I have a compulsion to google the term "riot nrrd" every few months to see what comes up, and lately, www.riotnrrdcomics.com has been moving up in the rankings. So I indulged my curiosity and clicked through.

Well I am on comic #35, and all I have to say is: Hooray, it's a comic about queer geeks!

"Riot Nrrd" originated for me in a smelly basement playing role-playing games with a bunch of other excessively bright and fucked up punk kids. We had a couple of female friends who were big into riot grrl and it inspired us to try and reclaim a little space too. We ran Slackware, played in high school punk bands, dialed BBSes, shared mix tapes and played Cyberpunk 2020. Not a lot of people still remember this, for some reason, but way back in the nineties being a geek was nothing to be proud of unless your name happened to be Jobs, Gates or Hawkings. Being punk rock and geeky was actually a pretty tall order.

(By the way, if you read the wikipedia article on riot grrl, you should probably also read up on these ten myths of riot grrl)

Still, somehow, I was weirder than most. Part of it was my sexuality - I tried really hard at being straight, but I just wasn't, and being bisexual at the time (seriously, it was too early for me to have heard the word queer used as anything other than an insult) was just cause for my fellow riot nrrds and so called friends to call me sleazy. Racism wouldn't become an obvious problem for me, outside of my family, until 2001, but I still had a group of kids who always wanted to talk to me about the "Lebanese problem" evidently assuming I would be some kind of expert.

So it's great to see someone using the term riot nrrd and tackling issues of oppression and privilege in the various fandoms and geeky subcultures.

What's more, these are Joss Whedon geeks. It's always bugged me that Joss Whedon considers himself a "feminist", and it was cool to see some alternative takes on his characters and story tendencies.

The story-lines are interesting, the characters are fun and the dialogue is intelligent. Also bonus points for use of the word Kyriarchy. So what are you still doing here? Go read the comic!