My Canon: Longboxes by Nate McDonough

A year or two ago, I was talking with Nate about Longboxes and he told me it was basically his Eltingville Club. I like The Eltingville Club a lot, but Nate was wrong. In fact, I don't think I've ever talked to a person who misunderstood their art more than Nate misunderstands his. No, I'm just kidding, but there's a key difference in Eltingville and Longboxes.

The Eltingville Club was Evan Dorkin's look at the grungy side of comics and sci-fi fans. Premiering in the great and forgotten Dark Horse anthology Instant Piano in 1994, Eltingville came out at a time when the mainstream idea of comics dorks was probably still in the "unwashed virgin with an encyclopedic knowledge of one very specific thing and a fear of all other things" phase. Eltingville was darker than that, though. Eltingville was about so-called friends who would hold random nerd tchotchkes just out of each other's reach like antidotes to the poison they'd just been slipped. They'd one-up each other on useless trivia like knowing the color of Boba Fett's original cape (the one at the San Enselmo parade, not the one from the Star Wars Holiday Special and certainly not the one from Empire Strikes Back) meant total cerebral dominance. The four main Eltingville characters went scorched earth on each other in every story and then met back up again to play DnD and trade Mystery Science Theater 3000 tapes because there wasn't anybody else to talk to. If you walked into a comic shop and saw these guys in the corner, talking loudly because they wanted to be heard, you would have every reason to turn around and come back later, or never.

Dorkin was inspired to start Eltingville after his friend and sometimes-publisher Dan Vado got hate mail for the DC comics he was writing. Little decisions Vado made would result in death threats from people overly-invested in a Justice League spin-off. The Eltingville characters were based on real people and their brains were full of Dorkin's geek culture knowledge, every reference a damning admission. You couldn't just google this stuff, so it was clearly in Dorkin's brain. But there's some distance there. And Longboxes, by starring Nate himself, has a much smaller distance.

There's still one there, of course: Nate is usually not the worst character in his comics. He spends a lot of time digging through longboxes of comics (in addition to making and self-publishing comics, he sells mass market work online), which means he's often getting elbowed by people who'd slit his throat for a character's debut issue. And Nate, both because of what he does for a living and because he's a genuinely curious person, has as much or more knowledge as those chuds.

This is dangerous. The two repulsive, self-centered poles of autobiography are "I'm so pathetic, can you believe I did all of these embarrassing things and then wrote about them in my public diary?" and "I'm so great, can you believe I have to deal with these idiots, who I always have the perfect comeback for?" Nate does a good job floating in the middle, which is not easy considering, again, he's usually sharing physical space with people who would have proudly bookmarked one of those websites counting down to Natalie Portman and the Olsen twins' 18th birthdays. It's hard to look humble when you're writing about run-ins with dudes who know more about Witchblade than they do about any real woman in their lives.

When Nate writes about completing sets of William Shatner's TekWar comics or feeling bad for finding key issues of a forgotten Marvel character's solo series for under market value, he writes about the experience from the layered perspective of a guy who knows our hobby is silly but who also can't help but know who penciled Shatner's dire vanity comic. He has empathy for those who know the same, where many have a self-loathing that seeps out into a misanthropy, the "I wouldn't want to be part of a club that would have me as a member" bullshit I struggle with all the time.

Eltingville was a joy to read because it was so scabrous (and beautifully drawn and sincerely funny where most nerd culture comics would just be a list of references, etc.). Longboxes is a joy to read because there's a glint of real empathy there for the chuds and a recognition that they're chuds. The lack of distance necessitates empathy, I think.

And it isn't always empathy for the baboon trying to elbow you out of the way to get to the stacks first. It's often empathy for fellow comics artists, people whose work is now turning into smudged dust in some comic shop's basement.

Reading Longboxes as a collection (which you can do if you buy the book here), you fall into Nate's rhythms pretty easily. He knows CGC ratings are bullshit but has to know about them because of his job. He spends a day combing through a warehouse of unpriced comics and then has to sit there for an hour as the shop owner decides how much this stuff he didn't care about enough to inventory should cost. And while he's digging, which is so much of Nate's professional life, he thinks (and then writes and draws) about the guys who drew three spectacular issues of Spider-Man 2099 and then vanished. Or the person who did a back-up in an independent book, and did they make anything else? Did they give up on comics?

Longboxes is not about the stench of pop culture's worst hobby, it's about exploring comics in a way few people have. And sometimes it's about completing a full run of Marville comics. Don't look that up.