Line #23 ComicBook/TheEltingvilleClub


1	[[quoteright:243:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the_eltingville_club_hc_collected_edition_2014.jpg]]
2	''The Eltingville Club'' is a comic book by Creator/EvanDorkin (and occasionally colored by Dorkin's wife, Sarah Dyer) and published by Creator/DarkHorseComics and Creator/SlaveLaborGraphics. It follows the misadventures of a small group of four problematic geek teenagers, with each member showing a specific interest in one area of the geek fandom.
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4	The comic was adapted into a pilot for an animated series on Creator/CartoonNetwork's Creator/AdultSwim in 2002, but didn't get picked up.
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7	!!This comic has examples of:
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9	* AntiRoleModel: It's apparent that some of Bill's abysmal attitude is a result of years of hanging around Joe the comic shop owner, whose toxic attitude on everything from women to his customers clearly rubbed off on him.
10	* BreakingTheFellowship: Played often for laughs at the end of each episode with the tagline "Is this the end of The Eltingville Club?" However, this is played straight in the last two episodes, [[spoiler: as the parents forbid them to seeing each other after Bill burns Joe's store, and in the epilogue, where Jerry cut ties for good after a failed reunion.]]
11	* BorrowedCatchphrase: Jerry uses "Beedee beedee beedee" as his own catchphrase in reference to Twiki from {{ComicStrip/Buck Rogers}}. In the pilot episode, this actually becomes important, as Bill and Josh's exhaustively long trivia showdown comes to an end when Bill asks who says "Beedee beedee beedee", and Josh blurts out Jerry instead of Twiki, causing him to lose.
12	* CardSharp: The dice variant. Bill's percentile dice are loaded so he can always get a favorable result. He gets caught by the rest of the group at the start of "The Intervention".
13	* CerebusSyndrome: An interesting example. While the chaos the club members create never stops being absurd, the repercussions of their actions gradually become less and less funny as the comic continues, escalating to the point of Bill burning down a store, at which point it becomes clear something is ''genuinely'' wrong with him. By the end, particularly "This Fan... This Monster!", the club members (except Jerry) have become more tragic and unsettling than funny.
14	* ChekhovsGun: At the begining of "This Fan... This Monster!", Joe mentions to Bill that he's using a kiddie pool in order to catch the leaks on his roof during the rain. [[spoiler: At the climax of the chapter, as the store collapses from the fire, the kiddie pool full of water falls on Bill's burning body, saving his life.]]
15	* ChildrenAreInnocent: [[spoiler: At the end of "This Fan... This Monster!", Jerry reminisces back to the much more innocent times when they first started the club.]]
16	* DidntThinkThisThrough: [[spoiler:In a fit of impotent rage (Combined with a possible concussion), Bill lights Joe's comic shop on fire, not stopping to realize it's a bad idea to do so ''while he himself is still standing in it''.]]
17	* DownerEnding: [[spoiler: The comic ends with the group discussing the chaos they caused at Comic Con and how they are likely to get arrested and face charges now that they're adults who aren't protected by their parents. Jerry cuts ties with his former friends for good upon being blamed by the other members, realizing they still haven't matured, and decides to leave the car they're hiding in and search for Mindy, fearing for her safety.]]
18	* EvenEvilHasStandards: Pete, who in his adulthood admits to sexually exploit women in his pornographic movies, is appalled by Bill's misogynistic tirade against [[spoiler:Mandy, Jerry's girlfriend]].
19	-->'''Pete''': Wow. I mean, I'm someone who thinks women ain't much more than receptacles an' even I'm offended by that shit.
20	* EvilIsPetty: As shown in the timeskip epilogue, Bill still carries the head of the broken Boba Fett solely to torment Josh with.
21	* FailedPilotEpisode: The comic was adapted into an animated pilot, but never got picked up.
22	* FatBastard:
23	** Joe, the comic store owner who often mistreats his costumers and takes advantage of their fanaticism to sell his merch at ridiculously high prices.
24	** Josh, the most overweight member of the club, often picks fights with Bill over petty stuff and acts pretty awful, especially when collections are involved.
