Conclusion, Part 2

Everyone who takes pleasure in reading comics can call themselves a fan. And even though you might not agree with their particular tastes in comics, they’re all welcome to the club. There are so many comic fans out in the world that there’s plenty of room for everybody, regardless of whether you’re partial to superheroes or romance or funny animals or yaoi or any other genre. Rest assured that there’s a group of folks out there who enjoy the same type of comics that you do, and would be thrilled to chat with you about it. Of course, that’s where complications begin: finding those others whose tastes and passions compliment your own.

When I first announced on my blog that I was writing this book, in an attempt to ensure that I didn’t miss any significant points, I tried to solicit ideas from other fans on things they would like to see included. One person responded that I should probably decide whether to focus on fandom before or after the Internet really took hold because of the vast difference it had made. But my research had already shown that, while the Internet has indeed made a huge impact on the ability for diverse fans to get together, it hasn’t actually changed the fundamentals of their behavior. Fans were arguing about whether Superman was stronger than Captain Marvel as early as the 1940s; kids would trade comics during the Great Depression so that they could all share the same enjoyment from the same stories and talk about how great they were with one another; George Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips were so popular in the 1910s and ‘20s that a Washington, D.C. speakeasy illegally began appropriating the title character’s name and likeness to attract customers.

The ability for communication throughout the world has improved dramatically over the past century and promises to continue doing so. There are more means than ever to get in touch with other people, and form communities with them so that everyone within can share the same pleasures of the same comics. But, as has always been the case, miscommunications do occur and, with more venues possible for communication, that also means more venues possible for miscommunication. But that shouldn’t take away from the very positive idea of reaching out and sharing your passion for something you enjoy with others. It connects you with others in a positive and self-affirming way. Fans are out there, not so that you have someone to tell what you thought about the latest issue, but so that you have someone to share your life with. Perhaps not as deeply or intimately as a spouse or significant other, but sharing an aspect of your life that makes up part of your very self-identity and reinforces all the best traits within you.

There have been and will always continue to be disagreements within fandom as a whole. With hundreds of thousands of comic fans in the world, it would be impossible to get them to all agree on anything. But precisely because there are hundreds of thousands of fans, it’s easy, even necessary, for them to break into smaller groups that are more closely knit. That’s really the key to fandom: to find those people who enjoy the same types of things in comics you do and enjoy the time you can spend with them. Share your passion, your joy, with others and they’ll share theirs with you.

I’ve presented here a model with which to view comic fandom. It’s certainly not the only model out there, and it’s not necessarily the most “correct” one. But it’s one that seems to work well as I personally look at fans. I see the arguments that erupt and the divisions between groups of fans; I see the unethical and sometimes illegal acts some fans take; I see the tensions between what fans want their favorite characters to do and what the creators themselves want to do. But I also see the friends who rally around another fan who just lost her job; I see the schoolmates whose creative energy feeds off one another as they plot out new story ideas; I see introverts connecting with a larger community in a way that was simply impossible for them without comics to act as a bridge. It’s about people. It’s about feeling empowered to be yourself and having that feeling validated by those who care about you.

I love comics. It’s a wonderful medium and I’ve enjoyed reading comics my whole life. But I love comics fandom more. And I hope to spend the rest of my life a part of it.

Conclusion, Part 1

Although I had an interest in fandom previously, it wasn’t until I had read Bill Schelly’s The Golden Age of Comic Fandom at the very beginning of the century that I started gaining a deep appreciation of it. I made my first attempt at writing about comic book fans in 2002 with an essay that was intended to be part of a university press collection. The piece ended up being about 30 pages and presented a nine-step model for how comic book fans develop from the days when they first discover the medium up through when they might go on to become scholars or professionals in the industry. I made a sophomoric attempt at providing clear labels to each stage and used a Billy Batson/Captain Marvel metaphor throughout to show how quickly someone could jump from one stage to the next. I’m still pretty pleased with the auto-biographical comics I drew to accompany the essay but, in retrospect, I’m glad that particular project was never published.

Since then, I’ve spent a great deal of my time trying to learn more about comic fans and fandom. Much of what has been written about fandoms in general has seemed to focus on either sports teams or science fiction. It wasn’t difficult to start seeing parallels with comicdom. I was astounded, in fact, when I read Harry Warner, Jr.’s history of early science fiction fandom, All Our Yesterdays, with how similar it sounded to what I had learned about comics fandom. If you changed the names and shifted the timeline forward about 30 years, it would’ve provided the same story that Schelly had written about.

It was that realization that made me step back and take a look at comic fandom from a different perspective. Everything that comic fans were doing today—all of the activities I can stand here and observe first-hand—is not new. The specifics might change—websites instead of fanzines, more elaborate costumes, videography that’s comparable to something from Lucasfilm, etc.—but the emotions behind it are identical. Whether you picked up Famous Funnies #1 off the newsstand in 1934 or downloaded the latest installment of 2000 A.D. last night, the enjoyment you get out of that is eternal.

People see things they like in comics. They respond to the characters and situations and even the basic visuals themselves in an emotional way. They invest themselves in the readings of the works and begin to identify with them. “This character is just like me.” “This is the same situation I’m in.” “I would love to meet a soul mate like that.” The comics become not only an attachment of sorts, but as a conduit for themselves and even a very frame of identity. The comics become a physical manifestation and realization of an individual’s thoughts and aspirations, and other fans recognize that.

At Halloween every year, kids dress up as vampires and zombies and robots and pirates. And some kids dress up as their favorite comic-originated characters; Spider-Man and Batman are perennial favorites in my neighborhood. Those kids dress up like wall-crawlers and caped crusaders because they want to embody all the wonderful traits they see in those characters. Perhaps not a conscious level, but they’re responding to the works. They believe that something from those comics is valid and worthy to be incorporated into their own lives.

In some ways, that’s all that adult comic fans do as well. Even if they’re not making elaborate costumes, they’re using their favorite comics as signifiers of what they are trying to get out of life. An outsider can’t necessarily guess exactly what, but they can be pretty confident that the fan finds something powerful there. Maybe they prefer the notions of family and togetherness in The Fantastic Four over the scientific curiosity and exploration angles. Maybe they enjoy René Goscinny’s sense of humor in Asterix more than any ideas about cultural independence. Maybe they really don’t care all that much for Hawkman as a character, but just thought it would be a costume that would really challenge their technical abilities. Regardless of whether or not an outsider can pin down the specifics of why another fan enjoys what they do, they clearly do enjoy it at some level and would love to share that joy with others.

Yet fandom also provides a space within which fans may articulate their specific concerns about sexuality, gender, racism, colonialism, militarism, and forced conformity... Its institutions allow the expression both of what fans are struggling against and what they are struggling for; its cultural products articulate the fans’ frustration with their everyday life as well as their fascination with representations that pose alternatives.
—Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers

Blurring the Lines, Part 2

Robert Crumb proves to be another problematic example. He spent a great deal of time in his youth making Treasure Island Days comics with his older brother. The books were mainly for their own amusement and they stopped making them when they were teenagers. In 1958, they began a fanzine called Foo based loosely on the EC horror comics they enjoyed. Crumb eventually left home and began working at American Greetings in Cleveland, doing cartooning in his spare time. He eventually moved out to San Francisco and took freelance illustrating jobs to keep himself fed. He began submitting work to “hippie underground papers” and one publisher liked his work well enough to devote a whole issue to Crumb’s comics. That went over so well that he suggested Crumb do his own books, which soon turned into Zap Comix. Though Crumb initially did a lot of leg work to sell them himself, word of his work spread quickly. But despite gaining a great deal of recognition and attracting some economically impressive offers, Crumb opted against them, instead preferring to remain honest to his vision (to some consternation of his wife). It was only after several more years of work that he was able to financially support himself expressly through his comics. But exactly when that occurred is unclear and, in any event, recognition of Crumb as a professional appears to have taken place some time earlier and was what was the impetus for the generous offers that were extended to him.

Further complicating matters from the other direction are professionals who then pursue fan-like activities. Wally Wood famously started his own ‘zine called witzend which bore many similarities to comic fanzines, but contained the work of professional creators who worked for major comic publishers. Creators were credited but not compensated, instead simply being given the freedom to express themselves. Steve Ditko contributed several original “Mr. A” stories and art to not only witzend but a number of decidedly amateur fanzines as well, again going without compensation. Their work for fanzines was decidedly much more akin to that of other fans with regard to their mind-set rather than professionals earning a living through their craft.

Do I self-identify as an enthusiast? Yeah!
—Jerry Holkins, Participate

Yes, I am still a comic book fan. I am absolutely a comic book fan.
—Jim Lee, Comic Creators on Fantastic Four

Hey, I’m still a fanboy!
—Carlos Pacheco, Comicology #3

What is interesting about these examples and the hundreds, if not thousands, of others like them is that they highlight that comic book professionals are often a subset of comic fandom on the whole. Many who work in the industry began by engaging with their favorite comics beyond the basic reading. Indeed, comics like Penny Arcade, PvP and Least I Could Do became successful, in part, by their respective creators being very open with their interest in the medium. These comics, and many others like them, are not only the results of creating fan works in the creators’ spare time, but frequently also use comics and fandom as subjects and themes. The creators use comics to express their ideas about comics. They engaged (and continue to engage) the medium of comics on the whole and do not limit themselves to a single character or even publisher.

