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A Brief Note on Fandom
That’s January done. At first, it felt like it was going by too fast, but then I looked at everything I’d done in the month (I’ve returned to keeping a diary regularly, and it helps one see what’s happening vs. what one thinks is happening), and I realised that a whole lot happened this month – work, drawing, writing, photography, family, friends – of which I was instinctually only counting work as having been “productive”. But the rest – that’s what work is for, to allow one to live life on one’s own terms. So that was good.
Out this week, lettered by me – The Department of Truth Vol. 5: What Your Country Can Do for You. In lettering work, I did revisions on Resurrection Man #3, but that’s all. A whole lot of books that were supposed to come to me in January haven’t yet, so I fear February might be a bit packed. We’ll see. I’ve been tinkering with new font designs to eventually use on my book, working titled SEASIDE, but nothing from my doodles has grabbed me yet. I ended January having lettered only two books – my leanest month in a while.
In writing, I’m now 24 pages into SEASIDE. I’m supposed to hit 12 pages each week, and I managed that (to my admitted surprise). At the moment, the book is targeted at 120 pages, but that’s an approximate total based on back-of-the-hand numbers for how long each scene will be. I’m likely to land on the far side of the number in the end, so as to let scenes breathe, let a bit of magic happen. But there are three months to figure that out once I’ve nailed down a first draft by March. But proximately, I’m thinking that issue 1, estimated to be 32 pages, might end up at 36 or so.
It’s been very hard work figuring out how to get all the visual and textual nuances down on a comics page – it’s a strangely unwieldy thing, very different from prose or films – but I’ve been having a ball, and I actually punched the air a few times when I managed to make a moment land precisely how I wanted it to. More than ever, this has reminded me how much I love comics, and how much I like being a student of the medium.
(PS: I use a lot of post-rock/ambient music as background for writing, and my current rotation has been Tides from Nebula, Saxon Shore, Exxasens, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, apart from my old favourite, This Will Destroy You.)
SEASIDE page count as of 31/01/2025: 24/120
Links for the week:
- Here’s a delightful story from the world of parasitology about a scientist who nasally infected himself with leeches to study their behaviour and life cycle.
- Kieron has restarted his old podcast Decompressed (now on Vol. 4) to accompany the release of The Power Fantasy Vol. 1. Here’s the excellent first episode where he has a chat with artist Caspar Wijngaard.
- Speaking of old podcasts being resurrected, Jim Viscardi’s Let’s Talk Comics is back, this time via Image, and it has already accumulated four episodes. As an industry podcast interviewing some of the most successful writers around, it’s well worth a listen.
- On Gizmodo, this is a great article about the current state of manga lettering in English. It is both funny and sad that the only company offering full-time manga lettering jobs with healthcare is a hentai publisher.
- John Ganz on how popular media tends to misunderstand Hannah Arendt’s writings.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine made the point that if someone professes to be a horror movie fan, but only watches good horror movies, “then you’re not a horror fan, you just like good movies.”
Which dovetailed with something I’d been thinking regarding what it means to be a fan – given that “fandom” has won the cultural war, and, to my mind, rather poisoned popular culture in the bargain.
There is a tendency now to consider oneself a fan of something if, at some point, you’ve heard of that thing. I call this the Kevin Smith Enthusiasm Syndrome, based on the way Kevin Smith, perfectly nice guy though he might be, seems to be equally enthusiastic about upcoming adaptations of Superman or Roblox or Milkduds or the Garbage Pail Kids.
This is how you get companies making so many IP movies and tv shows over the last many years based not on how well a property is suited for storytelling but on how many people they think will have some sort of nostalgia about it. (And therefore will turn out with their wallets.)
On the other hand, if you gatekeep the idea of being a fan, you get … Twitter, essentially. People who profess to love something – say, DC movies or Spider-Man comics – spending most of their time complaining about the way whoever is at the helm at the moment is “ruining their childhood” (when their childhood was most likely ruined by their parents), and how only they truly understand Spider-Man. Basically, people who want to armchair govern franchises. These are the kind of people who make a direct correlation between a movie’s box office earning and its quality, and back corporations as if they were sports teams, but don’t seem to be having any fun. This reminds me of all the uncles I hung around as a kid who watched the World Cup and acted like they could play better cricket than Sachin Tendulkar. Same energy.
There was a time I used to like calling myself a fan of things. I’ve even gone through that phase of being really angry at someone for purportedly ruining something I love (in my case it was Steven Moffat and Doctor Who – don’t worry, I got over it and mostly came around on his version of the show). I don’t think I can muster up that energy now, and more than that, I wouldn’t want to. I’m contented in liking the things I like, and not reading/watching the things I don’t. I don’t have time for hate.
But coming back to the idea of a “fan” – a fanatic, someone who likes something an unreasonable amount. There’s the negative version of that – the kind of possessiveness I mentioned above, which eventually poisons you. I don’t think it’s healthy living like that, full of negative emotions about the thing you supposedly love. But there’s the positive version of that, which is what fandom was when I was a kid – to love something even when it’s not very good.
A horror fan, coming back to that quote from my friend, isn’t someone who just watches good horror movies, it’s that person who watches a lot of dross, and more times than not, still manages to find something to love about it.
In that way, I used to be a horror fan. As a teenager, I used to read every horror book I could get my hands on (novels, non-fiction, behind-the-scenes accounts of movies I hadn’t seen), and watch the shittiest horror movie with some awe. I retain a bit of that – I can watch a mediocre horror film as long as it has some kind of practical effects I can enjoy. But largely, I’ve lost my patience for bad horror movies – it might be the CGI aspect, but maybe I’ve simply grown out of bad horror.
But there are things even now that mean comfort to me, where I can tolerate a fair amount of crap to get to some good stuff – or sometimes, just to enjoy the dross. I remain a fan of superhero comics – I can read very long runs of very middling superhero comics with a fair amount of joy. And there’s Doctor Who – I will cheerfully admit that I have watched and read and listened to far more bad Doctor Who than good, and I will continue to do so. Sure, the Chris Chibnall series was a tipping point – I only watched half of his first series before I had enough – but other than that, even when it’s the Sixth Doctor on tv, or an Eighth Doctor Adventure, I can find something to like. Sometimes it’s just about spending time with old friends.
I do have less time these days to be a fan, so I spend more of my time reading and watching … er … good things rather than bad things I have nostalgia for. But in this old-school way, I still like being a fan.