Geeking-Out, Nerd Culture, and Oral History Methodology: An Interview with See You at San Diego’s Mathew Klickstein (Part One)

Mathew Klickstein is a multi-platform storyteller who consistently works in the formats of: reportage, non-fiction books and novels, ghostwriting, filmmaking, episodical television, live theatre, public speaking, comic book creation, audiobook originals, and podcasting. His recent book, See You at San Diego: An Oral History of Comic-Con, Fandom, and the Triumph of Geek Culture, is a fascinating (and unexpected) journey into the pop culture world. An excellent resource for fandom researchers and educators, See You at San Diego uses Comic-Con as a vehicle (or rather, a DeLorean) for introducing a broad cast of influential characters within pop culture who share their stories, opinions, and geekiness with the reader. Teeming with entertaining tangents and Easter eggs for the super-fan or keen reader, this oral history is one for the books - comic or otherwise!

As an acafan who proudly participates in numerous fandoms and a regular Comic-Con attendee over the last half-decade, I was thrilled to interview Mathew Klickstein about this book. Here, we discuss the often-circuitous path that is qualitative research and book publishing, as well as the implications of pop cultures’ transformation over the decades and its changing dynamic within fandom studies/ theory.

Cover of See You at San Diego (klickstein, 2022)

One of my favorite components to any superhero, fantasy, or Sci Fi narrative is the origin story. So before diving into the specifics of See You at San Diego I wanted to talk to you about its origin story. You have described the book as “the director's cut” of the SiriusXM podcast, Comic-Con Begins. I was wondering if you could explain what the podcast was about and how has See You at San Diego developed out of that. 

A lot of this goes back to 2014. I had just gotten off of finishing both the completion of and large scale promotion of my Nickelodeon book, Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age. And that was extremely challenging on a number of different levels. Although that did come up as a clue on Jeopardy not too long ago. But, I was kind of exhausted, similar to what I always read and heard about what happened to Paul Thomas Anderson when he went from Boogie Nights to Magnolia - where what he really wanted to do was a simpler, easier, shorter project, but “whoops” it turned into Magnolia because he can’t help himself - same thing with me. 

It is 2014 and it is the 30th anniversary of Revenge of the Nerds. I had been reading those 33 ⅓ books; they were these little books that were about different movies- really random ones too. That really intrigued me, so I hit my agent at the time and said “I would love to do something like that about Revenge of the Nerds for the 30th anniversary.” So, I started interviewing people like Curtis Armstrong and director Jeff Kanew. I really enjoyed it and had some great conversations. And from that it started to change and develop to a point when my agent discovered that people in the industry all liked the idea of a book on Revenge of the Nerds, but they also said “well, there is just not enough there for that.” And also the publisher that was doing those movie books already folded or something - you know how that goes. And everyone was like, “but all this other stuff Matt is starting to capture…” When I talked to Curtis [Armstrong], we talked for over 2 ½ hours. And we were not just talking about Revenge of the Nerds. Also around this time, there was a lot of other discussions going on about what nerd and geek culture means, what it means to be a fan and all this - pop culture and all that. So the publishers were more interested in that larger story. So now I’m working on this book that went from small to huge, about the changing face of nerd and geek culture. Through that process I started talking to a bunch of people, one of them was Wendy All. She became my Comic-Con contact because she was one of the original committee members. 

Then, a lot of other things happened… and there was a moment when [the book] was orphaned. I was really upset because I already put a lot into this; I interviewed all these people, and this book is going to be a game changer - not just for me, but for the industry, and I really wanted to get at what it was to be a nerd and a geek. I got really invested in reading all these philosophy books - I was reading Theodor Adorno, Rousseau, Raymond Williams…

Oh wow! You were reading in my land!

I always tell everyone, that was my PhD! I was interviewing professors and neurologists. I was breaking new ground. [But] when we found the other editor, it was clear that she wanted this to be kind of a behind-the-scenes rumor mill about Big Bang Theory etc. When we started talking about footnotes, she was like “wait a second, footnotes?! Why would you have footnotes?” And I was like “oh. Uh oh. So I’m not going to have a joke about don’t mix-up György Lukács with George Lucas?” She was like, “who?”

Oops!

So anyway, that kind of fell apart. But, it always stuck with me that I wanted to do something more with all this information. And then the years go by, 2019 rolls around, I need a new project, I’m with a new agent, and then I realize the 50th anniversary of Comic-Con had just happened and I missed it. But boy, there still hasn’t been anything big on Comic-Con. So we went from there!

Wendy was really my cipher for that world. She did two really important things for me. She got me a list of everybody’s names and what they had done, who they were, their emails and phone numbers - but most importantly she told them about me. So everything was coming together with setting up the interviews. But maybe as you have heard, this was the end of 2019 early 2020….soooo, something happened. 

What? Something happened in 2020? What was that?

Yes, as is my Sisyphus life. So when Covid hits hard, the publishing industry just was upside down just like everything else. Everyone was fleeing their offices and you couldn’t get a hold of anyone.  Luckily, I had a buddy who had done some podcast stuff and had risen the ranks at SiriusXM. They were one of the companies that said, “hey this is a good thing for us. Now people are going to be sitting around needing something to do.” They were going crazy for original content. So I have this great producing team and editing team, and the podcast was getting a lot of coverage because Comic-Con was virtual and there was not much to say about Comic-Con except that it wasn’t happening. In the podcast we used 4-5 hours of interviews, and I had recorded 70 [hours]. There was so much more stuff I wanted to talk about - what's going to happen to the con in the future, Comic Fest, the backstory of Sergio Aragones, Bradbury, but we didn’t want the podcast series to be 50 hours. 

Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Katz, and sergio Aragoné at the berkeley con in 1976 (See You at San Diego, p26)

Right, I saw in the book you do get into all of this.

Exactly. So now I have the podcast, which is great because when I’m talking to people about the book, I can say it's going to be like the podcast but 10 times as much. Stan Sakai, who was involved, said this would be great for Gary at Fantagraphics. Gary listened to the podcast and loved it. We made a deal pretty quickly in September 2021. He was supervising editor and brought on a really great team. Designer. Jonathan Barli and the three of us just made this thing happen. I’m even tearing up now, because as hard as it was, and as hard as every book is, from all the way back to 2014, when I had a different version of it to everything that's happened over the last few years…this one is like “I can’t believe it's actually here.” 

So that’s the full origin story and I swear to you I will keep my next answers much, much shorter!

That’s totally okay - it’s great! As someone who interviews other people, you would rather have extra content than not enough.

Right, exactly. And I tell that to people as well. The more clay you give me the better the castle I’m building. 

Exactly! So, along those lines, I think one of the most impressive aspects of this book is the breadth and variety of interviews. For those of us who do qualitative research, this is interview gold. I wrote my dissertation on the production of Law & Order: SVU, and I found significant success in just cold messaging producers, writers, directors, and actors and then expanding within that network. I discovered that people really love to talk about their craft. And I was wondering what your experience was in gathering these interviews, talking to people, and compiling the oral history format? I know you mentioned that you got a lot of your connections through Wendy All.

Wendy helped connect me to a lot of the people, and SiriusXM helped with some of the celebrity interviews - the Russo brothers, Scott Auckerman, Felicia Day; I have my own network of certain celebrities I can get to through different people. Kevin Smith for example, I had just worked on a documentary project and [he] was part of that. Frankly, simply put, I have gotten very good over the years at getting people simply because I have had to for other projects I have done in my life that have been very interview based.

One of my favorite stories is Frank Miller. Frank was a fun one. I have been trying to get Frank Miller for months, and this is going back to when I am still working on the podcast. I’m trying to talk to a bunch of his different representatives, and I am just getting nothing back. I get very meticulous about it - very into the “collect them all” mentality. 

A very Comic-Con mentality to have!

Yeah! I stay on it. So, Marc Summers said something that I always like to tell people. He said, “Matt, you are a pain in the ass, but in a good way.” But anyways, I’m getting nothing from Frank Miller. Meanwhile, there is a lot in the book of George DiCaprio. I don’t know why, it had never dawned on me to try to interview George, but I thought it would be really cool to talk to Leonardo DiCaprio. As you can tell from the interviews, I wanted it to be eclectic. I didn’t want it to be just a bunch of comic book people or a bunch of science fiction people. It would be kind of great to have Leo in here, not just for the marketing purpose, but to show it's a very vast field I’m playing in. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t getting much of a response from that either, but I kept bugging his publicist over and over again. And at one point she said, “we are not going to give you Leonardo DiCaprio, but this is about Comic-Con and comics, right? Do you want Frank Miller? We represent him too.” So, I get Frank Miller because I bugged Leo’s publicist so much, she just threw up her hands and said, “Okay, here’s Frank Miller!” And it's like, “Ok, thanks! Bye!” And that’s how that happened!

That’s a great story! I love when things work out that way. 

We were doing interviews for a few months, and we did them however we could. Some of the people we talked to didn’t have computers, we were just learning how to use Zoom at the time like everyone else in the world. We did mail out recording devices. That was the nice thing about working with SiriusXM is that we had equipment and a shipping budget. They were really working with me to make sure we could get the best quality recordings we could. Some people, like Sergio, like Neil, like Kevin, just recorded their own stories and sent it to me, and I gave them talking points. I also really wanted to make sure we had Richard Alf and he is such an important figure, and I found an amazing interview with him for the 40th Anniversary [of Comic-Con] that was really good, crystal clear, that was just before he passed away. I tracked down the producer who gave me permission to use it. So that’s how we got Richard Alf in there. 

Also, Pamela Jackson runs some kind of pop-culture library at San Diego State University - I have the links at the back of the book - but she did something called The Comic-Con Kids Project. She did a bunch of interviews with these people with videos and I hit her up to see if we could use some of that material. She had actually interviewed some of the people I was already interviewing, but I thought, like you and I just said, the more material the better! So, I gave her a call and she was like “thank God something came! We had all these grants and did all this work, and we put it up online, but we don’t really have anything to do with it… Please take this and do something amazing with it!” 

I had put together oral histories before; I have edited documentaries before. So, I had spent a good two months or so (sometimes like 15 hours a day - I got really into it, it was so much fun) [going] through every single interview and I just started cutting them together, basically like cutting a documentary. My team at SiriusXM were able to go through it and take this massive thing that I cut together (I cut probably 70 hours down to 50 hours, but at least it was all in order now), and they were able to help me cut that down to the 7 or so hours to make the podcast that happened. When I did the book, I quite literally went back to that original 50-hour thing and it is basically the skeleton, which is why I call it a director’s cut. 

Lauren Alexandra Sowa is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at Pepperdine University. She recently received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on intersectional feminism and representation within production cultures, television, and popular culture. These interests stem from her several-decade career in the entertainment industry as member of SAG/AFTRA and AEA. Lauren is a proud Disneyland Magic Key holder and enthusiast of many fandoms.