The Rise of Geek Chic: an Analysis of Nerd Identity in a Post-Cult Market

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The Rise of Geek Chic: An Analysis of Nerd Identity in a Post-Cult Market

Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation

Authors Reynolds, Renee H.

Publisher The University of Arizona.

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THE RISE OF GEEK CHIC: AN ANALYSIS OF NERD IDENTITY IN A POST-CULT MARKET

Reneé H. Reynolds

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WITH A MAJOR IN RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, AND THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2017

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.

SIGNED: Reneé H. Reynolds

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the unwavering placidity of Ken McAllister, at whose shores I often found solid ground regardless of the conditions of the sea. I would also like to thank Robert Finger, Andrew Huerta, Jenna Pack, Alan and Regina Chu, and Renee Courey, in whom I found friendship beyond any expectation or comprehension and an unyielding (and undeserved) faith in my abilities as both a scholar and human being. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my parents who have consistently encouraged me to move forward with my academic goals and were steadfast in their support of my journey to the PhD.

DEDICATION

To my beautiful, patient, and loving husband—without whom nothing would be possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES 7

ABSTRACT 8

CHAPTER 1 The Zeitgeist of Geek Chic: How Cultishness and Panic Trouble Nerd Cultural Identity 9

CHAPTER 2 Policing Culture: The Rise of a Working-class Readership and the Media Panic of the Bourgeoisie 36

CHAPTER 3 Rise of an Authentic Comics Fandom: Deviance and Defiance in the Comics Industry 61

CHAPTER 4 The Disneyfication of Nerd Culture: How Capitalizing on the Religiousity of the Fandom Almost Crashed the Comics Market 101

CHAPTER 5 The Insider Experience: Consumerism and Cultural Tension on the Expo Floor 143

APPENDICIES 167

REFERENCES 178

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1: Cover of Crime SuspenStories, No. 22, by EC 84

FIGURE 2: Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval 85

FIGURE 3: Comics Code Authority Advertisement 88

FIGURE 4: Final Panel of “Judgement Day!” in Incredible Science Fiction 90

FIGURE 5: Cover of The Amazing Spider-man, No. 96, by Marvel Comics 94

FIGURE 6: The Impact of Media Panic and Disneyfication on Media Culture 104

FIGURE 7: Cover of The Buyer’s Guide for Comics Fandom, No. 1 112

FIGURE 8: A Visual Representation of the Field, According to Bourdieu 121

ABSTRACT

This project is an analytical history of the discourse of media panics that have affected comics-like forms in the mid- to late-1800s, comic books in the mid-1900s, and comics media in 1990s and the contemporary moment. The study of these media panics shapes a theory of nerd culture in general and comics culture specifically in order to better understand the delicate and foundational dialectic that sustains a consumer identity that is paradoxical in its indulgence in and animosity towards popular culture. With its historical formation in mind, this project explores the formation of geek chic as a consumer identity that, in many ways, troubles and even threatens the status quo of nerd culture.

CHAPTER 1

The Zeitgeist of Geek Chic: How Cultishness and Panic Trouble Nerd Culture Identity

I’m a nerd, and I’m pretty proud of it. —Gilbert, Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

In a public display of disgust, Pat Broderick, an artist returning to DC after a 20- year absence from the comics industry, took to Facebook to proclaim his rejection of cosplayers at comic conventions (i.e., “comic cons”).1 Broderick (2014) addresses convention promoters directly, stating if “you’re building your show around cosplay events and mega multiple media guest [sic] don’t invite me….if you’re a promoter pushing cosplay as your main attraction you’re not helping the industry or comics market.” To cosplayers, Broderick (2014) is a bit more pointed: “You bring nothing of value to the shows.” Long-time and prolific comics creator, Michael A. Baron (2014) concurs, responding to Broderick with “them fuckin’ cosplayers!”

While these instances may seem like little more than frustration with the presence of cosplayers at cons, there is a deeper concern expressed here that is made clearer in the response of Raymond Lui (2014), a tokusatsu and anime dealer and owner of Muteki

Sales:

I had a cosplayer pass by my booth all excited about the upcoming

DOCTOR STRANGE movie, and wanted to dress like him, but the

cosplayer had no idea what Strange does, if he’s a real doctor, and when I

1 Cosplay, or costume play, is the act of dressing as a character from comics, anime, video games, etc. While the first comic cons in the US included attendees dressed in costumes featuring characters from comics and fantasy, cosplay is most closely associated with an offshoot of anime-manga youth culture in Japan. Since the mid- to late-1990s, cosplay has become standard fare at US comic cons. 9

remarked that he was created by Steve Ditko, the man who made Spider-

Man, the cosplayer asked me if Strange was related to Spider-Man. I had

to boot him out of my booth.2

Lui’s story reveals an unspoken tenet within nerd culture: there are die-hard fans and then there are the wannabes, those who have the desire to be a part of the fandom but may lack the compendious knowledge or obsessive dedication that marks the “true” fan.

