Weird Fandom on the Net

Confess to an interest in comics and you well might cut yourself off from the gene pool entirely, at least until such time as you can relocate to somewhere no one remembers that "weird comics nerd." Indeed, comics enthusiasts do enjoy a reputation for a number of traits that do not properly describe everyone who occasionally opens a comics magazine. The reputed weirdness does not infect all readers or creators, but it exists somewhere, and outsiders recognize and fear it. People might fear it more if they could see some of the material comics fans put up for public inspection via Web browsers.

In the vast milieu of material available on the internet, one expects to find the cranky, the peculiar, the inexplicable, and the disturbing (as well as the trite, the pointless, and the lame). The terms fan art and fan fiction bring to mind all kinds of images to fit many of the aforementioned adjectives. However - perhaps not surprisingly - we can find things stranger than the efforts of enthusiasts to create new stories or images of the comics concepts that interest them.

Most amateur productions remain fairly innocent displays of enthusiasm, occasional talent, and the tastes of their creators. We can enter a dark side to this, however, when we intrude upon the strange worlds of erotic fan fiction and art and radical comics advocacy.

These works lend considerable credence to the notion that comics fans do not live in the same world as outsiders.

Erotic Fan Fiction and Art

Imagine, somehow, a young man beset with boredom. Nothing on the television or on his bookshelf interests him. He recognizes a certain ennui in his state and wonders what might ameliorate it. What, really, does he want to do? Now, stretch your imaginator a little further and answer: He wants to view erotic comics fan fiction and art!

Our hypothetical leisure-problem sufferer seems considerably less likely now, doesn't he? Perhaps he stands on the frontier between "almost never happens" and "just can't happen." So we would hope. But if our imaginary reader did not exist, who could we say puts up superhero-derived pornography for the amusement of others? And who reads it?

Something very, very disturbing lies behind the fact that some comics fan somewhere would dedicate his creative prowess, however limited or sublime, to writing home-made erotica about female superheroes. Granted, comics fans may occupy a portion of civilization with limited access to the reproductive resources available to alpha males (of various social classes, from gangsters to emperors); but one would think that fantasizing about coition with beings that do not exist must indicate some pathological state.

On the other hand, comics themselves may have done much to create an environment in which only a short step separates their material from erotica. As early as Will Eisner and The Spirit, comics readers saw some extremely lewd and admiring depictions of the female form; EC comics brimmed over with the steamy renditions that Wally Wood, Bill Elder, and Jack Davis put on paper; and many artists of the Silver Age also took a try at using comics as an adjunct to the cheesecake pinup medium. Marvel even printed a swimsuit edition, perhaps as a piece of humor, but who knows? Those within and without the industry who see comics as a complete and self-contained universe must look within the medium for what they desire, and thus we see superhero swimsuit editions.

By the seventies, works like Vampirella would no longer split hairs over their intent; reading that black-and-white production involved more display of the female form than most Victoria's Secret catalogs. The later comics carried on this tradition, with contributions like Wally Wood's version of Power Girl, who seemed to have an extra super-power that allowed her to grow like Giant-Man, but limited the effect to her bosom. Even creations that remained sexless in their originator's hands (i.e., Kirby females of the 1960s) sometimes enjoyed cheesecake makeovers. The atrocious swimsuit version of the Invisible Woman's outfit marked a point in comics where comics and cheesecake clearly merged.

So we have, today, the shattered remnants of the "new comics," with an absurd array of bethonged superheroines with breasts larger than houses and two or three threads of costume to cover themselves; female semi-heroes, like Catwoman, who, although purportedly deprived of the benefit of superpowers, can nonetheless turn a costume into body paint and defy gravity with an ever-growing bosom (at some point, it will either stop growing or explode); and uncountable similar excesses.

Earlier versions of the superheroine did indeed appear to titillate, something Dr. Wertham noted in his Seduction of the Innocents, a work that made a dubious connection between rising youth crime and comic books. But through the first several decades of comic book history, comics attempted to titillate within a framework that contained limits and standards essentially vanishing from the culture. Thus we have DC's Green Arrow, which during one run featured full frontal nudity (so I hear) during an adult-themed story about a sexually predatious criminal whom Green Arrow had to neutralize.

At this point, we may step out from "comics" and walk only a step or two to enter "erotica." Into the world of fan-produced comics erotica, we may find homemade tales of sex acts performed with the likes of Wonder Woman, Power Girl, Catwoman, or Supergirl. At one time, the holder of the domain "supergirl.net" featured a page filled with erotic fan fiction and adorned with doctored nude photographs made to resemble costumed heroines. Even where real photographic images existed, such as stills from the ill-fated Supergirl movie, the minds behind the defunct "supergirl.net" would doctor these photographs until their subjects included at least 50% silicone by weight.