With the improvements in technology, these very fans indeed can become publishers in their own right. The start-up capital required is minimal compared to a generation ago, and many creators today can go out on their own to produce, market and sell their creations. Breeden did precisely that with The Devil’s Panties. Comic fans have the opportunity to effectively step into the comic creation process at any level their skills and desire allow.

What this means is that comic fandom can engage the medium at any level of participation they choose. In 1950, fans were largely limited to letter-writing and producing their own sketches. In the 21st century, fans can certainly still do that, of course, but they also have a greater ability to make costumes and sculptures and magazines and books and movies and almost anything else they can think of. Furthermore, if they’re good at it, they can have other fans pay them to continue doing that and, if they’re really great at it, they can get paid enough to support themselves engaging in something they love.

Blurring the Lines, Part 1

One of the things fans enjoy about comicdom is that comic book professionals feel very much a part of the comic fandom community. Professionals are generally seen as very approachable and can be found in many of the same pursuits as the rest of fandom. They post to many of the same message boards. They hunch over back issue bins looking for old comics. They draw sketches of characters they have no professional connection with. In many respects, it can be extremely difficult to tell professionals from other fans.

In point of fact, many comic professionals were themselves fans before earning a living as comic professionals and they often remain comic fans as they break into the industry. Letter pages and fanzine credits are rife with the names of people who would go on to become well-known comic book professionals. Names like Wendy Pini, Ralph Macchio, Diana Schutz, Cat Yronwoode, Steve Gerber and Mark Gruenwald can easily be found in letter columns from their days before becoming comic professionals. Likewise, comic book fanzine contributors include the likes of Paul Levitz, Gary Groth, Tony Isabella, Mark Evanier, Dave Cockrum and Robert Crumb, all of whom went on to work in the industry.

However, there is no straight path from being just a fan to being a comic professional. Nor are there ample clear markers noting when such a transition might occur. While it would be easy to note when someone might be hired by a comic publisher as a full-time employee, many comic professionals work as freelancers and take other jobs while trying to make a name for themselves in the industry.

Jennie Breeden, creator of The Devil’s Panties, was able to document, to some extent, her progress attempting become a self-sufficient artist. She spent more than a few years trying to squeak out a living from her comic. In 2006, she noted on LiveJournal when she finally felt she’d begun making enough money to live from the earnings she received from her comic...

So I quit my job.
About a month or two ago...
Holycrap
Holycrap holycrap holycrap
I am now, officialy, [sic] an artist.
holycrap.
I’ve been doing a ton of conventions, not going to work... and my bank acount [sic] has been increasing so I guess I’m doing well. Still eating Ramen mind you, but I can pay rent and fill up my tank.

She elaborated on her then-current situation in her Frequently Asked Questions page in response to a query on advice for new comic creators...

My flyers are still printed off the computer on hot pink paper and thrown at people. I pack my lunch at conventions and share a bed in whatever hotel. I’ve slept in a van in the parking lot and carpooled 14 hours with people I never met before. I’m still steeling [sic] muffins from the complementary breakfast. But I’m printing up more books and spending less time pitching my comic and more time selling it to people who have come to hunt me down at the conventions that I do every year.

Although, she clearly wasn’t making a fortune from her comics at that time, she was able to keep up with her expenses. In Breeden’s story, she first identified herself as an artist when she tried making a go at drawing comics for a living. This would reinforce the notion that “earning a living” from working in the industry qualifies one as a professional. Interestingly, though, the job that she noted quitting to become a full-time comic creator was that of a clerk at a nearby comic shop. Technically, she had already been employed in the comic book industry, thus making her a comic professional years before The Devil’s Panties became a financial success.

A Culture of Participation, Part 2

Some ideas work more naturally in some formats over others. An extended explanation for a minor plot hole or continuity error might be best served as a written article. Irritation at a change in the thematic direction of a comic might warrant a letter written to the creators. Trying to figure out how a drawn design might functionally work could lead toward modeling, either virtual or real. Sarcastic humor might work better in a comic strip format. Strong identification with the characters might persuade someone to fashion a costume of their own, based on their favorite. Idolization of the characters might lead creating “shrines” for them in the fan’s home.

Naturally, a fan’s other biases and tastes will play into how they act on continuing their engagement as well. Artistically inclined individuals are more likely to focus on drawings or videos. Those with a penchant for writing are probably more prone to creating fan fiction. More technically minded people might focus on creating websites. This isn’t to say, of course, that a musician will necessarily begin writing music about their favorite comics, just that it might be a more natural expression for them.

Astute readers will have noted that I have so far only noted a few specific forms of expressing the participatory aspects of comic culture. This is not to suggest that any one form of expression is necessarily better or worse than another (the qualitative differences in results would depend on the particulars of execution in any event) nor is it intended to even suggest one is more popular than another (a fact which could easily change after this is published). To be sure, any creative endeavor that uses a comic book or one of its characters as a springboard is a means of engaging with the medium beyond the initial readings, and it would be functionally impossible to list every option available, especially in light of constant technological improvements.

Consider the fanzine. There were science fiction fanzines at least as far back as 1930, but they didn’t really come to prominence in comicdom until the 1960s. This was due, in part, to the availability of cheap printing equipment. As technology improves, the prices on existing technology drops and it wasn’t until the 1960s that access to ditto machines and mimeographs was cheap (and widespread) enough that fans could more readily begin producing their own fanzines.

Similar progress can be charted online. Early access to bulletin board systems was limited to a fairly small number of people throughout the 1980s but, as computers became cheaper and faster, more and more people bought or gained access to them. But even four years after the World Wide Web was introduced to the public in 1991, it was estimated that only .4% of the world’s population was using it. As of this writing, that number has increased to almost 25% and is projected to continue growing in the foreseeable future. More people have access to the tools to create original content online than ever before and, consequently, more people creating than ever before. The 3,000 blogs that were online in September 2000 grew in just a few months to over 20,000 in February 2001.

Clearly, those numbers say nothing with respect to the content at all; it seems certain that the vast majority of those 20,000 blogs had nothing to do with comics whatsoever. However, it points to the increased availability of materials used to create new content, whether that is wholly original or inspired by some comic or comic creator. With greater access to (in this case) publishing materials, a greater number of people took advantage of it. More people are able to interact with their favorite comics in more ways than ever before, and that is projected to increase by nearly all accounts.

So regardless of the method of how someone chooses to express their appreciation for a comic, their options of expression continue to grow and become more readily available. The fanzine publishers of the 1960s and ‘70s turned into the website developers of the late 1990s and 2000s.

Textual poaching, thanks to technology, has become increasingly easier as people can manipulate the data they have more easily. The novelty with which fans looked at Mike Saenz’s Shatter, the first comic book produced entirely on a computer, and Iron Man: Crash, the first graphic novel produced on one, are comparatively passé as computer comics are now considered an entire genre. Having access to digital copies of promotional comic art from creators’ and publishers’ websites, today’s fans can even re-contextualize the material even before it’s been published.

A prime example of this can be seen in manga. Japanese comics are, not surprisingly, generally published in Japan before anywhere else. Often, publishers from other countries make deals to translate the works and publish them in their own respective countries; however, the full extent of published manga outside of Japan is relatively small and many fans clamor for more. This has given rise to a process where the original Japanese books are meticulously scanned page by page and posted online. Other readers fluent in multiple languages are then able to translate the originals and provide full scripts. Still others take the original scans, digitally clean up the artwork and populate the speech balloons with the translated text, thereby effectively creating a version of the comic that can easily be read by those who don’t know Japanese long before a non-Japanese publisher gets around to releasing those volumes.

This work is generally not done for economic gain, but simply as a means to share favorite stories with those who otherwise might never be able to read them. While legal arguments against this practice can of course be made, it remains a very direct form of engagement with the comics beyond the reading. The process of translation alone requires very deliberate and conscious thought about the context and the meaning of each word on the page. Written dialects and slang often do not translate well, and substitutions must be made with other words and phrases that adhere to the original intent, if not the literal meaning. The fans who produce these translations and re-letter the artwork are attempting to share their passion for the stories and characters with literally a world-wide audience and are likely more conscious of their love of the material than any ethical gray area they might be wandering into.

Ultimately, though, that’s what drives fans to produce these works, whether they are translating existing material, dressing up in costumes, writing new stories or playing original songs: they hold a great deal of passion about their favorite comics and characters and want to share that passion with others. They find enjoyment in certain comics and self-identify with them; then, they try to pass along that enjoyment or, barring that, at least create an outward expression of who they are so that others who share the same passions might find them. Finding joy in something is a great feeling, but being able to share that joy with others is wonderful. It really begins to point to the joy of being with others who also enjoy your company: a fan can enjoy their comics, enjoy engaging them after reading, enjoy sharing that with others, and enjoy the others for their own sake.

