On being a fan and then not talking about it

One of the most common moves of cultural studies in the 1990s was to write about one's self. This was usually done in identity and meant mentioning one's race, class, and gender. When academic's attention turned to fandom, it usually meant declaring their own fandom. Over at Aca/Fan, Henry Jenkin's website, Will Brooker talks about why he declared his fandom in Batman Unmasked and why he did not in his second book, Hunting the Dark Knight. It's worth checking out. 

Sexual Harassment and Fandom

The following comes from Bully Says: Comics Oughta Be Fun! but it bears re-posting and people ought to be aware of what's going on there. -The Editor


Overheard at San Diego Comic-Con while I was having lunch on the balcony of the Convention Center on Sunday July 27: a bunch of guys looking at the digital photos on the camera of another, while he narrated: "These were the Ghostbusters girls. That one, I grabbed her ass, 'cause I wanted to see what her reaction was." This was only one example of several instances of harassment, stalking or assault that I saw at San Diego this time.

1. One of my friends was working at a con booth selling books. She was stalked by a man who came to her booth several times, pestering her to get together for a date that night. One of her co-workers chased him off the final time.

2. On Friday, just before the show closed, this same woman was closing up her tables when a group of four men came to her booth, started taking photographs of her, telling her she was the "prettiest girl at the con." They they entered the booth, started hugging and kissing her and taking photographs of themselves doing so. She was confused and scared, but they left quickly after doing that.

3. Another friend of mine, a woman running her own booth: on Friday a man came to her booth and openly criticized her drawing ability and sense of design. Reports from others in the same section of the floor confirmed he'd targeted several women with the same sort of abuse and criticism.

Quite simply, this behavior has got to stop at Comic-Con. It should never be a sort of place where anyone, man or woman, feels unsafe or attacked either verbally or physically in any shape or form. There are those, sadly, who get off on this sort of behavior and assault, whether it's to professional booth models, cosplayers or costumed women, or women who are just there to work. This is not acceptable behavior under any circumstance, no matter what you look like or how you're dressed, whether you are in a Princess Leia slave girl outfit or business casual for running your booth.

On Saturday, the day after the second event I described above, I pulled out my convention book to investigate what you can do and who you can speak to after such an occurrence. On page two of the book there is a large grey box outlining "Convention Policies," which contain rules against smoking, live animals, wheeled handcarts, recording at video presentations, drawing or aiming your replica weapon, and giving your badge to others. There is nothing about attendee-to-attendee personal behavior.

Page three of the book contains a "Where Is It?" guide to specific Comic-Con events and services. There's no general information room or desk listed, nor is there a contact location for security, so I go to the Guest Relations Desk. I speak to a volunteer manning the desk; she's sympathetic to the situation but who doesn't have a clear answer to my question: "What's Comic-Con's policy and method of dealing with complaints about harassment?" She directs me to the nearest security guard, who is also sympathetic listening to my reports, but short of the women wanting to report the incidents with the names of their harassers, there's little that can be done.

"I understand that," I tell them both, "but what I'm asking is more hypothetical and informational: if there is a set Comic-Con policy on harassment and physical and verbal abuse on Con attendees and exhibitors, and if so, what's the specific procedure by which someone should report it, and specifically where should they go?" But this wasn't a question either could answer.

So, according to published con policy, there is no tolerance for smoking, drawn weapons, personal pages or selling bootleg videos on the floor, and these rules are written down in black and white in the con booklet. There is not a word in the written rules about harassment or the like. I would like to see something like "Comic-Con has zero tolerance for harassment or violence against any of our attendees or exhibitors. Please report instances to a security guard or the Con Office in room XXX."

The first step to preventing such harassment is giving its victims the knowledge that they can safely and swiftly report such instances to someone in authority. Having no published guideline, and indeed being unable to give a clear answer to questions about it, gives harassment and violence one more rep-tape loophole to hide behind.