I never had quite enough stomach to read any erotic fan fiction. The titles scared me away; the recoil factor inherent in my normal knee-jerk resistance to straight fan fiction added to my own dubious view of speculative seduction of people who only exist on paper. It strikes me, intuitively, that one might as well fantasize about pollenating Wilma Flintstone or Betty Rubble as bother with costumed female vigilantes.

No, I make no call to send out the forces of Law to strip the Great Erotic Fan Fiction Menace from the Internet, nor do I much worry about the salacious effect it might have on vulnerible young minds. Nonetheless, its fundmental creepiness gives me a weird feeling I have a hard time shaking off.

I have to wonder: Does this stuff make sense to anyone but the people who write it? And should a parent allow his daughter to date someone who writes it?

The Weird World of Superhero Advocacy

As the infathomable world of superhero erotica demonstrates a troubling mixture of sexual inclination and four-color fabrication, so too the world of superhero advocacy works blurs the world of the political with the world of comics.

Sometimes these movements center on advocating or slandering some superhero creation. This differs fundamentally from attacks on the creators; creators exist and act, and therefore provide something worthy or unworthy of criticism. The advocacy politics of comics characters, however, ignores the distinction between real and fanciful, and treats things that appear on paper as if they bore the guilt of the deeds of writers and editors.

Enter the world of the truly bizarre, where pointless obsession drives comics fans to treat pet peeves as important legitimate grievances, requiring political mobilization and action, petitions, boycotts, slander campaigns, and, perhaps, even threats to people who write and draw comic books.

• Imagine transcripts of imaginary trials where superheroes prove the stories they were in could not have happened; and comics "Nuremburg trials" that call writers and creators to account for crimes against superheroes or the medium.
• Imagine works that dispense with unpopular superhero characters through lovingly-depicted scenes of torture and murder; and imagine these fan-written works sometimes also drafting artists and writers into the same absurd festivals of pain, and, with their keyboards, justifying stalker legislation everywhere.
• Imagine pointless, convoluted summaries of how, with one story, the editorial staffs of the offending comics companies could put things right, and bring back Hal Jordan, Earth-2, Krypto the Super-Dog; and imagine the boycotts these plans advocate to pressure comics companies to restore some past status quo.
• Imagine atrocity lists and manifestoes, frequently patterned after the Declaration of Independence, targeted at the "criminal" authors or artists of stories for various laundry lists of grievances; and in these, imagine the premise that comics companies can violate the rights of their creations.

Before a red-faced fanboy could scream "Death to Ron Marz!" one could see that herein lies a vista of obsession, delusion, and detachedness from the solid reality some people take for granted as a shared, objective world. Sometimes the hatred becomes thick enough to squeeze between the fingers in this odd world in which no one seems to step in and say "It's just a comic book!"

Superhero Anti-Defamation Leagues

Kept in their place, movements like "bring back Hal" represent a healthy voicing of customers who wish for a change in product. Customers should speak out so that producers can improve products. A demand economy works like that.

However, the world of comics advocacy includes people who take the "death" of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern or the Oliver Queen Green Arrow more seriously than real events like the imprisonment of Neldon Mandela. To point out one seemingly obvious difference that leaves one faction off in dreamland and the other firmly attached to reality, Nelson Mandela can shake a man's hand and Hal Jordan or Oliver Queen can't. Mandela has a body made of matter, walks the earth, talks to people, appears on television, divorces his wife, says nice things about brutal dictator Fidel Castro, breathes, eats, sleeps, and excretes. Comic book characters only exist as words and pictures on paper, flickers on screens, and toy simulacra. Comic book characters do not exist. Again, for the hard of hearing: Comic book characters do not exist.

Some of the superhero advocacy factions don't seem to think much about this; you could read material they write and assume it dealt with a political prisoner rather than someone who played guest star in old issues of Brave and the Bold. We have to face it, though: Ron Marz did not commit murder when Green Lantern "died." Jim Starlin did not commit murder when Adam Warlock, Captain Marvel, or the Jason Todd Robin "died." They simply put endings on stories that someone didn't like.

Really, then, shouldn't we dispense with the "WANTED - FOR MURDER!" kind of accusations against writers like Marz? As far as the criminal justice system knows, Ron Marz never killed anybody. A judge would laugh himself incontinent at some fanboy district attorney attempting to bring him in for crimes against comic characters; a truly inspired judge would sentence him to having a comic drawn with pictures of him in jail for his punishment.

