Will and Al were born, alternate personas of our own little troupe. (Sadly, our fourth brother, Berto, tragically passed away in 2005. In his memory, we created the character of Burt, personifying the geek who has already sort of grown-up, married and had children, as he hit all those milestones before any of us.)

Anxiously, and with great passion, we threw ourselves to write the adventures of our doppelgangers. We wrote something like 20 scripts while Ricardo designed the look and the characters. Although German was already an accomplished graphic artist and I had dabbled somewhat in lame Photoshopping, Ricardo had to give us a crash course on working with vectors with Xara Xtreme to give life to our nascent comic. We were really excited, we were also stuck.

We had no idea what to name the adventures of our chosen heroes. No names seemed right. Then, as if by magic, German muttered the magic words: “How about The World According to Geek?”

We didn’t need to think about it anymore. We had our title. We also had an awesome URL for our new website: http://www.twatgeek.com. Short, sweet and so full of suggestiveness and juvenile innuendo, it was hard to resist. After all, if somebody says “twatgeek,” you’re so gonna remember it!

So, there you have it. A brief history of The World According to Geek, and it only took like 1,000 lines. Thanks for reading all this crap. You deserve a present.

Cheers!

Pete