Difference between revisions of "Comic Book Guy"

Revision as of 21:43, October 29, 2008

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"Worst (insert random word) ever!" - Comic Book Guy's catch phrase

Jeff Albertson, better known as Comic Book Guy, is a fictional character in the animated series The Simpsons, voiced by Hank Azaria. He is the proprietor of the comic book store, The Android's Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop.

Profile

Comic Book Guy is obese, nerdy, hairy and perhaps best known for his sarcastic quips. He holds a master's degree in folklore and mythology (he translated The Lord of the Rings into Klingon as part of his thesis. (This is a reference to an organization called the Klingon Language Institute who took the time to translate Hamlet into Klingon after hearing the line "You haven't experienced Shakespeare until you've read him in the original Klingon" in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) His catchphrase is the declaration "Worst... (Noun)... ever". Comic Book Guy is said to be mocking certain Simpsons fans who will race to the Internet to criticize the producers and writers of an episode they have just finished viewing and declare such episode to be the "Worst Episode Ever". (Simpsons fans started to do just that sometime in 1992 on the alt.tv.simpsons USENET newsgroup, and later on the Web, leading to an on-air reference to "alt.nerd.obsessive".) In the episode "Mayored to the Mob", he states that he is a 45 year-old virgin who lives with his mother. His characteristics may appear somewhat similar to Ignatius M. Reilly from J.K.Toole's novel Confederacy of Dunces.

Appropriate to his name, Comic Book Guy is obsessed with comic books. A science fiction buff, Comic Book Guy has a bumper sticker that reads "My Other Car Is The Millennium Falcon," given to him by a Harrison Ford lookalike. The license plate on his AMC Gremlin is NCC-1701, the registry number of Star Trek's USS Enterprise. The contents of his display case include, among other oddities, a photo of Sean Connery signed by Roger Moore and a very rare Mary Worth in which she advised a friend to commit suicide. He also owns a T-shirt that says "C:/DOS C:/DOS/RUN RUN/DOS/RUN" (Notice the incorrect usage of the forward slash. DOS directories are listed with a backslash). He is a member of the Springfield branch of Mensa, along with Principal Skinner, Dr. Hibbert, Lisa Simpson, Professor Frink, and Lindsey Naegle.

In the episode "Saddlesore Galactica", he wears a T-shirt saying "Worst Episode Ever" while criticising the ideals behind the Simpson family keeping a horse since it had already been done. Later on he even popped into the frame when it was mentioned that Marge might be developing a gambling problem saying "Hey, I'm watching you". After the credits of the same episode, his voice is heard declaring it "the worst episode ever".

In the Simpsons city of North Haverbrook there is a comic book shop named "Mylar Baggins" and the proprietor looks very similar to Comic Book Guy with the exception that his skin and hair are slightly darker. He also has a deep-rooted rivalry with a store similar to his - "Frodo's of Shelbyville". These shops could have had the same owner, as both rival store names refer to The Lord of the Rings character Frodo Baggins. In The Simpsons Movie Comic Book Guy says that his obsessive comic book collecting is a "life well spent". (By contrast, in an episode of "Treehouse of Horror VIII" (airdate October 26, 1997), in a sequence entitled "The Homega Man," the Comic Book Guy, shown reading an Aquaman comic, looks up to see the neutron bomb--fired at Springfield by France--seconds before it detonates, and mourns aloud, "Oh, I've wasted my life." It should be noted that 'Treehouse' episodes occur outside of continuity.)

The Android's Dungeon

Comic Book Guy is the owner of The Android's Dungeon, a local comic book store. Many of the comics and toys he sells are of poor-quality, and often for very high prices. His store is his sanctuary, where he holds some level of self-esteem, imperiously lording over pre-teen kids, like Bart Simpson and Milhouse Van Houten, using a heavily sarcastic tone. When he was the target of mockery while trying to return the Ultimate Belt, he sighed, "I must get back to my comic book store, where I dispense the insults rather than absorb them". His store contains a section full of illegal videos (which include Mr. Rogers drunk, Alien Autopsy, Illegal Alien Autopsy, a top secret American nuclear war strategy session, a "good version" of The Godfather Part III, Kent Brockman picking his nose, and Ned Flanders in a police informant video, wherein he claims that Homer released a radioactive ape in his house). He once had to give up the Ultimate Belt (which he won as a door prize at a Star Trek Convention) because, as he pointed out, "the average Trekker has no use for a medium-sized belt".

Romance

Comic Book Guy was once married—in an online role-playing game. He and his Internet wife contemplated having children, but that would have severely drained his power crystals. He was shown paired with a blonde woman (asking if she enjoyed comic books) during a mass-marriage that occurred when a cult took over Springfield, and presumably the two were wed in the mass ceremony. While part of an intellectual junta that briefly ran Springfield, he proposed plans to limit breeding to once every seven years (a reference to the Vulcan blood fever of mating, called Pon Farr), commenting that this would mean much less breeding for most, but for him, "much, much more". He was a virgin well into his forties when he became romantically involved with Principal Skinner's mother Agnes. (Chief Wiggum was notably repulsed when he and his officers stumbled upon the couple "in the act".) He later dated Edna Krabappel and was shown with the superman logo tattooed on his upper right buttock.

History

According to Comic Book Guy's Book of Pop Culture, he lived in his parents basement in the 1980s. He had a dog named Chewbacca (currently deceased).

Creation

Comic Book Guy was partly inspired by a clerk at the Los Angeles Amok book shop who often "[sat] on the high stool, kind of lording over the store with that supercilious attitude and eating behind the counter a big Styrofoam containerful of fried clams with a lot of tartare sauce." Matt Groening noted that: "I can't tell you how many times people have come up to me and said, 'I know who you based that comic book guy on. It's that comic-book guy right down the block.' And I have to tell them, "No, it's every comic-bookstore guy in America." Hank Azaria based Comic Book Guy's voice on a student who went by the name "F", and lived in the room next door at his college. Azaria also "loves that the character is an adult who argues with kids as if they're his peers."

A long-running gag on the show was never to reveal the character's name, with other characters referring to him as "Comic Book Guy". Finally, in the February 6 2005 episode, "Homer and Ned's Hail Mary Pass," Comic Book Guy nonchalantly told Ned Flanders, "My name is Jeff Albertson, but everyone calls me 'Comic Book Guy'." Showrunner Al Jean remarked, "That was specifically done to make people really mad. We just tried to pick a generic name. It was also the Super Bowl show, so we did it so the most people possible would see it." Groening stated that he had originally intended him to be called Louis Lane and be "obsessed and tormented by" Lois Lane, but was out of the room when the writers named him.

Merchandising

Even though Comic Book Guy is a very minor character he still has some merchandise such as, Comic Books Guy's Book of Pop Culture.

Appearances

• The Frying Game
• Sex, Pies and Idiot Scrapes

more to come...