The Whiplash Decade

The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords

Why do they have to be such sore winners?

Illustration: Brennon Leman

This piece is part of the The Whiplash Decade, a package on the wild ride that was the 2010s.

The most significant pop-culture story of the decade is superhero culture’s evolution from nerd culture to monoculture. Nothing else has altered the map as profoundly; nothing else that seemed this unlikely 10 years ago feels as inevitable and possibly irreversible now. It feels weird to even refer to superheroes as “nerd culture” at this point. It’s like calling Facebook “computer culture.”

But for the record, there was once a social cost associated with being into superhero fiction past the age of 14 or so; it marked you as an immature or unserious person. When people made movies and TV shows based on comic books they were generally pretty bad; bad in a cynical why-try-harder way, and largely uninterested in digging into the thematic richness of their source material. Even the okay ones weren’t tailored to the tastes of people with a preexisting investment in the characters or otherwise optimized as product. The best you could hope for, as a comic-book-loving moviegoer, was either a competent action film that happened to be about Blade or the Punisher, or an actual filmmaker…