... accept that value arises here from the process of looking for meaning (and the elaboration of the story by the audience)... [The creators] trigger a search for meaning; they did not determine where the audience would go to find their answers.
—Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture

The first fan profile in this book, if you haven’t read it, is that of Gregg Allinson. His and my story, I think, begin to speak to that enjoyment. I first “met” Gregg when he responded to a request I made on my Fantastic Four website for issue reviewers. We had both enjoyed The Fantastic Four and also took enjoyment in activities beyond the comics: Gregg with writing and me with web development. He would send me reviews and we would invariably chat about the issue in question. Initially, as we didn’t know each others’ tastes very well, the discussions were short, but as I got to know Gregg, through his reviews and our discussions, our topics broadened. We started talking about issues besides the one he had just reviewed. Then we talked about favorite artists and writers. Then we talked about other work by those artists and writers. Then it was works by artists and writers who had similar sensibilities, and what we were able to take from those works. The topics ranged farther and wider as we got to know each other better and it wasn’t that long before we hardly talked about comics at all. We knew each other well enough that I knew what he would think of an issue before he read it, and he knew what I’d think. Any sort of discussion on comics was effectively moot and we focused instead on each other as individuals. In short, we became friends. Our enjoyment of comics led us to externally engage them, which led us to contacting each other, which led to us becoming friends.

So far, I’ve focused primarily on taking basic concepts, characters and ideas out of existing comics and producing fan works based on them. But it’s entirely possible to take the medium as a whole and use it to express wholly original thoughts and ideas. This is what professional comic creators do, naturally, but there is also a notable contingent of fans who do so as well. The question then becomes where do the fans end and the professionals begin?

A Culture of Participation, Part 1

Though Marshall McLuhan defined comics as a highly participatory medium, he was speaking primarily in the sense of a reader’s direct engagement with comics themselves. The very act of reading a comic book is inherently participatory, he argued, because comics are a relatively “low definition” medium that requires readers to fill in a fair amount of the story themselves. What McLuhan did not speak to, however, given his focus on communication through media, was the continued participation that could keep a reader involved with comics after the initial reading process itself was complete. These ongoing efforts that occur outside the medium itself are what constitutes participatory culture as it’s generally regarded today.

Mainstream news outlets are fond of highlighting those in costume at comic book conventions. They cover the events as they’re deemed big enough to be newsworthy, but the focus tends to be people dressing up in something flashy. This is understandable, to a certain degree, as the costumes provide a much more interesting visual than the vast majority of convention-goers. But it does point to a large segment of comic fandom that continues their interaction with their favorite after closing the latest issue of their favorite title. Readers’ extra-media experiences aren’t limited to costuming, of course, and have becoming increasingly more sophisticated as technological improvements open more possibilities for non-professionals. Fans have been known to paint, sculpt, write and record songs, produce videos, develop websites and, of course, write about their favorite comics and comic characters, often for little more than the joy they get out of sharing their enjoyment with others.

This participatory aspect of fandom is frequently focused on in writings about the subject, in large part, I suspect, because it’s the most visible and most tangible. In attending a comic book convention, for example, the only people who you can be fairly certain are not there because they were dragged in by significant other are those who dressed in costume. It’s an obvious, outward sign of an individual’s appreciation of a character. Likewise, an artist whose sketchbook is filled with drawings of comic book characters is more likely to be a fan than an artist with a notebook of still lifes. A simple Internet search that uses a character’s name and the word “fanfic” will undoubtedly lead you to fans of that character. The assumption under all of these cases is that the individual would not spend that much time creating a costume, filling a sketchbook or writing an original story if they didn’t really enjoy that character in the first place. These types of fan activities are easy-to-identify expressions of passion, and often symbolize a fan’s cultural capital in that fandom.

Let me to stop to make a point of emphasizing my phrasing there. The types of fan activities I’m discussing can symbolize a fan’s cultural capital. The artifacts created in such endeavors are not cultural capital in and of themselves. The cultural capital in wearing a really great Flash costume is not that the person has a Flash costume, but the fact that they took the time and energy to make a really great one for themselves. (Of course, this goes back to my much earlier point about not being able to actually measure cultural capital. The time it took to make a costume is estimated by everyone, sometimes including the person who made it; and the person wearing the outfit may not have had a hand in its creation in the first place.) So the end product—the costume, the illustration, the story, whatever—is a result of the individual’s cultural capital and not the capital itself. It’s the mental participation that really counts here.

It’s fairly easy and common now to find evidence of active participation among comic fans. Many appear at conventions in costume, as I’ve noted; several fan musicians have gained some notoriety especially in recent years crafting original songs based on comic book properties; and online artist portfolios are often filled with drawings of popular characters, the illustrators often putting their own deliberate twists on them. But, in point of fact, the very history of comic fandom is an exercise in participatory culture and both have diversified dramatically over the past century.

The earliest fans of comics were taking their love of the medium and playing it out in any way they could. Film-making and similar “hi-tech” outlets, of course, weren’t realistic options back then, but drawing certainly was. Jack Kirby famously drew on every spare scrap of paper he could get his hands on during his school days, copying the works of comic strip artists like Hal Foster and Alex Raymond.

To keep from being bored in grade school, I spent a lot of time at my desk drawing the old Sandman’s gas mask. I was intrigued by such masks. Hawkman got a similar treatment.
—Jerry Bails, Alter Ego #68

Writing, of course, was even more popular as the basics are taught more readily in school. With the insights of Julie Schwartz, taking cues from Hugo Gernsback, the letters pages emerged in comic books as a prime outlet for participating in the fan culture. Readers could, for the price of a stamp, alert the editors, and potentially a much larger reading audience, of what they thought about the comics they read.

Both of these seem rather primitive and almost inconsequential against the possibilities that exist today, but they were and are necessarily an extension of a reader’s interaction with a comic. Once someone has finished reading a comic, to draw the characters or write to the editor requires additional time and attention beyond the initial processing of the story. The artist has to consciously think about what Sandman’s mask looked like and, if she or he can’t remember, they re-open the book to look for reference pictures. The writer has to consciously think about how to express their thoughts and feelings about the comic story in a cohesive, understandable fashion. Indeed, in many ways, this can be a fairly involved process if the reader wishes to really discuss their reasoning. It’s simple enough to say, “I liked the latest issue,” but it’s an altogether more complex process to explain why.

In the 1960s and 1970s, fanzines were what garnered the most attention in terms of fan activity. Bill Schelly has cataloged over two dozen comic fanzine titles that were available in 1962, a number which tripled by 1965. While each comic book letters page might run two or three letters, a fanzine—especially the APAs—could and often did run articles and art from a dozen different people. In Fantastic Fanzine #10, editor Gary Groth thanked all ten members of his “art staff” by name, and there are written pieces by seven other contributors, not counting those whose letters were published in the issue. Readers saw fanzines as an incredible opportunity to continue to involve themselves with the comics they already were enjoying.

There were, of course, several benefits in fanzine activity beyond what was possible in letters pages. Most central is simply the element of control a fanzine editor has over their own material. Any given letter sent into comic publisher was unlikely to be published against the sheer number of other letters that were sent in by others, and the comic editor maintained the right to edit the letter in any way he or she saw fit. There are even accounts of letters having been edited to the point of entirely changing its author’s meaning. A fanzine, though, allowed the authors the ability to publish whatever they wished with no real authority to report to; there were reviews, analysis, interviews, original stories and comics, pin-ups, etc. And the content was often more broadly focused than a single comic book, so fanzine creators could cover the entire industry and not limit themselves to a single title or publisher. While submitting work to a fanzine still allowed the fanzine editor to act as a gatekeeper in much the same way a comic book editor might, a fan always had the option to publish their own fanzine.

This, in turn, gave rise to readers taking greater liberties. People realized that they had outlets for creative expression of their ideas about their favorite characters. Fans could craft their own stories that didn’t appear in the comics, or portray scenes that were unlikely to take place. This notion of fan fiction was not new, certainly, but the popularity of comic-related fanzines helped propagate it to other fans who might not have considered it previously. The wider availability of ditto machines and mimeographs—thanks to improvements in technology and decreasing prices—essentially helped to promote fans' collective ability to textually poach works from their favorite comics.

This notion of textual poaching gained notoriety in large part thanks to Henry Jenkins’ using the phrase in the title of his 1992 book, borrowing the idea from Michael de Certeau and describing it as “an impertinent raid on the literary preserve that takes away only those things that are useful of pleasurable to the reader.” In essence, the analogy is that readers take their favorite bits from existing works and re-purpose them for themselves. Earlier, I described how involved a reader is in the process of decoding the text and images from comics and how no two people are going to read the same story in precisely the same way. Consequently, the ideas and concepts they take away from a comic are going to differ and reflect themselves differently in how they’re expressed or acted upon.

What’s Yours Is Mine, Part 2

Although generally considered overly simplistic for widespread practical use, David Berlo’s model of communication does provide a basic understanding of the processing issue at hand. Berlo’s SMRC model poses that any person sending a message needs to first encode it in some manner and transmit it via some process or channel to a recipient, who then has to decode the message. In other words, a creator might have an idea they want to convey, so they develop a comic to express that idea. That creation process, according to Berlo’s model, is a form of encoding. The act of writing and drawing the comic is a means of translating the ideas in the creator’s head into a form that others can understand and appreciate. But that comic then needs to be passed along or transmitted to someone else; perhaps via the web or a graphic novel or a newspaper. The reader, upon seeing the words and images that make up the comic, needs to take in that information and process it so they can attempt to understand what the creator was trying to say; this is the decoding Berlo noted. The problem here is that the creator’s original idea may have been altered from the time it first formed in his or her brain until when the reader understands it. If the creator’s skills were poor (i.e. he or she could not differentiate one character from another) or the reader’s comprehension ability was lacking (i.e. their frame of reference did not include some cultural or societal knowledge necessary to understand a particular word or phrase) or some external elements distorted the message during the transmission process (i.e. one of the pages was accidentally ripped out of the middle of the story), the original idea might well not make it into the reader’s head.

