Back in my day, "nerd" meant actually being an intellectual. You know, reading books, doing math, being interested in physics, etc. How did consuming comic book slop become false signaling for what Nerdom once was?
But apparently I have them reversed in my head, for reasons that unsure of. Perhaps growing-up in a country that was not then saturated with US pop-culture is to blame. Etymology references arent particularly revealing in this case, as they just tell me what I already know.
People forget that "nerd" was just an insult, it wasn't an identity. It's was something people called you when they were beating the shit out of you for violating social and physical norms, and like the f slur it could be very loosely applied.
And since everything nowadays seems to be about surface-level signaling, cultures get represented by whatever is most visible.
So, for "actual nerds", that is comic books, I guess. Nobody will pay attention to what those comic books were (no idea if there were any of the "non-slop" kind). People spending hours poring over some math/physics/other textbook in their homes or libraries weren't exactly visible to the others. They were just the "pasty weirdos".
But then I start wondering if we are just gatekeeping nerddom?
Being a nerd has almost always been about consumer preferences. Everything from baseball cards to anime, comics, D&D, video games, all of the staples of nerd culture are also consumer culture.
In any case, I am not sure anything of this has to do with "being a nerd" per se, if I even get to understand how to properly define a category based on a term that has most often than not served as an exonym (or used to). But if I ignore this part, I would say that stuff like eg marvel comics is akin to fast food, and now it goes from being a "nerd's fast food" to being "normie's fast food". In either case, making stuff like "marvel comics" a definitional point of being a nerd seems absurd to me (and I have read tons of marvel comics in my life).