I enjoyed Comic-Con. I'm looking forward to coming back next year. So, in fact, are the two women whose experiences I've retold above. Aside from those instances, they had a good time at the show. But those instances of harassment shouldn't have happened at all, and that they did under no clear-cut instructions about what to do sadly invites the continuation of such behavior, or even worse.

I don't understand why there's no such written policy about what is not tolerated and what to do when this happens. Is there anyone at Comic-Con able to explain this? Does a similar written policy exist in the booklets for other conventions (SF, comics or otherwise) that could be used as a model? Can it be adapted or adapted, and enforced, for Comic-Con? As the leading event of the comics and pop culture world, Comic-Con should work to make everyone who attends feel comfortable and safe.

–John DiBello
Crossposted From Here

Portrait of the Comics Reader as a Young-ish Man

1985. My apartment in New York City. A sudden realization, and not a pleasant one. My thirtieth birthday is right around the corner. I’m posted to turn one year older than Batman… I’ve come to accept, in recent years, that Spider-Man is younger than my brother, but Batman? Batman? My favorite childhood hero? The lantern-jawed wise father figure? I’m actually gonna be older than Batman? This was intolerable. Something had to be done.

With these words Frank Miller opens the collected edition of his most memorable contribution to comics, The Dark Knight Returns. The work presents perhaps, the most elegant solution to Miller’s problem. Miller makes Batman older, which in the parlance of graphic novels (née comics) means somewhere around fifty. Thus, we get a Batman, much older than Miller’s thirty, a Batman who worries about his knees when climbing up his bat-rope, who needs Bat-ifocals glasses to ensure that his batarangs hit their targets, and will probably need to go to Bat-cross for his medical needs. However, nothing in comics but the status quo lasts. DKR was only a few issues long and it was not long before Bruce Wayne stopped being a Dirty Old Man and became a dashing millionaire playboy again. The number one rule of comics: you get older, but Bruce Wayne will never collect Social Security.

It was only after college when I had some sense of what Frank Miller was writing about. I found that I could no longer identify with the teen sidekicks. My life had passed them by and unless their emotional plight hit some type of universal cord, I just could not identify with them. Yes, it could be exciting to see Robin fight a Yeti in the rocky mountains of Tibet, but in the end I could not care about his fights with his father or the bad grades he got because he was out fighting crime. Even for comics, it seemed trivial. I had my B.A., was working a crappy administrative job at UCLA, and was hopping that I would get into graduate school so that said job would be over. Robin was fifteen, worrying about getting his driver license, and was hopping the Teen Titans would ask him to join. I was simply too old to be hanging out with the Boy Wonder. I had Big Boy concerns.

But, if comics eventually make you feel old because you outgrow the characters, things get even worse when you realize that your mastery over the storylines has grown out of date. Every 10 years DC Comics does what fans call retconning, meaning that they retroactively change their company wide continuity; they change the narrative past. Small retconning is common place in comics to allow for creative growth, however every ten years it seems DC attempts to do it in a comprehensive way. Since DC Comics overhauled their line last year I’ve found that things I could recall with a frightening level of encyclopedic detail – things such as Superman’s origin story – have been, if not fundamentally altered, significantly tweaked. Now, if you asked me to give you a description of what Krypton was like, I honestly could not tell you with any veracity. This is after a lifetime of reading Superman comics. Things I used to know, I don’t know anymore. What really makes you feel old as a comics is fan is not growing older than the perpetually young heroes of your childhood, but that comics companies force an odd form of senility upon you. It’s nerdy, fictitious Alzheimer’s and I don’t know my way around the House of Mystery.

The cure: read more comics. But with my healthcare, how could I afford it? Anyway, can’t I die with dignity and just read the reprints?

A Hobby Sized Hole in My Heart

Although the World Series starts tonight, as far as I’m concerned Major League Baseball is over with until next spring. Even those sentimental Tommy Lasorda commercials, where he encourages disheartened fans to watch baseball despite the fact that their teams didn’t make the postseason, don’t have any effect on me anymore. On Thursday, during game seven of the National League playoff between the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Mets, the most I could muster is a half-hearted, “I love this game?” It would have made the former manager of the Dodgers and ambassador to baseball cry.

