The Secret Loves of Geeks

The Secret Loves of Geeks is a 2018 anthology of comics, essays, and short pieces edited by Hope Nicholson and including contributions from a wide range of writers and artists working in the comics and adjacent geek culture spaces. While Margaret Atwood is sometimes credited as a contributor, the anthology is a collective project featuring more than fifty writers and artists, with each contribution exploring the intersection of geek culture, fandom, and romantic or emotional life. The book is a follow up to the earlier The Secret Loves of Geek Girls, which had a similar collaborative structure and similar themes.

The contributions in the volume range widely. Some are short autobiographical comics about creators’ first crushes or first conventions or first acceptances by a fan community. Some are essays about the long complicated relationship between fandom and identity. Some are reflections on what it has meant to come of age as a queer person, a person of color, a woman, or anyone outside the traditional default audience of comics, science fiction, and fantasy. Margaret Atwood’s contribution, if she did contribute, fits into the wider conversation about how readers and writers form their identities through the cultures they consume.

The anthology format works particularly well for this kind of material because the variety of voices captures the variety of ways geek culture has touched people’s lives. Some entries are funny, some are devastating, some are simply observational, and the cumulative effect is a snapshot of a particular cultural moment.

For readers interested in comics studies, in fan culture, in autobiographical short comics work, or in the wider question of what it has meant to be a geek across the decades when geek culture has gone from fringe to mainstream, this anthology is worth knowing about. The contributors include established names alongside newer voices, and the book functions both as a sampler of contemporary creators and as a coherent meditation on its theme. For new readers of comics anthologies, it is an accessible entry point.