25	* FourTemperamentEnsemble: While the group as a whole leans towards the [[HairTriggerTemper choleric]], each member expresses it in a different way:
26	** Choleric: Bill, the angriest, most self-absorbed member of the four.
27	** Melancholic: Josh, a miserable recluse who's always complaining about everything.
28	** Sanguine: Pete, who though [[HotBlooded hot-tempered]] is generally passionate and positive about his love of horror.
29	** Phlegmatic: Jerry, the ineffectual voice of reason.
30	* TheFriendNobodyLikes: Bill, the self-proclaimed leader of the group, is the most disliked member of the gang, and for good reason, as Bill tends to get them into deeper trouble. By the time of "This Fan... This Monster!", the rest of the group was thinking of kicking him out of the group for good.
31	* FutureLoser: Most of the members of the group don't adapt to adulthood too well. Jerry seems to be the only one who seems to have changed for the better, trying to avoid what happened to his fellow club members.
32	** [[spoiler:Josh is a failed comic writer working for a comic book news website whose ideas always end up being rejected by publishers.]]
33	** [[spoiler:Pete, now balding, works as a film director specializing in the creation of horror porn, a position that he frequently uses to exploit desperate women.]]
34	** [[spoiler:Still, the latter two come out looking rosy compared to Bill, who - unsurprisingly - is the member with the worst outcome. Still living with his mother, Bill became a failed independent dealer and expert in comics and collectibles whose collection maintenance business failed due to him losing his customers' trust by slacking on the job and taking advantage of them. By the time the epilogue started, he sunk so low to the point of attempting to steal comics at comic-con by taking advantage of the vendor of a commercial stand being distracted with a client.]]
35	* GoodAngelBadAngel: Parodied with Joe in the pilot. Upon witnessing Bill and Josh's desperation to own his Boba Fett, Joe's demon appears and suggests Joe to scam the Eltingville boys by pricing it for $200. As soon as he's finished, Joe's angel appears and suggests increasing its price to $250, ending up with Joe deciding to sell it for $300.
36	* HopeSpot: "Lo, There Shall Be an Epilogue!" starts out with Jerry and Bill reuniting at Comic-Con and reminiscing about their youths, with Bill making self-deprecating jokes about burning down comic shops. It seems like they might have all been able to grow up and change as people... and then they meet up with Pete and Josh, and everything goes downhill.
37	* InternetJerk: [[spoiler: Bill uses his alias Greedo 318 to bully Josh anonymously. Jerry exposes him in retaliation when Bill reveals that he's the one who started rumors in order to destroy Jerry's relationship with his former love Zawatsky.]]
38	* JerkassHasAPoint: For all his faults, Pete is ''completely'' correct in the epilogue about his assumption that hanging out with Bill again will go horribly wrong.
39	* LighterAndSofter: The failed pilot is ''very'' toned down from the comic that spawned it. Omitting the comic's grotesque at times art-style, and removing the very copious swearing.
40	* MirrorUniverse: One story is about the Club's alternate-universe cultural (but not moral) opposite selves, the "Northwest Comix Collective", who are obnoxious, pretentious art-comix fans.
41	* OnlySaneMan: Jerry Stokes Jr. is this in comparison to the other members, as he has a more easygoing personality and is calmer than his peers. [[spoiler: He's also the only one who succeeds in love and the only member who permanently decides to cut ties with them upon realizing how toxic his former friends were.]]
42	* PersonaNonGrata
43	** The group gets banned from Toys 'R' Us when Pete decides to burn the steel toys and the fire spreads to the store.
44	** Downplayed with Joe. He has kicked out the group from his store several times and has openly stated his dislike for the boys. The only reason he hasn't fully banned them is due to them being his best customers. [[spoiler: That's until Bill gets drunk with power destroying his store and burns it to the ground.]]
45	** [[spoiler: At the end of "Lo, There Shall Be an Epilogue!" The Eltingville group fears that they will be banned from every geeky store, con and event in existence after Bill causes havoc at Comic Con.]]
46	* PlayingTheVictimCard: Seen in the pilot. After Josh makes a mistake and loses the trivia showdown, he states that it was obvious he knew the correct answers and starts claiming that all the people who called them out are anti-Semites.