In my defense, I did try to take Lasorda’s words to heart and go along with baseball even after the Dodgers lost all three playoff games to the Mets. After all, as a Dodger fan, how could I turn Tommy down? He’s probably the most visible face of the Dodgers and so, when Lasorda tells me to buck up, I try to do my best. After the Dodgers were eliminated by the Mets, I decided to pick up the pieces, hang up my Dodgers cap, and root for the very team that demolished the boys in blue.

I even developed a couple of reasons for rooting for the Mets, trying to develop some sort of second tier loyalty. First of all, the Mets have three former Dodgers on their roster: second basemen José Valentín, catcher Paul Lo Duca, and right fielder Sean Green who the Mets recently acquired from the Arizona Diamondbacks. I figured that basically, I was just rooting for the Dodgers, circa 1999. And who doesn’t love the Dodgers, circa 1999?

I also figured that the Mets were essentially nothing more than the replacement team for the Dodgers in New York; the Mets were founded after all, only after the Dodgers left New York for Los Angeles. Essentially, this amounts to a snobby kind of fandom where all you’re doing is rooting for the team out of pity. I was OK with this because it took the sting out of them beating the crap out of the Dodgers. The funny thing about this strategy is that you can just as easily see the Mets as the replacement team for the Dodgers’ rivals, the San Francisco Giants, who left New York about the same time that the Dodgers did. Thus, during the game both me and a Giants fan were united against the St. Louis Cardinals.

But the most important reason that I had for rooting for the Mets relied on a kind of cannibal logic. I figured that since the Mets beat the Dodgers, they absorbed their strength. Unfortunately, I guess the Mets really just absorbed the Dodgers ability to lose big games.

Now that the two teams in the World Series are the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals, I really can’t find a team to root for. Sorry Tommy. The reasons for my inability to feel the spirit of baseball are complex. Originally, I thought that the owner of St. Louis Cardinals was racist Marge Schott. You might remember her for praising Hitler’s early rise to power, for owning a swastika arm band, and for calling the African American members on her team racial epithets. But it turns out that she’s dead and owned the Cincinnati Reds. Nonetheless, the association remains. Besides, I’ve never gotten over the fact that, when I was a kid, I went to a Dodger game and one of the Cardinals didn’t drop his bat when he ran to first. Although they beat the Dodgers all the time, I’m still convinced that the Cardinals must not be that good; even an unathletic kid like me knew to drop the bat. As for Detroit, how can I root for a city that gave us Eminem and a state that has, according to the Museum of Tolerance’s map of hate, the most white power groups in the country? Certainly, Detroit has given us some good stuff like the Detroit Cobras, but that’s just a drop in the bucket, and it’s been a long time since Motown released anything as good as the Supremes.

Now, I’m left with a hobby sized hole in my heart. Comics are getting a little bit better since I last posted about them. But it’s still not the same. You still can’t really have a conversation about them and the fans tend to be just as weird as ever. Dodger cap hanging low, I’ll go back to reading comics but I’m not happy about it. Besides, my other hobby, library science only provides so many opportunities for practice. And I've already organized my books from AZ361.S56 1964 to Z253.U69 2003.

Comics vs. Baseball

The past two days have provided me with more reasons why Baseball should be favored over comics, at least seasonally. I saw this morning at Comic Book Resources pictures from Wizard World Chicago, one of the summer’s big Comics Conventions. The fact that I share an interest with these people is frightening.

While CBR has plenty of pictures of kids dressed up as their favorite characters, for every picture of a young Captain America beaming because he got to go to a convention in costume, there are more than three dozen like the one above. Here Butterball Superman, 15 year old Batman, and what appears to be Keanu Reeves in a bad wig as Green Lantern, pose for their picture. And while it’s obvious that these three like the attention their receiving from the comics fan press and no doubt their fellow fans at the con, there seems to be to be something unreasonable about a fan that goes to such heights. Where Superman’s smirk betrays a confidence, I’m just a little embarrassed for him by how the costume accentuates his man boobs. Is this just an expression of self-neglect and social stigma turned into a strange expression of prideful abnegation? Really, I think there are better ways to go. Even secret shame seems a more dignified response. Or even making fun of those who clearly have no secret shame.

