For many classic sitcoms, the setting is just as indelible as the comedy. From TV station WJM in Minneapolis, to the Sunshine Cab Company in New York, to a little Boston bar named Cheers, these locations not only supplied the premise for their respective television shows but provided access to a multitude of supporting characters unique to their environment. The same ultimately holds true for Anti-Matter, a web series set in a New York City comic book store that features its own assortment of offbeat characters just like those found on Taxi and Cheers in years past.
Comic book culture has already served as fodder for numerous web series, including the Dallas-based The Variants. While that series focused on the staff of Zeus Comics – some of whom were portrayed by actual employees of the establishment – and contained threads of an underlying storyline running through the handful of standalone installments, Anti-Matter gives equal screen time to its customers and features actors from the Upright Citizen’s Brigade and New York comedy scene.
Almost any work environment provides a bounty of potential characters – as the sprawling supporting cast of the NBC sitcom The Office successfully proves – and a comic book store is no different than a paper company. There’s employee Mike (Justin Tyler), who realizes the dead-end and mind-numbing nature of his job but does nothing about it; co-worker Ginger (Julie Katz), who is easily flustered by the store’s clientele and harbors a secret crush on Green Lantern; regular customers Jeremy (Davram Stiefler) and Taylor (Johnathan Fernandez), who apparently hang out at the store full-time; and senior manager Kaitlin (Kirstan Perry), who is able to keep the store functioning through a unique form of psychological manipulation.
With so many characters and an infinite source of acting talent from the Upright Citizen’s Brigade, it is no wonder that Anti-Matter uses them sparingly. There may not be an overarching narrative to the episodes but the web series paints an accurate picture of comic book culture nonetheless, replete with the requisite references to its environment as well as more relatable storylines involving everyday life. In the same way that Cheers was a very funny television show that just happened to take place in a bar, the same could be said of Anti-Matter in regards to a comic book store.
In the episode “Kung-Fu,” for instance, customer Jeremy is scared for his life after smack talking an aspiring MMA fighter on X-Box 360 the night before. African American Dennis (Pedro Lee) tries to teach him the ways of the street but Jeremy’s attempts at urban speak only make matters worse to hilarious effect.
“First Date,” meanwhile, features Mackenzie (Christina Calph) and Kayla (Shannon Coffey) offering advice to Bernie (Walter Vincent) for his date later that evening on everything from what clothes to wear to what movies to watch, as well as testing his kissing talents and ability to fondle a woman’s breast.
“I’m pretty surprised,” Mackenzie observes after scaring Bernie away. “He was pretty good with his hands.”
While such episodes could easily occur in any environment, other installments of Anti-Matter are more geared to the comic book store setting. In “Hierarchy,” Mike instructs co-worker Ginger on the different levels of geekdom. “It’s the nerd classification system,” he explains. “It doesn’t really apply to girls. With girls you’re either cool or you’re not. It’s a guy thing. It’s nature’s way of saying ‘sorry about giving you only three different emotions – anger, lust and a more extreme form of lust.’”
And in “Bag and Board,” manager Kaitlin effectively manipulates Jeremy and Taylor into bagging and boarding a recently acquired collection of comic books. When Mike insists that Kaitlin could never use the same technique on him, he is inevitably coerced into walking ten blocks to buy his boss a burrito for lunch.
“The basis for the humor in Anti-Matter is that as a comic fan, you’re hanging out with your buds and probably being an ass at someone’s place of business,” creator Chris Walker explained to Wired in December 2010. “I know because I was that guy. I’d come by and talk smack on new comics every Wednesday with everyone in the store right up until closing, at which point they would kindly ask me to leave.”
Geek culture has steadily begun to seep into mainstream entertainment in recent years. There’s The Big Bang Theory on CBS, for instance, which features two brilliant but socially inept scientists who are more comfortable with their comic book and action figure collections than with what is commonly considered the “real world,” while one of the most successful web series in recent years, The Guild, centers on a group of online gamers.
Anti-Matter adds to the growing movement by not only setting its episodes in the geek-friendly environment of a comic book store but by crafting small snippets of a lifestyle than can easily be relatable to anyone, regardless of their cultural orientation.
Comic books aren’t just for kids anymore, and web series like Anti-Matter aren’t just for geeks – they can easily be enjoyed by anyone who appreciates quality entertainment.
Anthony Letizia