Many within traditional nerd culture utterly reject what they categorize as inauthentic or surface-level participation. Such concerns materialize in a variety of ways—several of which are discussed in this project—but for the most part they center on the policing of what many die-hard fans might categorize as inauthentic pretenders.

While many of the markers of an “authentic” fan may be the gathering and production of nerd knowledge, there are often other characteristics that are unspoken or simply assumed; more specifically, there are established characteristics of whiteness, heteronormativity, and male-domination within the fandom that assign cultural capital to individuals who may not have any more purchase on the fandom beyond these arbitrary characteristics of race, gender, and sexuality. In this way, the assumption of

“inauthenticity” may be inherently assigned to any individual who falls outside of this nerd norm, as it has been established beginning in the late-1960s and early-1970s.

2 Tokusatsu (特撮), or toku, is a genre of Japanese live-action media that typically features science-fiction or fantasy themed narratives. While toku relies on special effects, the emphasis of production is on the use of practical effects. Perhaps one of the most well-known examples in the US is that of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993-1995). Anime (アニメ) is a catch-all term for an animation style that is mostly associated with the Japanese animation style that took its aesthetics from manga, a form of Japanese comics and graphic novels that rose to popularity in the 1970s. Much anime are based upon popular manga. 10

Beyond the socio-cultural acceptance of a person into the fold of nerd culture, there are complicated and often antipodal relationships formed between nerds and the industry producing their nourishment. The latter sentiment resonates in Broderick’s

(2014) post as it relates directly to the stability and growth of a comics market that relies on the proliferation of a comics culture—whatever form that culture may take because, after all, comics culture is as much an economic manifestation as it is an identity formation. For this reason, the tension between who is authentic and who is inauthentic as a fan is both essential and nonessential to the constitution of the larger pop culture market, of which nerd culture in general and comics culture specifically are a dominating influences. In other words, the market moves in the direction of its own health and vitality, so it is willing to embrace non-traditional nerd culture consumers as a new demographic of customers, and perhaps for this reason, among others, there is sustained panic within the established nerd fandom that has so far functioned upon the stability of a fairly narrow demographic.

The Aims of This Project

This project seeks to come to some conclusions about the state of comics fandom broadly within the US by examining the complications and implications of the tensions around “authentic” nerdom. While this project spotlights nerd culture generally and the comics fandom specifically, I mean for the rhetorical findings herein to be transferable to the study of other fandoms. The undeniable component of identity formation through consumption connects fanaticism and mass consumption of the popular culture industry and, in the process, erects a divide between the insular culture of fandoms and an ostensible mainstream. This distinction suggests that fandoms exist in dialectical

relationships with mainstream culture, a struggle marked by the give and take between the mass adoption of fringe culture and the preservation of “authentic” cult knowledge.

Paradoxically, despite the (likely false) presumption that the supremacy of one cultural formation or the other is eventual, I contend that this struggle is a fundamental driver at the heart of many fandoms. The comics fandom may be particularly susceptible to this struggle because—despite its metastatic configurations—comics are often seen as agnostic or a shared space of Americana. I document this struggle, particularly in the context of the comics convention as a space of contact where these tensions play out, and posit that authentic fandoms and mass culture are not so much antithetical as they are symbiotic, even umbilical, when viewed through the lens of advanced global capitalism.