The more positive aspect to this comparison is that I was recently inspired to work out harder by the Dodgers, thus avoiding a Super-Belly and Super-Heart Disease and Super-Diabetes. I was at the gym the other day and the game happened to be on. It was the top of the sixth, and the Dodgers were loosing to the Marlins, one to three. I planned on a fifty minute run and intended to leave when my time was up. But as I was running the Dodgers began to turn the tide, mostly due to the ineptitude of the Marlins’ pitching staff, which walked in three runs. By the end of the seventh inning The Dodgers were up four runs and I was nearly done with my run. Not only did I want to see the end of the game – another post-trade Dodgers victory – but it dawned on me that in running, I was in fact being more athletic than any of the ball players out on the field that day. While certainly they could all outrun me, out hit me, and out field me, a lot of the time they were just standing around waiting for a hit. By running at a constant rate, I was in fact getting more of a work out than they were. When the work out program ended towards the beginning of the eighth I decided to run for the rest of the game, and I ended up running about eight miles for about eighty minutes.

The recruiters should be knocking on my door any day now.

A Post in Which The Author Comes to Discover Why He Has Become More Interested in Baseball

On Friday night I went to see the Dodgers play the St. Louis Cardinals. We had excellent seats – about fifteen rows back from the field just to the right of home plate along the first base line. The Dodgers played well defensively, although I think they should have gotten Brad Penny off of the mound before he gave up a homerun to Chris Duncan. Offensively, they did not do much, only garnering five hits on a full nine innings. And so they lost two – zip at the end of the game. Given the Dodgers run of losses and bad luck to injuries it was more than likely that they were going to lose and I knew that going into the game. However, I suppose part of me will always suspect that the Dodgers should win against the Cardinals because the earliest baseball game I can remember seeing was a match up between the two teams and I can still distinctly remember one of the Cardinals running with the bat. Part of me still believes that the Cardinals must still, even though it’s been probably more than twelve years, really suck. I mean c’mon, even at eight I knew to drop the frickin’ bat

But despite my innate knowledge of just how bad Cardinals must at least secretly stink, the Dodgers offensive performance was disappointing. In the second half of the first inning Jeff Supan of the Cardinals struck the Dodgers’s big stick, J. D. Drew in the knee with a wild pitch taking him out for the rest of the game. I haven’t heard much about his recovery, only that the injury is not expect to be too serious. My new baseball hero, Nomar Garciaparra didn’t get much time to shine as he has in the other games I’ve seen this season. With three AB’s he popped it up to right field in the first, got thrown out later in the game, and was later walked.

But enough about the game itself. I noticed I’m more into baseball this season. Part of the attraction no doubt stems from the fact that I got last seasons EA MLB video game for my Game Cube. I’ve learned a lot more about the game – stuff that I probably should have learned growing up because I’m male and American. The other factor in my growing interest in Dodgers baseball is my hatred of Orange County and my proximity to the Angels, who I’ve always kind of suspected as being the WASP-Country Club team of Southern California. But I think my growing interest in Dodgers baseball has really lied in my decreasing interest in the comics that are being produced these days. Despite some of my posts, the stuff being put out by DC Comics (my company of choice) has just been boring and total dreck, and for the first time in many years I’m no longer a Wednesday buyer. Instead, I got a few subscriptions and when I’m in L.A. I’ll occasionally go to the shop and pick up something that I can’t get through the mail. Since something has to fill the “hobby hole” in my life, and its summer, baseball seems like a good substitution. It has some similarities, in that both possess a lore of trivia and have distinctive personalities and allow you to have irrational favorites. The upside of liking baseball in comparison to comics is that less people will begin to snore when you want to talk about it. Plus, baseball fans are not, on average, as scary as comics fans.

Anyone want to go to a game this season?