47	* ProperlyParanoid: In "Lo, There Shall Be an Epilogue!", Josh and Pete aren't willing to let Bill join the reunion, pointing out how troublesome he was, only allowing him to join under Jerry's assumption that they aren't rabid teenagers anymore (and due to Bill bribing them with overpriced food). [[spoiler: They are proven right as Bill acts Immaturely in the reunion, disrespecting Jerry's girlfriend and starting a fight on purpose, which escalates horribly, ending up with the collapse of the Comic-Con convention.]]
48	* PyrrhicVictory: The conclusion to "The Intervention." Bill may have resisted the intervention and even convinced his kidnappers to become geeks again, but he's still left with his entire collection stolen and is left tied up all alone until his mother returns home.
49	* {{Pyromaniac}}:
50	** Inspired by Josh's commentary that anyone should burn the steel toys, Pete decides to burn them with his lighter, accidentally burning the Toys 'R' Us store alongside it and getting the group banned from there.
51	** [[spoiler:Upon ruining Joe's store, Bill finishes destroying the place by burning it to the ground as his resignation.]]
52	* RelationshipSabotage: [[spoiler:Bill spread around a lie that Jerry was boasting about having sex with Agnes Zawatsky, his crush from the old days. She stopped talking to Jerry after that, but he never found out why, until Bill revealed the truth during the reunion, justifying it as done in order to protect the club.]]
53	* ShopliftAndDie: Having caught and fired his former assistant, Joe makes it clear to Bill that he will kill him if he catches him stealing stuff from his store. [[spoiler: This becomes one of the reasons why he fights the Eltingville club in "This Fan... This Monster!" as he learns that Pete stole a lighter from him earlier at some point.]]
54	* StagingAnIntervention: Concerned by his son's habits, Bill's mother pays two guys to kidnap the boy, lock him in his basement and force him to quit his geeky life.
55	* TokenGoodTeamMate: Jerry, and to a lesser extent Pete. Granted, they can still be jerks like Bill and Josh.
56	* ToxicFriendInfluence: The members became the worst versions of themselves each time they were together, ramping their worst traits to near-psychotic, criminal levels. [[spoiler: At the end of "This Fan... This Monster!", their parents took notice of this and forced their sons to abandon their friendship after Bill burns Joe's store to ashes.]]
57	** Within the group, everyone universally agree that the self-proclaimed leader of the group Bill is the most problematic member due to his tendency to start conflicts and excalating them, with the group getting into deeper trouble.
58	* UsedToBeASweetKid: [[spoiler:At the end of "This Fan... This Monster!", Jerry flashes back to the founding of the club, and it turns out that ''Bill'' of all people wanted it to be a genuine celebration of the things they loved rather than "arguing about stupid crap".]]
59	* VillainProtagonist: The main characters were all varying degrees of {{Jerkass}}es, but {{The Leader}} and most prominent member Bill was by far the ''worst,'' as his extremely overbearing personality made him greatly disliked by his peers, [[VitriolicBestBuds including the other members of the Eltingville Club]]. In the second-to-last issue, Bill [[PsychopathicManchild sets fire to his workplace with his friends in it in a fit of rage]].
60	** In the GrandFinale TimeSkip, the other members of the club have found fulfilling careers and varying degrees of success in life, while LoserProtagonist Bill has become a BasementDweller and petty thief who's even ''[[TookALevelInJerkass more]]'' unpleasant than he was as a teen. Bill's milder-mannered {{Foil}} Jerry found success as a professional ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'' player with an attractive pop-culture correspondent girlfriend, and when Jerry introduces her to his old friends Bill goes on a hateful, misogynistic tirade about "[[CountryMatters cunts]]" and "cultural immigrants" ruining their fun.
61	* VitriolicBestBuds: Deconstructed. Despite claiming to be friends, the group is always seen insulting and fighting with each other over petty things. [[spoiler:Mandy, Jerry's girlfriend, directly asks the group if they were even friends at all.]]
62	* WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity: [[spoiler: As soon as Joe leaves Bill in charge of his store to attend to an emergency, the latter becomes mad with power, immediately breaking Joe's rules when he's not around and threatening clients with banning them for live if they don't comply to his demands.]]

Context ComicBook / TheEltingvilleClub