This decoding process, the reader trying to make sense of the words and pictures of a comic, is what creates the participation McLuhan was referring to. The higher the definition, according to McLuhan, the less participation is needed on the part of the audience. Conversely, the lower the definition, the more participation is required.

It is relevant to consider that the old prints and woodcuts, like the modern comic strip and comic book, provide very little data about any particular moment in time, or aspect in space, of an object. The viewer, or reader, is compelled to participate in completing and interpreting the few hints provided by the bounding lines.
—Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

It is within this ongoing participatory process that comic fans become emotionally attached to the stories they’re reading. They come to care for Skywise or Alanna Wolff or Xal-kor as if they were real friends or relatives. They have real worries about how their favorite character might escape a villain’s deathtrap, not because they’re concerned about the character’s book being cancelled, but because they have an emotional attachment to Chun Hyang herself and don’t wish to see her come to harm.

This, then, leads to a source of conflict between comic book creators and comic book fans. Each individual has brought their own ideas and biases to the table when they think about a character; just like in real life, a character can play a different role for different people. A person’s role as a son or daughter is notably different than their role as a co-worker or a spouse. Different aspects of a person’s personality come to the fore under different situations, so any one person is often thought of in different ways. Characters behave similarly and, depending on a reader’s relationship to them, can be seen under different lights. Which means that every reader has a different vision of who a character is and how she or he should act. This almost inevitably leads to conflict as the ideas of fans do not necessarily replicate those of creators, especially when those creators are not the people who initially developed the character. Fans can feel as if their favorite character is not being written or drawn in accordance with how they envision the character. Their interpretation of the character might not say or act in the same way that the comic creator has depicted.

What frequently happens in this thought process is that fans begin citing the character as their own. They feel a sense of ownership over the character, regardless of who might legally own the intellectual property. While this can certainly be frustrating, even infuriating, for comic creators, the fans in fact do have something of a point. The character that is portrayed in the comic is not really the definitive version of the character; the reader’s interpretation of the character stemming from the decoding process is what is definitive. The reader subconsciously writes her or his own biases onto the character as they read, making the character unique to each and every member of the audience. If the creators are doing their job well, the differences between everybody’s vision should be minimized, but the variations are still there.

This is most visibly seen when a new creative team is hired to work on an ongoing comic title. When asked about how they will approach the comic, it’s not uncommon to hear something along the lines of “trying to return the character to his roots.” Despite this repeated claim, many creators still develop something noticeably different from the original. This is precisely because they, like every other reader, have interpreted the characters slightly differently and inevitably place emphasis on different aspects. The effects can be seen most easily in characters who have had long publication histories, spanning several decades of more-or-less continuous publication. Characters like Marvelman, The Phantom and Lucky Luke have seen radical transformations of character over the years; some of these are due to deliberate “reimaginings” but many are attempts to return the character to their original incarnations.

All of which is to say that when a fan makes implicit ownership claims over a character, they aren’t entirely wrong in this thinking from a psychological perspective. Their interpretation of the character is unique to and owned by them, and that particular interpretation is never actually seen in its entire complexity by anyone else. That’s not to suggest they have any legal claim on the character, of course, only that the characters and worlds they inhabit are only partially provided by the comic creators. As McLuhan pointed out, readers are required to complete the stories on their own and, in that sense, they have some justification for feeling as if they own the character, as the version in their minds was co-created by themselves.

It should be reiterated, though, that ownership of the names and likenesses of the characters is retained by the copyright holders (whether an individual or a corporation) under copyright laws. The feeling of ownership on the part of fans is somewhat justifiable, but actual ownership is not. Fans’ emotional investment in what they co-created, not surprisingly, can run deep and they have a vested interest in having “their” characters treated in the best possible manner, but it remains the right of the copyright holder to do whatever she or he might wish with the characters. When that runs counter to fans’ desires, this often leads to irritation on the part of the fans. “They can’t do that to my character!”

Movie director Brett Ratner experienced this directly while working on X-Men: The Last Stand. Despite advice from previous X-Men director Bryan Singer to avoid paying attention to Internet chatter during production and Ratner’s requirement of the script writers to limit themselves to only events that actually occurred in the comics, fans still became incensed.

They’re such rabidness fans, they’re so passionate about their comic book characters that they think that their favorite character should be the star of the movie. Someone might be passionate about Iceman being the star. So, you can’t win. Everyone’s going to have their own... You can’t make these people happy. I’m kind of the Anti-Christ to these comic book geeks.
—Brett Ratner, Starpulse

While it’s certainly frustrating for creators like Ratner to deal with this sort of criticism, fans do actually have something of a point. Each fan has his or her own version of the X-Men in their head. Maybe based on Stan Lee’s writing, maybe Chris Claremont’s, maybe Scott Lobdell’s, maybe Grant Morrison’s. But each reader has a view of what the X-Men is and should be that is absolutely unique to him or her, and no one has the exact same version in their head. So when Ratner puts his version on screen, fans cry out, “Ratner betrayed who and what the X-Men are!” Which is completely and totally valid, provided they include two more words: “to me”. The same quote again with those words added (“Ratner betrayed who and what the X-Men are to me!”) seems much more reasonable, and is an entirely understandable position to take.

What fans often seem to fail to recognize is that the version of the X-Men (or any character) in their head is not the same one that’s actually on the page. They, as readers, have interpreted what the creators put down on the page, patched it in with all of their own biases and past experiences and worldviews and whatever else is rolling around in their heads, and come up with a version of the X-Men that is wholly unique and, more significantly, inaccessible to anyone else. So of course Ratner betrayed that vision—he couldn’t have possibly known what that even was to begin with!

This difference between a fan’s interpretation of the character and the actual character property is frequently difficult to identify for an individual reader. Where the character on the page ends and the reader’s interpretation begins is a fuzzy line at best. This manifests itself in the form of a blurry line between the right to pursue happiness (i.e. reading enjoyable comics) and the right to happiness itself (i.e. having a character treated in exactly the manner the fan envisions). The former is generally considered an unalienable human right, while the latter is not. That distinction often proves difficult to fully comprehend and appreciate, and fans frequently find themselves acting as if they were themselves the legal copyright holders of a property. This often comes in the form of fan fiction, videos and artwork.

What’s Yours Is Mine, Part 1

It’s an old maxim in the comic industry that “every issue is somebody’s first” and, while it was aimed at writers and editors to ensure that all of the ongoing characters and plot points were clearly delineated in each issue, it can easily be turned around to fandom. Every comic book fan has an “origin story” about how they first came to love comic books, and most of them start with different comics. Something about the comic appealed to them at an emotional level and convinced them to pick up the next issue. It might have been the art or the writing or the colors. Maybe they identified with a particular character or the storyline really resonated with them. It doesn’t seem like a wild exaggeration to suggest that there are as many comic fans’ origins as there are comic book fans. Even a small sampling of stories starts to illuminate how different they are...

I had only read comics casually, and never saved them, until, when I was in junior high school, I was bored, and picked up a copy of Daredevil #120 at the Colonial Pharmacy... And this comic book showed me this whole sprawling universe, not just one where the characters had adventures from month to month, but one where previous issues actually mattered to the new stories—and where previous events on completely different series even mattered. I wanted to know more. I wanted the next issue, I wanted to find these SHIELD stories, I wanted past issues of Daredevil... I wanted to find out what I’d been missing out on... The story led me to the world, and exploring the world of the Marvel Universe led me to fall in love with the form.
—Kurt Busiek, personal communication

My father and comics were inextricably joined in my mind, Teen Titans and The Avengers forever linked to the interior of my dad’s broken-down old Dodge... Dad would drive me to the park, we’d shoot baskets or run the track, buy a stack of comics, and then head for the Baskin-Robbins. He’d park the car and we’d read comics side-by-side, scooping out our ices with little wooden paddles. There we would carry on long conversations about who was stronger, Superman or the Hulk, who was better, Superman or Spider-Man, what comics were funner, DC or Marvel.
—Valerie D’Orazio, Memoirs of an Occasional Superheroine

When Secret Wars came out, my mother bought me a Captain America figure (have no idea why) and I really dug his outfit. Then my friend was going to get comics and offered to buy me some, so I picked Captain America. Years later, around 14, I went to my first comic shop and tried to find the continuation of that Cap story. I did and I’ve been collecting comics ever since. That’s when I discovered Cap was a scrawny kid who wanted to do things his body just wouldn’t [let] him. I identified with that and wished there was a super-soldier serum for me.
—Michael Kaiser, personal communication

Superman Annual #1 is the first comic book that I remember picking out for myself. The ones I’d seen before hadn’t made any particular impression on me. Maybe it’s the four-square-and-solid look of this cover, with the heavily-mustered frame of Superman facing directly forward, bursting a chain by expanding his chest... This is clearly a special comic book.
—Bill Schelly, Sense of Wonder

By about age five, I had acquired some Justice League of Americas... but the first Marvel book that lit a fire under me would have been an X-Men in the twenties. I remember as a seven-year-old developing a crush on Jean Grey. What struck me about Marvel at the time was that subplots in one story carried over into the next issue. This was unheard of from my limited exposure to DC at the time. That led me to care about the characters.
—Russ Chappell, personal communication

For the record, Superman Annual #1 was released in 1960, the X-Men issues cited mostly were printed in 1966, Daredevil #120 is cover-dated April 1975, the Teen Titans title referenced debuted in 1980 and Secret Wars ran from 1984-1985. Regardless of the age or generation, comic book readers became comic book fans through an emotional involvement in or around the medium. Irrespective of the specifics, each reader finds something in the comic book compelling. That’s why they become fans of the medium, after all: there’s something inherent with the comics they read that speaks to them and makes them feel good. Which again hearkens back to the self-esteem issues from the previous chapters. People like to feel good and, for many, comics help to facilitate that.

