In a statement accompanying the announcement, Klickstein described geek culture: “People who speak a shorthand based on the singular universe built around certain niche passions. It’s more than a subculture, but rather an entire network of interconnected and often overlapping nodes of fandom. The Marx Bros, Ray Bradbury, Flash Gordon, Bride of Frankenstein, Bruce Lee, Sailor Moon, all melding together and burbling a certain effervescent energy. I wanted to help organize and tell the story of how this all came together over the last century, focusing on the thrust of the before-during-and after the creation and expansion of Comic-Con over the past five decades in particular.”
Klickstein’s book joins several other accounts of Comic-Con and fan culture, including ICv2 columnist Rob Salkowitz’s Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture and Jackie Estrada’s Comic Book People (see “‘Comic Book People: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s’”).
