“We live in a vacation town, and people want to forget about their problems and what’s going on. So if you go out and just start hitting them with political stuff, even if it’s funny and even if they kind of agree with it, they don’t want to think about that. … They just want to have fun, they want to gamble, they want to drink,” says Greg Vaccariello, who headlines and books acts at Sin City Comedy and Burlesque at Planet Hollywood.
In a retail landscape littered with the never-to-be reanimated corpses of comic shops that have come and gone, Alternate Reality Comics has become a rare commercial survivor and Ralph Mathieu the unofficial godfather of Southern Nevada’s comic book universe.
As the sci-fi franchise reaches its 50th anniversary, fans and observers share why the show, often cheesy, struck a chord and speculate on why we can’t let go.
