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11/21/2003: Fannish Friday Five
The questions of the Suprise Fandom Fannish Five are from fannish5:
- What fandom did you get into that you were absolivity and posiloutly sure, you were never going to get into, but you did.
Superhero comics.
- What made you think you would never get into it? What tipped you into it?
I guess some kind of snobism. For the longest time I read and collected comics, but didn't have any interest in superheroes. I mean when I started to get into adult comics as a teenager, comics were even more associated just with "being for children" and/or "superheroes" i.e. ridiculous stories about muscled guys in tights (and the occasional woman with big boobs), than they are now. But I had progressed through the franco-belgian stuff, and there were great children's comics, but tons of good stuff for adults, both genre and non-genre, too. And then I got into some (non-superhero) US comics, both classics (like Krazy Kat or Little Nemo) and modern "alternative" comics, etc. but throughout it was sort of important to me to "advocate" comics as an artform and literary genre, that they ought to be taken seriously. I mean, I read some US mainstream graphic novels, which were outgrowths of the superhero genre even then, but as a whole I didn't think much of the genre. That (from it's genre premise) it's not the most "ideologically compatible" with my views didn't help either.
Getting into the genre itself, as opposed to sometimes enjoying the fringes of the genre that played with it, was kind of a slippery slope. The beginning of the end of my resistance was the Spider-Man movie, I think. I really enjoyed that, and following the movie I read somewhere that currently JMS was writing Amazing Spider-Man, so that became the first superhero title I subscribed to, and for some time it was the only one. At that point I still fooled myself that liking it was an "aberration" for me rather than the new norm. Anyway, the first cracks were there, providing the opening for Lucy and Sanj to get me interested in the Batverse and Nightwing in particular. I mean, I was looking for new fandoms, after my Sentinel love had cooled, and the universe and characters sounded really interesting and complex, much more so than what my vague impression of superhero comics had been before. Also I had missed a focus in my collection habit, and getting to know Nightwing and the Batverse works great for that (which isn't a small factor, really enjoy collecting comics as objects, almost as much as reading them).
- Did you start to write/vid/archive/dub/(fill in fannish creative activity) in that fandom? Do you still?
I'm more active than I've been in other fandoms, though that doesn't say much, since I didn't offer any creative activity (well besides discussions and such) before, and now every once in a while I might draw something, and I've started making icons. I still have the best intentions to continue my Batverse comic/continuity indexing project too, though my inner slacker proves to be quite the obstacle to progress -- as usual. And I'm not sure that counts as "creative" anyway.
- Have you ever pimped someone into a fandom without trying? Which fandom, and what did it?
No.
- Do you have a fandom where you do not read the fic? Why not?
I don't have a fandom where I avoid fanfic out of some principle. I have fandoms where there almost is no fanfic at all, or where I don't like any of what I've found. But if a good author were to write a story with an interesting concept/pairing in it, I can't think of a fandom where I wouldn't read that fanfic.
