Being an artist myself, I think I can safely say that artists are not particularly articulate people.

Don't get me wrong, most of us like to talk, and we do talk, a lot, mostly to each other, about the kinds of things that bore our friends and loved ones to tears. We have a secret language, an inner world that we all find endlessly fascinating. I, for example, am capable of virtually endless chatter about the character designs in the latest Miyazaki films, the state of storytelling in the comics industry, the merits of THE LORD OF THE RINGS. If I'm not in the company of other nerds, I have to keep such conversation to a minimum. And when my fellow comics creators and I get going, even nerds goggle at the obsessiveness of which we're capable.

I recall, for example, one San Diego Comicon when a bunch of us struggling creators of dubious ability and few prospects all piled into a Horton Plaza theatre to watch INDEPENDENCE DAY. We were horror-struck. Afterwards and for the rest of the convention, we could talk about nothing else. We discussed in excruciating detail just how dreadful this movie was, how it managed to fulfil the necessities required for a hit film in the most formulaic, contrived and often downright plagiaristic manner imaginable. To anyone other than out-of-work comics creators, we must have been unendurable.

'Artists have an inner world that we all find endlessly fascinating.' In the larger world, I frequently have to stuff down the desire to discuss what's really on my mind, and do the best I can talking about who's divorcing whom, what's happening in the stock market, how's the weather, blah blah blah... when I really want to geek out about how amazing it would be if Christian Bale played Batman in the soon to be never released YEAR ONE movie.

Why do we love this world so much?

I've recently come upon an idea. While many little nerdlings grow up to become creators of things such as comic books, software or rock and roll, the popular kids, the prom queens and varsity lettermen, end up in marketing or business, buying and selling, living off the people skills they developed in high school. Prom queens came of age within the cult of personality, and stay there. Nerds are happiest when given a project and left alone to accomplish it. As kids, the two groups hated each other, but in the adult world, we live in a symbiotic partnership, both needing the other to survive.

I saw this division most clearly in my brief career as a videogame artist at a large company. The office's two floors were divided between the developers upstairs and the administration downstairs. Two worlds could not be any more dissimilar. Downstairs you had the reception desk, some tasteful displays of the company's various products, and just to spice things up, the mock-up rubber heads of alien characters from some science fiction game they'd produced.

Behind that were the neat, elegant cubicles, most of which looked much the same, except for the occasional poster from a recently released game, or maybe a collection of Star Trek memorabilia. The outside walls were lined with private offices. Upstairs was a different story. There were toys everywhere. Collections of bizarre and offensive imagery would accumulate on the walls. Music would blare from cubicles; Bee Gees one day, Hard Knock Life the next. There were no private offices. Everyone was in cubicles.

'Nerds are happiest when given a project and left alone to accomplish it.' Yet the company couldn't function without both groups. The developers needed the administrators to talk banks into giving loans, to talk magazines into giving favourable reviews, and to talk buyers into buying the products. Admin needed us to actually make something worth selling. But needless to say, there were few friends between floors.

As a fledgling writer, I've found that the most difficult part of the craft is selling the idea. A publisher says, "What's it about?" and I'll launch into the most incoherent, incomprehensible babble they've ever heard. I'll pull at my facial hair. I'll say "ya know" every seven seconds. I'll get so excited about getting the idea into their heads that I'll forget what I'm saying and trail off into "umms" and "uhs" before finding my place and resuming my clumsy narrative. Six months later I'll show them a finished comic series and they'll go, "Oh, that's what you were yammering about". Federico Fellini used to say, "They always want to produce my last film." I wonder why?

The French have a phrase, "l'esprit d'escalier", the spirit of the staircase, referring to the tendency to think of the right thing to say long after the moment to say it is past. When you're halfway down the stairs after loosing the argument, that's when the perfect retort appears in your brain. You serious TV nerds might remember George Costanza from Seinfeld and his snappy rejoinder, thought up over coffee hours after the argument, "The jerkstore called, and they're out or you!"

l'esprit d'escalier. I like it. Not quite as good as the Germans' "shadenfruede", but I relate to the concept. Basically, when it counts, I can never get it together and say the right thing. I think this is a common malady among creative people.

'What's a comic book but a magnificently re-written childhood?' If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch an academy awards ceremony. You will never see a more awkward, more poorly socialized group of people in your life. Actors make nerds look positively graceful. Many of them very wisely write down what they intend to say and rehearse it thoroughly. The ones who don't have an unpleasant tendency to make terrible jackasses of themselves. Young women burst into hysterical tears, middle-aged men go on hubris-induced tirades about their personal beliefs or the nature of their careers until everyone is feeling incredibly uncomfortable.

If you want an explanation of this phenomenon, think about the spirit of the staircase. Don't we all occasionally wish that we could do over some moment, that we could get our shit together and say exactly what we want to say, gracefully and concisely, and for once come off looking good? What's a comic book but a magnificently re-written childhood, making the protagonist a powerful (and usually misunderstood) hero who does the right thing and looks sexy doing it? What's an actor if not someone who wants to have all the right things to say memorised? What's a writer but someone who has something to say and takes the time to put it just so? What's an artist if not someone who wants to share their idea of beauty in perfect relief?

They're all nerds, the people who couldn't make it in the cult of personality, who didn't know how to talk to other kids, who aren't articulate. In some ways, the inability to communicate drives us to draw it, to write it, to recite the lines over and over again till they come out perfect. We're all composing our ideal world, the building blocks of which are the realm of imagination and the craft of creation. The obsessions of nerds, I believe, spring from that search for just the right thing to say, and just the right setting in which to say it.

I sometimes wish I could just say it. It'd save time.

Oh well.

Ted Naifeh is the creator of the COURTNEY CRUMRIN books from Oni Press and the co-creator of HOW LOATHSOME from NBM.

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