Geek a Week: Big Names and Eye-popping Art Bring Attention to Len Peralta's Year-long Project

Growing up in North Royalton, Ohio in the 1970s and '80s, Len Peralta was a bit of a collector. And not just the usual stuff like Star Wars cards and Wacky Packages stickers and comic books: Peralta collected memories, too - hanging onto all those Saturday afternoons watching Superhost and monster movies on Channel 43, for instance. And drawing. Always drawing - collecting the things in his head and saving them on paper.

A couple decades later, Peralta's still here in Northeast Ohio, now an artist and a husband and a dad - and the creator of an attention-getting "collection" all his own. Since last March, Peralta's Geek A Week art and podcasting project has celebrated influential geeks ranging from the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters' crew to Clevelanders Harvey Pekar and Toby Radloff, depicting them as caricatures in a set of trading card-style art.

"I grew up on comics and cartoons, and it's just kind of a geeky extension of who I used to be," the 40-year-old Peralta explained. "It's always been a part of my personality. There are a lot of things about Geek A Week that are from my childhood. I was borrowing from my love of trading cards and Star Wars and all that."

Peralta's art has long showcased his geek side, from his illustrations in books like Ken Plume and John Robinson's "There's A Zombie In My Treehouse" and "Mystery Science Theater 3000" alum Trace Beaulieu's "Silly Rhymes for Belligerent Children" to his posters for W00tstock events featuring the likes of Wil Wheaton and science fiction author John Scalzi.

The idea for Geek A Week was hatched last winter, and by March, the first card made its debut. Featuring musician Jonathan Coulton as a zombie killer and a humorous back-of-the-card style biography and "fun facts" provided by musical duo Paul and Storm the piece struck just the tone Peralta had sought. From the nostalgic feel of the card's design elements to the pop culture crossover to the cardback text, Peralta said, "it seemed to have formed really quickly into exactly what I wanted it to be."

And he's crafted his 52-geek list from across the interest spectrum: "FoxTrot" comic strip creator Bill Amend; Mythbuster Kari Byron; filmmaker Kevin Smith; Apple guru Steve Wozniak; Lucasfilm writer Bonnie Burton.

"It's always been about being passionate about something," Peralta said. "It's about celebrating and elevating the passion people have for a certain subject."

He also began recording chats with the people he was drawing.

"You can enter this project from a bunch of different ways," he said. "You can look at the art and appreciate the art, or if you want to go deeper, you can listen to these interviews."

Peralta says he was near the halfway point of the project when he felt it really started to garner more widespread interest - and he marveled at it. "I think it was around the time of 'Weird Al' Yankovic (Card #29)," he recalled. "There was a time in the summer when I was getting email from one hero of mine after another."

He confesses, though, to having missed on one particularly great opportunity: Peralta "never mustered up enough courage" to get in touch with Harvey Pekar and ask him to be part of the deck. After the "American Splendor" writer died in July, Peralta drew a special "Legend Series" card honoring him.

With 2011 coming up fast, Geek A Week is entering the home stretch. The project has gotten attention from the likes of CNN, G4TV, and The Onion's AV Club. And while Peralta is wrapping up the last dozen or so cards, Peralta would like to take the project one step further. Since the beginning, he's fielded questions about whether or not these works of art were available as actual trading cards. Then, l ast summer, online retailer ThinkGeek printed and gave away mini-sets of eight Geek A Week trading cards over the Internet and at Comic Con in San Diego.

The response to Geek A Week showing up in physical form was more than encouraging, and Peralta hopes that leads to more print runs in the future.

"I think the most amazing thing is just that people like it," he said. "It's just been really well-received ... and it's really humbling to work on something that people really seem to enjoy."