Though certainly not to the same extremes that Dr. Harry Harlow’s experiments went, comics can be comforting and reassuring. Harlow’s tests with rhesus monkeys are well-known and covered in many psychology textbooks; he used wire-frame and cloth-covered mother surrogates to show that a child’s emotional attachment to his or her mother does not stem from the nourishment she provides, but the love and affection that accompanies it. What Harlow also proved—though this was not his intent—was that we can form deep emotional attachments to inanimate objects. His rhesus monkey subjects behaved around a cloth-covered fake mother in much the same way they would behave around their real mothers; it provided a sense of comfort and security to the young monkeys when they were confronted with strange and frightening situations.

While it would likely be considered laughable that someone could substitute a comic book for their mother, an emotional attachment to figures drawn on a page can still occur. Fans invest themselves emotionally in the creators and characters they enjoy and, over an extended period of time, that investment begins to demand a more active involvement. Not necessarily in the sense of participation and ongoing engagement with fandom, as I’ll discuss in the next chapter, but in the sense that a fan’s favorite comics are thought about more consciously.

In reading a comic that doesn’t resonate with you, it’s not terribly difficult to recall the basic exposition that occurs in it. (For the sake of readability, I’m going to proceed using only narrative comics as a theoretical example. The same ideas would apply to non-narrative works, but the additional verbiage to include them becomes very cumbersome for the reader.) Details might be sketchy, but the basic plot and structure would be memorable enough, but not much else. In other words, the basic factual elements of the comic. In reading a comic that does strike you, you’re likely going to be a more active reader and start thinking about elements beyond the basic story itself. You might speculate about character motivations or mentally extrapolate on plot points that weren’t sufficiently addressed. You might think about alternate endings or future installments of the story. Perhaps you imagine entirely new stories based on the same ideas and premises.

Mashall McLuhan considered this type of behavior almost inherent within comics. In Understanding Media, McLuhan described what he called “hot” and “cool” media. A hot medium was one in which a great deal of information for at least one of the senses was conveyed—“high definition” was the phrase he used. A cool medium was one in which only a comparatively modest amount of information is transmitted, forcing the audience member to fill in a lot of it themselves. With comics, readers are more frequently called to question what they are about. “Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than dialogue.”

Which speaks to his central theme of Understanding Media, and the line for which McLuhan is most famous: the medium is the message.

What he meant by that, as it pertains to comics, was that a comic book reader has to work out a great deal of the comic book story for her- or himself. Each panel is a frozen moment in time and it is up to the reader to deduce how the story progresses between one panel and the next. Scott McCloud discussed this idea at length in Understanding Comics, calling the idea of filling in the gutter space between panels a form of closure. This process actively engages the reader throughout the entire story and forces him or her to derive meaning from the work. Following McLuhan’s theory, the medium of comics is all about creating one’s own story from the snippets of information provided throughout a comic book.

The story in any given comic book, then, is incomplete until someone picks it up, reads it and develops their own story from it. The medium is the message.

To clarify, this isn’t to say that the story is complete for everyone as soon as someone reads it. Every story is incomplete for each individual until that individual reads and decodes it for him- or herself. Captain Victory and the Galactic Rangers #8 is a complete story for me personally because I have read it; if you have not read it yourself, it remains incomplete for you. I have read through the issue, taken what information was in the book and processed it, assigning some meaning to it based on my own experiences and background. For anyone who has not done that, the issue remains elusive.

Fans vs. Collectors vs. Nostalgics, Part 2

All of these factors tied together and prompted the idea that publishers could design comics to be collectible, thereby tapping into some of the after-market funds by creating an immediate demand, as opposed to the delayed one that generally drove the collectibles market. Early publisher gimmicks were simple, such as heavily promoting first issues or “significant” events, but there were enough comic fans that tried to cash in on the speculator market that publishers noticed sales spikes on those issues. By the early 1990s, they were promoting variant covers and pre-polybagged issues as well as heavily marketing “event” comics to mainstream media outlets. All of which encouraged a collector mentality among fans as well as non-fans eager to tap into a booming economic market.

In recent years, however, the comic collector looking for economic gains has dwindled. In the first place, the aforementioned speculator market burst in the mid-1990s, forcing many people who had tried collecting allegedly rare and unique comics to sell them for a fraction of what they paid for them. Though some believe the number of those individuals is comparatively small.

They actually thought all the comics they were printing were selling to eager fans, when in fact, I estimate that at least 30% of all the comics being published from 1990-1994 ended up as overstock in comics dealers inventories.
—Chuck Rozanski, Tales from the Database

In the second place, readers don’t need to be collectors the way they used to be. When Byrne was looking for old Fantastic Four stories, he had no alternative but to seek out the original issues in which they were printed. New issues rarely contained reprint material and when they did, often it was haphazard. Readers couldn’t necessarily count on the next reprint issue containing the story that immediately followed the currently reprinted one. Publishers, though, have paid more attention to that reprint market recently, providing a variety of ways someone can engage the same story. That same issue Byrne bought from the barber has been reprinted at least 15 different times, several versions of which have remained in print for years and some are available digitally. The need for a fan to act as a collector is no longer present, by and large, as they can still partake of their favorite stories without involving themselves with the preciousness of rare objects like fifty year old comic books. Which is not to say that there aren’t comic collectors any longer.

When I first started, my goal was to get complete sets of Avengers, Captain America and Thor. I completed my set of Avengers last year, I’m one issue away from a complete set of Thor and three issues away from having the entire run of Captain America. Once I finish completing those, I’m going to try to finish my JLA set.
—Mike Berry, personal communication

Clearly, any number of old comics are sold every day both online and in physical retail locations. A large portion of comic conventions is devoted to retailers selling these paper artifacts. Some of these individuals might be completists, looking to acquire an entire run of a particular title or perhaps every appearance of a certain character. In cases such as these, though, psychologists have yet to define a clear cause for this behavior despite generations of examinations.

Some have likened the process to the hunter-gatherer mentality of pre-historic man, but this does not account for the fact that pre-historic man’s gathering was more immediate and fleeting (i.e. they gathered berries and ate them soon afterwards) nor that not everyone collects. Others have made comparisons to various mental disorders; Maggie Thompson once jokingly suggested to me that everyone at a comic convention had Asperger’s syndrome. But research so far has been far from conclusive, as collectors tend to have few traits in common with patients known to have obsessive-compulsive disorder, which many presume is a higher order of the hoarder mind-set, itself believed to be a higher order of the collecting one. There has been some speculation that collecting is somehow genetic, and researchers have found some casual evidence that a “collecting gene” tends to run in families. But here again, scientists have found little to form any substantive theories yet. We are left with the idea that some people do have a strong desire to collect things, and some of those people collect comics, but little else can be concretely said on the topic.

Nostalgia can, of course, play in to the reasoning behind purchasing comics. It’s not uncommon for adults to long for earlier times that they have mentally given a whitewashing, pushing back any negative memories and emotions to only recall the “good ol’ days.” As I’ll elaborate on in the next chapter, comics are often tied to strong emotions, thus making the recollections of them more desirable. Those memories can be enhanced or recalled more easily with the aid of objects from the period in time the individual yearns for, and comics’ iconic images are ideal triggers. The comics remind them of a time when they were able to enjoy the simple pleasure of reading without the responsibilities that come with adulthood.

Here I was pushing thirty, and thinking to myself, “Why not have the things I enjoyed when I was ten?” So the bug bit me, and I began collecting all over again.
—Bill Thailing, The Golden Age of Comic Fandom

Some fans indeed continue buying new comics in an attempt to recapture that very feeling. “If reading Action Comics made me feel happy twenty years ago, reading Action Comics now should illicit a similar reaction.” It’s not a bad premise on first glance; however, the changes in the creative team of the comic over that time and the experiences a reader has that inevitably impact her or his thinking will almost inevitably result in that same feeling not being recaptured. Those changes, though, often aren’t that perceptible because the comics are often purchased on a month-to-month basis. Creative team changes are generally not done across the board (even if the writer and artist are replaced, the editor is not) and few people have significant life events each and every month. So the premise is actually more akin to “If reading Action Comics made me feel happy last month, reading Action Comics this month should illicit a similar reaction.” It is only when this process is carried out over years or even decades that it becomes less and less feasible. But the emotional connection with the characters remains important, and I’ll discuss how that plays out in the next chapter.

