The Simpsons has played a huge role in bringing comic book culture into the mainstream, largely because the show is so transparently the work of geeks with giant brains, far too much pop-culture knowledge, and little in the way of conventional social skills or attractiveness. The writers of The Simpsons are geeks themselves, so the show’s withering satire of the form and especially the dateless wonders who flock to it is undercut by a very palpable sense of love, even reverence for the nerdy world of superheroes and funny animals and freak accidents involving radiation and various fallout boys. The Simpsons kids comic book geeks because they love.
To an entire generation, The Comic Book Guy has defined the smug self-importance and pathetic myopia of the quintessential comic book geek. Like so many Simpsons characters, Comic Book Guy has become a pop culture archetype. “Three Men and a Comic Book,” today’s Simpsons Classic episode, finds the show delving deep into a comic book world it would explore extensively though out the course of its initially glorious, then less glorious run.
The show opens with one of its signature set pieces, in this case, a comic book convention where an amusingly clueless Diamond Joe Quimby tries to curry the favor of the assembled Poindexters by saying he’s full of a warm glow, not unlike their hero Radiation Man, only to be roundly sassed for his unforgivable error. Today, of course, comic-book and geek culture has become mainstream culture; nowadays the cool kids show up at Comic-Con and bend over backwards to win over the geeks who now wield power disproportionate to their numbers. But back in 1992, geeks were still ghettoized as either dorky boys or adults who never matured emotionally or sexually beyond the age of dorky boys.
At the convention, Bart becomes obsessed with buying the first issue of Radioactive Man for $100 from Comic Book Guy. First, he tries to nag Homer into coughing up the dough, but when that proves futile, Bart is reduced to a sad, rinky-dink quest for cash that first involves the thankless task of recycling cans. Then, he turns to doing odd jobs for a hilarious parody of an old biddy voiced by Cloris Leachman. The offending old-timer runs Bart ragged when not watching soaps that are, by her estimation, both “filthy” and “genuinely arousing.”