The holiday season can be a stressful time of year. Amidst the craziness of booking flights to visit your family, preparing feasts, or simply maintaining your sanity while maneuvering holiday traffic, the last thing on your mind may be finalizing your holiday gift list. Fanboy Comics is here to help with the best recommendations for gifts to give the geeks in your life. Not everything falls into the categories of graphic novels, DVDs, games, or apparel. Geeks also like gifts that help them decorate their home with their favorite properties or jam out to a great playlist from a favorite film. Highlighting such items and closing out our 2014 Holiday Gift Guide, we present to you our geeky extras. Happy Holidays! – Kristine Chester
Artwork from James Hance (Jameshance.com)
Recommended by Erik Cheski
James Hance is a British artist living in Jacksonville who makes nerdy art come alive. Mixing and matching various fandoms like The Muppets and Serenity’s crew in his “Firefrog,” Star Wars and Up with Russel and Carl becoming Luke and Han (There’s one with the Carl and Ellie mailbox converted to Han and Leia with a multicolored Falcon in the background that hangs prominently in my home.), or just dropping superheroes into classics with “Dark Starry Knight.” (It’s SO good.) He’ll get on a tear and do portraits of awesome characters from movies and games, doing series of Ghostbusters and Labryrinth portraits that capture the essence of what we love about them. His brain just works on another level when it comes to his creativity, and you can feel the joy he gets from creating his relentlessly cheerful art. He’s always creating new stuff, especially when a new season of geekness drops. Check out his stuff at Jameshance.com and find the perfect gift for the nerdy person on your list.
Guardians of the Galaxy – Awesome Mix Vol. 1: CD, Deluxe Vinyl Edition, or Limited Edition Cassette Tape
Recommended by Amy Hypnarowski
Get your discerning, nerdy music-loving friend hooked on the Awesome Mix Vol. 1, the official Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack. Featuring every song on Peter Quill’s “Awesome Mix,” the soundtrack is certified gold and is only $10 on Amazon (which also includes a digital download of the soundtrack that may conveniently find its way onto your computer, hint hint). Challenge your friend to a dance off, Peter Quill style, to “Ooh Child” by The Five Stairsteps, start an epic quest to save the galaxy (’cause, after all, we’re one of the idiots who live in it) while rocking to Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love,” and play the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” to their bamboo plant. Who knows . . . it may start dancing.
Want to up the ante? Treat them to the Deluxe Edition Vinyl Edition, which also includes the entire orchestral score by Tyler Bates ($22.99 on Amazon) or the extremely exclusive cassette tapes of the Awesome Mix, available November 17th – and only until the end of the year at specific locations.
If you manage to score one of those cassette tapes for a friend who actually knows what a cassette tape is, I think that puts you in the running for nerd friend of the year.
Nerdy Subscription Boxes
Recommended by Joshua Desjardins
Shopping for everyday necessities is boring. Especially when monthly subscription packages are available for just about anything you can think of. So, if you can’t decide what to get your loving nerd this holiday season, why not sign them up for a monthly box of geeky memorabilia?! There are so many to choose from, but each subscription service offers a unique touch.
LootCrate is probably the cheapest of them all, starting at only $20/month which includes shipping. Although you are not always guaranteed to get a t-shirt in each box, a couple items per month are worth more than the $20, and that’s not including the stickers and other smaller items inside. LootCrate also has a theme each month with collectibles relating to said theme.
Nerd Block is probably the most popular of all the subscription boxes, mostly because of its wide variety of monthly choices. While their regular Block will usually include all things comic book related, their Arcade Block will offer a monthly gift filled with video game trinkets. They even have a Horror Block as well as Junior boxes for the little ones. These will range from $20-$30/month after shipping.
The new block on the block would be My Geeky Goodies. Starting at $25/month, MGG promises to send either a t-shirt OR a Funko POP! Vinyl toy in every box. And, almost all of these services offer monthly drawings for larger boxes of goodies! But, regardless of what subscription package you go for, any of these boxes is the gift that keeps on giving every month of the year! What nerd won’t like that?
R2-D2 USB Hub and Car Charger
Recommended by Jodi Scaife
Nothing can match the stress and worry about shopping for the Star Wars fan in your life. (We at FBC worry about what to get Head of Lightsaber Maintenance and Repair Sean Foster every time we hit a gift-giving occasion!) You’ve already scoured eBay for copies of the original edits of the original trilogy and splurged on the X-Wing knife block and even sat through the holiday special, so what else is there? Enter the R2-D2 USB hub and R2-D2 USB car charger to save the day! These recreations of the cute, chirpy droid clearly hold Star Wars nostalgia and perform useful services like charging two tablets at once! The USB hub even mimics the original R2’s signature sounds every time you plug in a peripheral!
Both the R2-D2 USB hub and the R2-D2 USB car charger retail for $39.99 each from Thinkgeek or Toys R Us, which is a small price for more Star Wars fun for your holidays.
