The excitement of this reality series which summarizes the life of Kevin Smith in his shop which full of comedy incidents and the customers there feels happy when they see the cultures artifacts and the legends. So the first season of this series opens with Kevin, who will play a hockey in the street of the towns.
Comic Book Men fails on its own terms. These gentlemen are clearly capable of talking about such matters in terms suitable for a Ph.D. oral examination administered by Tarantino, but the show gives us mere word-bubble quips.
The characters are not inviting or interesting, which would seem to leave out norms. And the comic book/pop culture aspect is so watered down, so entry level, that nerds will [feel] condescended to.
It's diverting, a little sad, a little boring, full of geeky macho posturing and ultimately pointless, much like a Wednesday afternoon in a comic-book shop.
These sad transactions recall the working class despair embedded in so many Smith projects, from Mallrats to Jersey Girl... What is strange, though, is how little Comic Book Men attempts to engage with that despair.
It can be annoying to stand in a store and listen to the employees babble on endlessly about some obscure comic book or movie, and Comic Book Men captures that feeling of "just let me buy this book so I can get out of here" effortlessly.
Comic Book Men is certainly genial, good-natured, eccentric and dry-witted... But its appeal is impossibly narrow, even within that subgenre of unscripted series that revel in the eccentric pursuits of glorious oddballs.
Given the lofty place comics, sci-fi and fantasy occupy in movies and pop culture, it's overdue to have a show for devotees, and from afar, Smith appears to be the guy to do it. It's only too bad this series about collectibles is so, well, disposable.