Fans vs. Collectors vs. Nostalgics, Part 1

In common usage, comic book fans are often called comic book collectors. Indeed, many fans have accumulated large collections of comics over the years and even refer to themselves as collectors. Not infrequently, they are, but I feel that there is a distinction between fans and collectors that needs to be made and addressed.

Comics have, almost since their inception, had a temporal quality to them. Not only do they reflect the times in which they were created, but the very physical objects themselves were embedded with a certain transience. For generations, comics were printed on the poorest paper stock available, often using the cheapest printing techniques. They cost readers very little money to purchase and they were disposed of soon afterwards. Many people were perfectly content with that because, after all, a new installment would be out soon enough with all new stories. (In the case of comic books, this was generally monthly or bimonthly; in the case of comic strips, it was daily.)

Since comics were considered a disposable medium, it should come as no surprise that few people saved them. Those that remained interested in the individual comics after subsequent issues were published were left scrambling to find any issues they might have missed due to spotty distribution.

Issue two I found in the local barbershop. It took me three days to work up the nerve to ask the barber to sell it to me. I was willing to offer him cover-price for the slightly dilapidated copy. He gave it to me for free...
—John Byrne, The Fantastic Four Chronicles

But frequently, these quests were driven by an interest in simply reading more about the characters than an innate desire to have every issue. There were very few stories about any given comic character since they simply had not been around very long. Though it may be difficult to put into perspective here in the 21st century, when discussions about popular characters falling into the public domain by virtue of how long they’ve been around is not at all unheard of, the volume of comic book stories back then was not nearly as great. The above quote from Byrne refers to a time when there were less than a dozen issues of The Fantastic Four in existence; by acquiring that single issue, Byrne went from having half of all the FF stories ever made to having two-thirds of them. He was clearly enjoying the characters’ exploits and just wanted to see what other incredible adventures they might have.

This is a relevant point since the fans, over time, will naturally accumulate an increasing number of individual comics. The periodical nature of many comics meant than new installments were constantly being published, and readers would soon accumulate stacks of comics just by their virtue of not disposing of them. Fans would hang on to older issues for their entertainment value; a good issue of Daredevil will remain a good issue of Daredevil no matter how often you read it. This is where the distinction needs to be made between a comic fan and a comic collector.

We don’t call someone who buys lots of books a book collector—not unless they buy first editions, or other rarities. If they just buy books to read and keep them to reread, we call them an avid reader with a big library. That’s me—both with comics and with books. I buy ‘em to read them. I keep them to read them again. I have a lot of them because I’ve been doing this for almost thirty years.
—Kurt Busiek, personal communication

A collector, by contrast to an avid reader, would be someone whose interest lies more in the acquisition itself, rather than the entertainment value derived from any given comic. They are more interested in either the “thrill of the hunt” or simply using their collection as a form of capital, either cultural or economic. While the hunters and cultural capitalists have been around, in some fashion, since the dawn of comic book collecting, the economic viability of a comic book collector is comparatively recent.

While comic fans were almost always willing to pay more than the original cover price for comics they felt were rare and valuable, it wasn’t until the mid-1960s when anyone really took serious note of it. Articles began appearing The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek and the like noting that some people were willing to pay several dollars apiece for old comics that had originally cost ten cents. A 1965 piece in Newsday pointed out that “in exceptional cases, where a single book is needed to complete a collection, members have paid as much as $100.” Not surprisingly, this spurred an after-market economy, where fans and collectors would try to make money reselling comics they had bought from traditional retail outlets like newsstands.

We were speculating on stuff back then. We’d go around and grab stuff off the racks, get eight or ten. And then every once in a while, something really good came out. We’d drive up to Delowers in Oakland and they’d have a pile of, like, 200 of them. I remember we did that with House of Mystery 185 with the first Williamson.
—Dick Swan, unpublished interview with Tim Stroup

The increased attention led to more and more people using comics as a means of economic capital. Price guides were becoming common with Bob Overstreet providing the most comprehensive version. This all led to specialized comic book shops opening and, eventually, the direct market distribution system. The direct market was originally established to provide a faster and more reliable comic distribution network but it also proved to help facilitate a closed system which would allow publishers to have more control over the comics they produced. They had direct communication with the retailers and were able to utilize that to better promote new comics and storylines; they had more accurate sales data; and they didn’t end up having to pulp stacks of comics that were returned to them from newsstands.

Promoted from Captain Marvel to Major Victory, Part 2

The end of the previous chapter touched on the different roles fans can play. These roles have some significance in how fans are compared to one another as far as their cultural capital is concerned. A child idly reading a Wonder Woman comic isn’t going to be compared to an editor of DC Comics. Fans who have been reading comics for fifty years are put in a different classification than retailers. Their roles within comicdom are such that put them in contact with widely different sets of data and information which are, by and large, not privy to other roles. An editor, of course, would know about line-wide sales numbers whereas a retailer would have access to local trends. An older fan is expected to know more simply by the longevity they’ve had within fandom and newcomers are understood to be in the process of learning the basics. Each role, however it’s defined by fandom at large, has a different set of expectations that accompany it—a prototype of sorts—that allows individual fans to be assessed within a comparatively homogeneous group. This has the effect of more firmly establishing tiers within fandom, but simultaneously leveling each of those tiers so everyone is gauged against a fair baseline.

Not surprisingly, this doesn’t work quite so idyllically in practice.

Part of the reason for being in fandom, indeed any group, is to enhance one’s self-esteem. While this can be, and is often, accomplished through the external positive reinforcement of valued characteristics, it can also be internally supported by demeaning others’. That is, while other fans can provide encouragement or advice, some choose to belittle others in order to make themselves appear better than they are. It’s a relatively well-worn mechanism for coping with low self-esteem to bring down those around you in order to feel superior to them, and it would be foolish to think that comicdom is immune from such tactics.

The Simpsons’ own Comic Book Guy is an easy, albeit exaggerated, example. He regularly and casually dismisses all opinions that aren’t in line with his own; he always talks down to his customers, especially those who don’t immediately appear to have a purchase in mind; he continually makes comic book references regardless of their appropriateness for his audience in an effort to showcase his knowledge of the medium; a large proportion of his dialogue, certainly most of what is said to other characters, is sarcastic. Nearly all of his conversations with other characters involve his attempting to demean them in some fashion, and he’s shown very few positive character traits over the years.

I can’t tell you how many times people have come up to me and said, ‘I know who you based that comic book guy on. It’s that comic-book guy right down the block.’ And I have to tell them, ‘No, it’s every comic-bookstore guy in America.
—Matt Groening, TV Guide

The extreme exaggeration, both in the Comic Book Guy character and Groening’s comment, is where the humor stems from, of course. But the idea of a comic book fan trying to lord his or her cultural capital to both those in decidedly different roles and altogether unrelated outgroups is not unheard of. This type of behavior suggests that the individual is either unwilling or unable to distinguish the differences in value systems between her or his own tribe and role, and those of others. The stereotype that’s arisen from this bears some superficial similarities to the stereotype for someone with Asperger’s syndrome, notably with regards to social interactions. While it’s almost certain that some comic book fans do indeed suffer from Asperger’s, that particular stereotype of comic book fans is one that has largely fallen by the wayside, not coincidentally alongside a broader acceptance of the medium as a whole.

While all of this discussion of having and assessing cultural capital is necessary, it doesn’t speak to the more practical side of the equation. Namely, how is a fan able to increase their cultural capital and, more to the point, why would a fan want to increase their cultural capital in the first place? Since I touched on the answer to the latter question earlier in this chapter and it is the less complex of the two, I’ll address that first. How fans might go about increasing their capital is the subject of a later chapter: “A Culture of Participation.”

The reason why someone might want to increase their cultural capital is actually a subject I’ve already discussed: self-esteem. People uses comic book fandom as a means of connecting with one another and validating their sense of self. The other members of fandom share many of the same values as the individual, thus providing justification that the individual’s values are valid. Such a consensus approach provides ready and constant reassurance to the individual that the traits she or he uses to help provide a self-identity are considered valuable, thus promoting the internalized notion that the individual holding those characteristics is valuable as well.

Comics in this country have become very much a way to define oneself, either as a fan or as a creator. “This is my identity; I do this.”
—Landry Walker, Independents

One could argue that there are other reasons you might want to raise your cultural capital. Jerry Bails famously worked hard early in his fandom career to convince DC Comics to revive the Justice Society of America. There’s the possibility that comic fans with high cultural capital could be hired to work in the industry. There have been fans who tried to improve their standing within fandom in order to get emotionally closer to another individual, perhaps a potential love interest or a celebrity.

