Zeb Larson reviews The Big Con Job…
After working the same convention circuit for decades, a ragtag group of flabby action heroes, aging sex symbols, and sci-fi bit players become close friends as they watch their lines get shorter and their autographs get cheaper. That is, until they hire a cocky new booking agent who offers them their only chance at a comfortable retirement: robbing one of the largest cons in the country!
Jimmy Palmiotti and Matt Brady’s The Big Con Job is an odd and wonderful kind of book. The premise is simple: a group of aging and impoverished actors from various cult TV shows decide to rob the San Diego Comic Convention. While on its face value this is a heist story, it delves much more deeply into deeper themes about aging, the increasingly commercial nature of nerd culture, and nostalgia. How does an older actor stay relevant in an industry that is constantly pushing the new? How do you move on from what you think of as “your glory years”? This book dives into all of that.
The story begins with three older actors on the convention circuit: Danny Dean, Poach Brewster, and Blaze Storm. While each was part of one or more major franchises, all have found it next to impossible to break away from their major roles, and now they’ve been forced to make money from con appearances and autograph signings. Even that money is starting to dry up as the convention organizers keep more for themselves and spread what they make ever more thinly, while the spotlight is increasingly on new actors. Facing poverty, they gather a few other friends and come up with an insane plan: they’ll rob the biggest convention of all, in San Diego.
I don’t want to give away anything else about this story, because there are enough enjoyable twists that it should be read with its surprises intact. And especially for a four-issue series, this has a surprising amount of depth. You could read the first issue and assume that this would mostly be a story about Poach Brewster, and to be sure, he is ultimately the central protagonist. That being said, it branches out to focus on Danny, Blaze, and some of the actors who are introduced later, such as Hendrix. We’re treated to periodic flashbacks showcasing their work in the series that made them famous. If anything, that was the only major downside of the story: we could have used more space to further flesh out Colin, Maddie, and Johnny, who tend to recede somewhat compared to Hendrix, Poach, and Blaze.
Out of all of them though, Blaze might have been the most interesting to me, in part because so much of the characters she played are wrapped up in and around sex. There were times reading this book that I felt really ambivalent about the amount of cleavage Blaze was showing (though I can conversely respect the authors for not automatically de-sexualizing an older woman), but the more I read it, the more I decided it was a commentary on the way women are sexualized in nerd subcultures. While she’s still consistently depicted as a fox, her age has marginalized her compared to younger stars. She’s still sought after, but in a fetishized kind of way because of the star she used to be, not the person that she is.
Characters aside, there are also some interesting questions about aging going on in this series. All of the characters are older, facing increasingly marginal career roles if they’re getting any at all. Apart from the financial strain that they’re facing as a result, they’re also forced to come to grips with the fact that their most productive years are gone, and they don’t look like they’re going to come back. How do you cope with that? What do you do? Nobody wants to be forgotten, and these actors who didn’t seem to create any families don’t really have anything else.
The answer here seems to be in nostalgia, which is in conflict with the increasingly commercialized nature of nerd fandom. I was surprised that there wasn’t a bit more on the history of the early conventions, which were anything but financial powerhouses. If anything, there were grassroots kinds of enterprises that ran solely on the backs of fans. That was when these TV shows and comics were still being made for niche audiences, but the times have changed pretty dramatically. Nerd culture has become popular culture, and in the process, it’s been able to attract a lot of money. That profit motive is never an altruistic one though, and the people who run the cons now see it as business. It sustains that in no small part by focusing on the biggest stars, who not coincidentally are the youngest ones. In that way, Palmiotti and Brady seem to be saying that nerd culture is at risk of forgetting itself and obliterating its roots.
So, back to nostalgia. While the characters of this story have a lot of resentment for the cons and the fact that they’re supposed to survive on autograph signings, they don’t hate their fans, at least not inherently. They might tire of getting the same questions or having to put up with obnoxious jackasses, but they still want to be appreciated and recognized. Without giving anything away, the ending of the story affirms that looking back culturally is a good thing, both for fan bases and for actors. You need both sides in order to make that work: fans lose contact with what came before without a living representative to remind them, and actors need the fans in order to make a living. In a sense, it almost affirms the old idea of the conventions, which were an exercise at least partly in nostalgia.
It’s funny that with all of what I’ve discussed here, I’ve barely even mentioned the story. It’s a good and lively heist tale, with enough real characters to give it some emotional stake. There are a few moments when the particulars of the heist or the getaway strain credulity, but most heist stories aren’t really aiming for realism anyway, and this is a story about B-list actors robbing SDCC. If you just let it take you on a ride, it works.
What we get here is a very interesting book that also raises interesting questions about nerd culture as it merges with popular culture. Are we losing something as these cons, and by extension the movies, TV shows, and comics that go with them become increasingly profitable? There’s no real way to turn back the clock on that, but it might be useful to try and save some of the impulses that originally went into these conventions.
Rating: 9.2/10
Zeb Larson
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Originally published July 13, 2016. Updated April 14, 2018.