Superhero Defamation Leagues

Sometimes one can find consdirable amusement in a harsh and critical dissection of a substandard superhero creation. Even when unfair, if such criticism keeps itself to aesthetic criteria, it still remains within a world that clearly separates the real from the fictional. Not all works, however, can maintain such logical distance between the subject matter they treat and the emotions of the analysts. Sometimes this material goes into a territory that one might label "demented."

For instance, a number of comics readers really detest the Kyle Raynor Green Lantern. One would expect such a reaction for a number of reasons. One, his presence reminds readers of the absence of a better-liked character that Kyle replaced in the DC Universe mythos, the late Hal Jordan. Two, his concept involves an attempt to direct the title towards a younger demographic and thus tends to include occasional faddish or puerile elements. Three, the stories that gave rise to his assumption of the Green Lantern title represented an inconsistent and spotty treatment of inherited Green Lantern concepts; many readers qualify the stories that had Hal Jordan go bad, then die (at least twice so far), as stories that went bad.

The saner side of the "bring back Hal" or "get rid of Kyle" factions simply expresses their desires in blunt, honest terms. They want to undo several years of stories containing developments that they disliked. However, other treatments do not limit themselves to this. I have read one work that presented a mock trial where the Silver Age Green Lantern defended himself against claims of responsibility for the actions depicted in the last comics in which he appeared. This writer invented some premise of mind control that had not appeared in any DC comic dealing with the subject.

Naturally, the court saw the defendant's case and undid the unpopular stories; and the transcript ended with an account of the suddenly powerless Kyle Raynor dying horribly by being ground up under train wheels (with, perhaps, a few other violent actions thrown in) in loving detail by someone who really wanted to torture a comic book character bad enough to pen fantasies of horrible death.

Think about this. If I, one day, became enraged at Lucy van Pelt for pulling the football away from Charlie Brown and making him fall on his back once again, and I acted out my anger by drawing a cartoon where a gang of skinheads kick her to death with steel-toed shoes, would you view this as the product of a rational mind? More likely you would wonder if I had any attachment to the objective world at all, and would act to guarantee that no one left me around children.

Superhero Comics as Advocacy Politics

Into this category we can pigeonhole material that deals with concepts like the "racism of the Justice League," a body that has, admittedly, passed very few days with human members from places other than America and few days with members who did not need loads of sunscreen.

One faction of comics readership believes that comic book characters violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution by not including more characters with African, Native American, and other non-European ancestries.

The question of whether comics should portray more richly ethnic superheroes must wait for other discussion. Everyone can entertain whatever opinion he pleases about how another person writes, wrote, or should have written a story. To take up a cause like applying affirmative action to the Justice League or Avengers again crosses the line between real-world politics and the events depicted on newsprint.

Of course, one expects to see such demands in an age of ubiquitous advocacy politics; a growing number of persons, especially those indoctrinated to think that way in government schools, feel that everything people do must serve the causes they support. Therefore, we have the Journal of the American Medical Association running op-ed pieces as scientific studies in order to help a politician elude removal from office; therefore we have the American Psychological Association defining what constitutes mental illness based on what lobbyists want rather than what their knowledge tells them; therefore we have Saturday morning cartoons as instruments of political indoctrination. Why, in such a mindset, should we expect comics to remain immune?

However, such interpretation can destroy art or turn it upside-down. Robin Hood, who originally robbed to raise the ransom to free King Richard the Lionheart, became a model for the socialist ideal of redistribution of wealth; Don Quijote, in reinterpretation, became an exemplar of the intrinsic goodness of impossible ideals rather than Cervantes' cynical parody of proponents of irrelevant and obsolescent value systems. Superhero comics could become just a polemical tool, providing a vocabularity for political sameness everywhere instead of entertainment. Telling stories well would then become a forgotten, irrelevant purpose to a medium designed to indoctrinate instead.

A Remedy for Weirdness?

In general, all the strangeness of the previously-discussed milieux of weird comics fandom seems to derive from a failure to recognize a rather important fact. To take comics for such substantial matter that a reader wants to write down obscene fantasies about leotard-clad creations on paper, to invest them with such an importance that one will argue publicly about wrongs done to a superhero, or to demand that these works redirect themselves to investing in readers a perfect and invariable political ideology through depictions that demonstrate a set of purported "truths" all reflect the same fallacy in thinking.

A comic book does not depict the real world. Comics characters do not exist. Comics that do not include someone's idealized ethnic balance do not discriminate against anyone who exists. People can't sleep with comic book characters.

Comics constitute fiction. They depict the product of invention, not observation. Readers ignore this at their own peril.