But beneath those rationales, and any other you might think of, is self-esteem. If you are trying to become a professional comic book artist because you think that will make you happy, that’s an attempt at improving your self-esteem. If you are trying to get a date with the cute cashier at the local comic shop because you think he or she will make you happy, that’s an attempt at improving your self-esteem. If you’re trying to help revive old characters that you really enjoyed as a kid, that’s an attempt at improving your self-esteem. Even the simple notion of swaying someone else’s opinion is, at heart, an issue of self-esteem; “Wow, my thoughts were valuable and/or powerful enough to convince someone else to my line of thinking.” That clearly is a validation of an individual’s thoughts, reinforcing their self-esteem by “proving” that he or she was right.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of those rationales, and they’re all quite justifiable. People have an inherent desire to want to feel good about themselves and comic book fandom provides innumerable ways to help in that regard. Connecting with other people who share similar values provides an individual with a sense of belonging as they’re joining a community; it provides an individual with validation for the values they use to identify her- or himself; it provides active reinforcement and encouragement of their positive characteristics, and empathy and sympathy when those are lacking. The act of reading a comic book can provide happiness, but it’s really the connections with others—being able to really become a part of comic fandom—that gives an individual a longer term sense of joy and self-worth.

Your cultural capital asks how much sway you carry outside your immediate circle of friends.
—Juliette Powell, 33 Million People in the Room

Powell summed up the basic notion succinctly. Comic fans do want to persuade others to do things like hire them for jobs and change the editorial direction of a comic and show other people how valuable they are. This very book, in fact, is my trying to show you how I think comic fandom can be viewed.

Every individual is going to have different things that bring them joy and contentment, and it’s a basic human right to pursue that. But before I get to the ways in which fans try to raise their self-esteem through cultural capital, it’s worth noting that people often confuse that basic human right of pursuing happiness with an alleged right to happiness itself.

Promoted from Captain Marvel to Major Victory, Part 1

Typically, when people think of capital, they think of the financial capital involved with business and industry. CrossGen Comics had issues with their financial structure and couldn’t afford to pay their freelancers. Gorilla Comics couldn’t raise enough external money and ran into difficulties as the creators tried to finance their own comics. Charlton Comics ran into troubles when their sales declined enough that they couldn’t pay to keep up repairs on their deteriorating printing presses, much less buy new ones. Starting a new business of any sort, including the likes of comic publishers and retailers, requires a fair amount of initial capital investment to pay for getting things up and running. Most business majors in college will probably tell you that, if you’re opening your own business, you’ll need enough money at the start to essentially operate at a loss for the first two or three years.

But that’s not the type of capital that’s relevant to this discussion about comic book fans. Fandom can indeed be a source for this type of capital and there are conversations to be had along those lines; however, within the context of this book, this chapter will be looking at something called cultural capital.

The basic notion of cultural capital was introduced by Pierre Bourdieu in 1973, and was elaborated on by him over the ensuing decades. His essential premise was that there are, in fact, three types of capital: economic, social and cultural. I touched on economic capital in the opening paragraph above. Social capital is, to use the vernacular, all about who you know. Cultural capital is the knowledge, skills and wisdom someone has and is regarded as having value. Bourdieu originally used these descriptions in relation to French society at large and applied a somewhat limited view of what was culturally valuable. That is, cultural capital was someone’s knowledge and appreciation of “classical” forms of the arts created by the likes of William Shakespeare, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Leonardo da Vinci. It soon became apparent, however, that his application of the phrase he coined was rather limited in scope and highly subjective to his interpretation of value. In the years since then, cultural capital has been applied more broadly to encompass the values of any particular group. You should recognize by now that when I’m discussing a group’s values, I’m talking about the group prototype.

But Bourdieu still had hit on a good point: that money was not the only form of currency people used. People traded favors for political power; they educated themselves at schools to get better jobs; intellectual property was becoming as precious as physical property; grass roots organizations were making an impact on groups which had previously ignored their very existence. Clearly, something besides money was being bandied about as a means of exchange and this is where the ideas of social and cultural capital come into play.

To make sure everyone is perfectly clear on the distinctions between the three types of capital, let’s define them in relation to the comic industry. A comic book shop owner has a fair amount of economic capital; he or she has whatever is in the store’s bank account, of course, but also their inventory of comic book stock and, sometimes, the physical building itself and the property it rests on. An individual comic book fan has much the same type of economic capital, although often at a smaller scale relative to the shop owner. Social capital within the comic industry generally revolves around the names many comic fans are familiar with: the writers and artists of the most popular comics, as well as the editors, publishers, and other professionals in the industry. In short, if you start name-dropping comic professionals, you are using your social capital. Cultural capital in comicdom is how well you know the Nelvana mythos, whether or not you can recite the Green Lantern oath from memory, being able to determine who inked a comic just by looking at the style of brushwork, writing your own fan fiction and all the other traits that are considered valuable and part of the prototype. When a comic book fan utilizes the characteristics that are part of the prototype, they are showing their cultural capital.

The value of this cultural capital is immeasurable. Unlike economic capital, there is no concrete value one can ascribe to knowing a 50-year-old fictional character’s entire backstory. There is no way to score one person’s talent at discerning individual’s lettering styles against another person’s knowing which characters appeared in any given installment of Foxtrot. The traits might be considered valuable, but not in any quantitative sense. That said, an individual can accrue cultural capital just as they can accrue economic capital and use it to improve their status within the comic community.

It is relatively easy to see how someone can accrue economic capital. A person works at their job, earns money, and uses that to purchase comic books. The more comic books she or he buys, the more economic capital she or he has within comicdom. It’s also fairly easy to discern how someone might accrue social capital. First they meet a comic book professional and perhaps ask some questions. A dialogue between the two begins which might develop into a professional friendship. The professional could then introduce the fan to other professionals. The more people of importance the fan knows, and the more important they are, the more social capital they have.

Cultural capital is a bit more ephemeral. As noted earlier, the characteristics ascribed to the prototype are not able to merely be listed or categorized on a spreadsheet, but instead it is more of an accepted gestalt of the best traits seen in others. As cultural capital is just outward expression of these internalized ideas, it is likewise unable to be listed or categorized. The question that immediately and naturally arises, then, is: how can the amount of someone’s cultural capital be gauged? Fortune regularly creates a list of the wealthiest individuals from an economic perspective, and people frequently gauge their social capital by the number of contacts they have on various social networking sites.

There has yet to be a definitive way to assess someone’s cultural capital. It’s not unlike defining fandom in the sense that those within the group have an unwritten and almost inherent understanding of determining it. Fortunately, a single, decisive ranking of the value of fans’ cultural capital is unnecessary, much like economic rankings within one’s own circle of friends and relatives is unnecessary. The reason it’s unnecessary is that cultural capital is only of relative worth.

Whatever cultural capital you might have is only worth something to others who find that capital valuable. A comic fan who has memorized a great deal of information about the stable of Marvel characters might be well known and respected in his or her own circles, but that same information would mean very little to a fan of Matt Feazell’s mini-comics. Likewise, those interested in mini-comics have very little cultural capital as far as a fan of InuYasha might be concerned. Indeed, someone outside of comic fandom would find all of the cultural capital within fandom effectively useless. Recall that the praise-worthy values within fandom were designated by fandom itself, and they may not have any bearing or impact with outgroups.

The observation of someone else’s cultural capital cannot be done on sight. Further, it is inherently not static as the individual will continue to accumulate knowledge and traits considered valuable. (Alternatively, one can forget things as well and lose cultural capital but this is most often associated with decreased interest in fandom, if not a definitive break from it. The individual would likely cease calling him- or herself a fan and would have little or no use for the cultural capital established in that group in any event.) Thus, assessing cultural capital must be done over a period of time and is continually valuated.

When I first learned how to develop web pages, I quickly realized that I could transfer much of the knowledge and information I knew about the Fantastic Four to a website. My original intent was to have a readily accessible and easy-to-update system of keeping track of that information. That it was then shared with the rest of the world was something of an incidental concern for me at first. So I built a Fantastic Four website and began telling my online friends about it to share the information with them. At the time, there were several other Fantastic Four websites available and, not surprisingly, some of the information on our respective sites was similar. Over the ensuing few years, I continued adding new information and features and it wasn’t long before my site dwarfed the others in sheer size. The original articles I wrote, the creator interviews I conducted, the historical information I uncovered all showcased the cultural capital I had built up from reading the comics so closely over the years.

As one of the earlier fan sites that went online, and later one of the most robust, it became apparent to others that any one person who could write so much and at such depth on the Fantastic Four must have a great deal of expertise on the subject. Fantastic Four fans saw me display my cultural capital over the ten or so years that I ran that website in a way that hadn’t been seen previously. My cultural capital was so valuable to Marvel that they were willing to use economic capital to gain access to it; basically, they paid me for what I knew about the Fantastic Four. It was the cultural equivalent of owning a closet full of expensive suits, but never wearing them out of the house; and once I did start wearing them out, others were surprised.

However, despite whatever cultural capital I held with regard to comics at large, I was primarily only recognized within Fantastic Four circles since that was what I tended to put on display. Anything I might say on the subject of webcomics or fandom or other topics was largely irrelevant to the group I was often with, and not seen at all by those who might have had some interest in it. Thus, when I stopped working on my Fantastic Four site to focus on broader issues relating to comics, I was initially met with indifference since I was essentially coming to a new group as an unknown quantity. Within this different group, I had to be re-analyzed and re-assessed to see what sort of cultural capital, if any, I had. In many respects, I was starting over in comic fandom. Although there’s certainly no way to definitively quantify such analysis, I would have to say that it took at least a year or two to actively and aggressively highlight my cultural capital in this new group before it was even remotely close to where it had been in my previous one.

Cultural capital is also only relative in the sense that however much I have, it’s only really put in comparison with, at most, a handful of individuals at any one time. How much I have is not definitively quantifiable, but it is generally fairly easy to judge whether I have more or less than the next fan. Two fans discussing comic book history could discern who had more cultural capital simply by the examples each sets forth. If one fan only displayed knowledge of comics made within her or his lifetime, and the other was able to reference that material plus comics that had been published decades before that, the latter fan would generally be considered richer with regard to cultural capital. Certainly, not every example would be as cut and dried as that but, in instances where any sort of ambiguity might make a determination difficult, most people seem generally content with stating that the two fans had roughly the same amount of capital. Because of the imprecision in determining the full range of someone’s cultural capital, plus the time it takes to assess, large scale comparisons are impractical. Generally comparisons are limited to small groups and are very informal.

I Yam What I Yam, Part 2

Stability and continuity are important aspects of life in general, and we often use rituals as a stabilizer in our lives. Centuries ago, man simply didn’t understand much of what was going on around him, so he fell back on rituals to provide some continuity in his life. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to even find a mammoth, much less be able to kill and eat it. So he developed a ritual to perform in advance of the hunt because it was a way to give him security and confidence before taking steps outside his cave into the unknown. He knew that, even though he couldn’t count on the outcome of the hunt, he could count on the activities proceeding it.

By the twentieth century, man had figured out a great many things. Everything from fire and the wheel to creating and harnessing electricity to bring a small amount of daylight to the city streets at night. But while man’s knowledge has increased, providing a great many answers to what was previously unknown, we keep raising new questions at an increasingly rapid pace. So while I—a resident of the 21st century—can rest pretty comfortably knowing that I can reliably get something to eat any time I step outside my dwelling, I don’t have any clue what my long-term future looks like. In effect, my future is just as uncertain as that of our Australopithecus afarensis friend, Lucy—the only difference is that my future extends further out than my next meal.

Alvin Toffler, in the early 1970s, noted this and began touting the notion of “future shock.” The idea being that life is indeed moving much faster than at any point in man’s history and we, as human beings, are being forced to constantly adapt ourselves to ever-changing status quo; further, that some people simply cannot mentally keep up and experience a form of culture shock within the very culture they’ve been living in. The worldview they have held suddenly seems wildly out-dated compared to the environment they now realize they’re in. In extreme cases, future shock can resemble post-traumatic stress disorder.

A man living in the 1800s could pretty well assume that his day-to-day activities weren’t likely to change that radically over the course of his lifetime. He still had to question whether or not he could earn enough of a living to buy food and keep his belongings secure, but he knew that if he was a cobbler, his job wasn’t going to appreciably change at all during his lifetime. By contrast, today’s jobs are radically different than they were even ten years ago and we can counteract the emotional impact of that by using rituals to provide an ongoing continuity and sense of self to our own lives. Toffler argued that by ritualizing aspects of our lives, we are able to reduce the psychological impact of rapid environmental changes, the root cause of future shock. We are able to essentially turn ourselves off during a ritual process, giving us time to refresh and recharge ourselves, even in the presence of outside stimuli such as a comic book story.

We frequently do this almost subconsciously. Primarily because the repeated behaviors that eventually become a ritual are enjoyable. In the case of a comic book fan, they might return to their favorite comic book shop every week when new issues arrive. Although at first this is simply in order to purchase the newest comics, it becomes a routine as the weeks roll on, and eventually a ritual. The fan might head for the same store at the same time, or enter the store in the same manner, or exchange the same greeting with the employees. Regardless of the particulars, and almost regardless of what happens in the rest of the world, a comic book fan can walk into their local comic book shop once a week to purchase their latest favorite stories and take some solace in the familiar patterns they’ve developed in buying their favorite comics.

I was in a comic shop a few years ago on “New Comic Day”—the day when that week’s new comics are released. I was browsing the selections, and a gentleman walked in from the drizzling rain. The shop owner, having just sat down for a break from the regular hustle of business, greeted the customer with a sincere, “Mark! How’s it goin’? You’re in early today.” Mark proceeded to relay a story about having been fired not more than a few hours earlier and he’d need to trim down his comic purchases accordingly. On top of that, he then added, he had just found out the day before that he’s diabetic and he had to make some significant lifestyle changes, which would be extremely difficult now without being able to use his former company’s insurance. As he put it, he got a “one-two punch in the span of just over 24 hours.”

Mark’s life had been changed radically in a very short amount of time. One of the ways in which he was dealing with it was by attempting to carry out his habit of buying new comic books on a Wednesday afternoon. The ritual he had established in that particular store was familiar and therefore comforting, even if it was somewhat disturbed by other events in his life. Mark likely went home after purchasing whatever new issues he felt he could then afford, and carried out another set of rituals in reading them. Perhaps in a favorite chair, or with a particular type of music playing in the background. He embraced the familiar as a form of stability during an otherwise very turbulent time.

Fandom itself also provides a sense of stability to the individual. One of the reasons Mark stopped at the store was for sympathy and emotional support. The owner and manager of the store were the part of comic fandom that he specifically knew, and they showed an open and obvious compassion for Mark, as well as an appreciation for what he must have been going through. Indeed, as soon as Mark finished his pronouncement, the manager came up and hugged him with a visibly heart-felt embrace. She then invited him into the back of the store where they could sit and talk more privately. She almost certainly noted his positive attributes, helping to sooth his self-worth while reinforcing the values to which he ascribed as a comic book fan. While he had suffered some devastating setbacks, his characteristics which could help carry him through the adversity were no doubt rooted in his worth as a comic book fan. Not that those were the only characteristics which would help him, of course, but they would be the ones the comic shop manager would have been most familiar with, since her primary dealings with Mark all related back to their shared interest in comics.

The question of fandom’s eventual homogenization seems like one that is bound to come up in this type of discussion. If all comic fans are working towards becoming as much like their prototype as possible, the logical end-point would be when all fans become the same. This, as should be readily observable, does not happen. In the first place, as noted recently, the prototypical comic book fan so many are trying to become is ever-changing. Important values and traits may become less significant in lieu of new values and traits. Each fan works toward minimizing the difference between her- or himself and the prototype at different rates based on their opportunities and/or abilities. Fans rarely reach a uniform level of similarity, and the constantly changing end-point ensures that everyone remains on the path. Using a comic book analogy, one person might be one the opening splash page of a comic while another might be on page 16, while still another might be on a different panel of page 16, and yet another might be in the next issue. It’s part of the same story, but at different stages of it.

Furthermore, different roles within the group place individuals on altogether different tracks. Indeed, many people working in the comic book industry are there because they were a fan of comic books first. So while one person might become a professional comic book artist, another might be a comic retailer. While one might be an area representative for a distributor, another might be an editor. Though their titles make them easy to cite, comic professionals aren’t the only ones following different tracks within fandom. Leadership roles can be assigned by those moderating message boards or chat rooms; the term “letterhack” was created to categorize individuals who wrote in to publishers and had many of their letters published; some people might just assume the function of “the guy who knows a lot about Johan and Peewit.” The roles aren’t ones that necessarily can be easily defined, and any one person can take up multiple roles.

Amusingly, this was played up in Marvel’s first official fan club. In 1967, editor-in-chief Stan Lee reproduced a somewhat tongue-in-cheek letter from a fan that read, in part...

I have watched the MMMS turn into disorganized chaos! (And that’s the worst kind!) As a solution, I suggest we have some officers. By buying his first Marvel mag, a fan is automatically entitled to the rank of RFO (Real Frantic One). His first published letter elevates him to QNS (Quite ‘Nuff Sayer)...
—Mark Evanier, Fantastic Four #64

Other fans wrote in approving of the idea, and Lee soon instituted a formal ranking system for Marvel fans, based on Evanier’s and others’ suggestions. While not taken entirely seriously, it still proved to be a functional shorthand that could be used to help gauge someone’s involvement in Marvel fandom in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The more rankings they earned, the more deeply involved with the entire line they were. Indeed, simply knowing of the system showed more than a passing level of involvement.

As an aside, Evanier would soon afterwards go on to become an assistant to creator Jack Kirby and later a fairly well-known writer in his own right. And, on a personal side note, I was proud to have earned the first three of the six official rankings before graduating high school and got two more in college. I haven’t combed through the letters pages of each and every Marvel comic throughout this period, but I have never run across an instance of anyone earning the final ranking of Fearless Front-Facer. Although I think it’s safe to presume Lee did at least bestow it on himself in his typical self-deprecating manner.

Since we found out earlier that any one group would tend to max itself out around 150 members, that means that there can easily be multiple people in the same stage and/or filling the same role simultaneously within the larger body of comic fandom. Using some of the easy-to-define examples, Chris Claremont and Scott Lobdell were both writing X-Men comics at the same time, thus defining both men as X-Men writers, but they were at different points in their careers then. Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener both worked on Atomic Robo at roughly the same point in their careers, but in different roles: writer and artist. Steve Lieber and Jeff Parker worked their way into the industry as artists roughly in tandem and shared studio space together; however, the projects they worked on led one to more work for DC Comics and the other to more work for Marvel Comics, putting them in distinctly different groups.

It’s certainly possible, often likely, that an individual can change their role within a group or reach farther along on their path. While success for moving around within fandom generally relies on ability, effort and motivation, the currency that is almost always involved is called “cultural capital.”