The Purpose of This Chapter

This chapter establishes working definitions of two pivotal terms that enable a discussion of the aforementioned tensions: nerd culture and geek chic. While the terms nerd and geek may be used within fan and comics studies with some equivalency, within the bounds of this project, they take on specific meanings in order to differentiate between the factions they often signify. To these ends, nerd culture will stand as the moniker for a more traditional socio-culture formation that became recognizable in mid-

20th century in the US—a formation in which comics as a medium has often been inseverable—and is characterized by knowledge consumption, cultural capital accumulation, and fan production. By contrast, geek chic signifies a growing dynamic in which participants express fandom primarily through consumption, which then is (in some circles) transmuted into participation and even expertise. The cosplayer in Lui’s description above may fall into the category of geek chic: despite an apparently sincere

desire to participate in the fandom of Doctor Strange, the cosplayer’s intentions were met with hostility because he lacked knowledge of the fandom and the sense of decorum that true acolytes learn through experience and study. While I attempt to understand the trends in the comics fandom through the terminology of nerd culture and geek chic, I also acknowledge that these representations are only a means by which to discuss these happenings, as there is no way to definitively state “nerd culture does this” while “geek chic does that.” Instead, it should be noted that these statuses are not static; instead, they are fluid, enabling a person to shift back and forth on a continuum between the two identities. Notably, such identity shifting, which may be expressed in multiple ways, can be self-driven and/or imposed.

Beyond establishing terminology for this project, this chapter establishes a theoretical framework that explains the rise of geek chic and its threat to an established nerd culture. I postulate that a once-broad mass consumer base has been continually segmented, beginning in earnest during the 1950s, until fandom in the widest application of the term has become part of everyday life. Everyday fandom has obscured any solid distinction that may have once existed between cultish knowledge and the mainstream.

Further, everyday fandoms are both symptomatic and propagatory of advanced globalized capital, which offers identity formation based upon consumption and consumptive choices. In other words, what we buy is who are—to ourselves just as much as to others. Through the framework of everyday fandoms, two possibilities emerge: (a) cultural objects that were once considered to be a part of mass media culture, accessible to anyone with the financial means, may become cultish, most likely because they are forcefully evicted from mainstream culture as a result of media panic; (b) once

cultishness has been established it fosters an identity formation that is heavily dependent upon gathering and producing cultish knowledge, which intensifies the need to distinguish the fandom from the mainstream. In the case of comics, the form has always incited media panics that launch the many voices of elitism that condemn vice which preys upon the always vulnerable masses.

Emerging media often cause what Drotner (1992) terms “media panics,” in which the corrupting potential of new media is often of concern to those in power, who seek to either restrict or repurpose these media on the grounds that the elite are protecting an otherwise vulnerable consumer. These media panics are a pattern seen with the wide adoption of any new media by a consuming populace. Once emergent media forms are successfully interrogated by public concern (often through vice societies acting as the voice of the masses at large), new media are often restricted and/or repurposed. In the wake of these outcomes, production, distribution, and consumption move underground, allowing for the creation of rare, secret, and cultish fandoms. Fandoms of the rare are those that captivate and demand devotion of the mind. These are the fandoms that are nearly religious, imposing upon their fans a kind of deep and significant sense of self.

Late capitalism has a way of commodifying these stirring feelings by lacing them with the profound quality of nostalgia. It is from this mechanism of capitalism that media culture that was once driven underground because of mainstream rejection or restriction become desirable again. A heavy dose of commodified nostalgia easily facilitates re- emergence of past media, which seems simplistic, in a market overrun by choice— making what was old and tossed away into something not only new, but also familiar.

While the market does cater to the specialized needs of fandoms, like nerd culture, fandoms exist because fans are consumers of the very industry that offers indifference to their cultishness. The survival of the comics industry depends upon sellability, not cultish authenticity; so herein lies the struggle between nerd culture and geek chic—a tension between a cultural identity based upon buying and the buying of identity-forming media. The media panic of social elites throughout the centuries who have attempted to limit the exposure of the assailable masses to the corrupting power of the comics form has been inverted; now the panic lies with nerd culture, containing elites of its own that worry for how the undisciplined and uncultured geek chic will approach the sacred objects of the fandom. Nerd culture’s panic is about the potential dismemberment of nerd identity by the loss of its cultishness through mainstream adoption. Whether or not this panic is warranted, it exists, and the corresponding moments in which these two cultural formations clash are the entry points of this study. If the global market itself operates out of fear and risk, rather than the capitalistic sacrament of competition, then these points of cultural contention should be recategorized based upon the conjoined nature of comics culture and comics industry. This categorization is one way to better understand the horizontal hostility within the fandom as a means to examine the finer points authority and expertise as expressed through the mythos of authenticity.

Defining the Fandom: The Cult(ure) of Pop Nerdom

The Cultishness of Nerd Knowledge

Fans are eccentric. Many of them would admit as much with a thinly veiled pride.

It is a well-earned eccentricity that stems from the acceptance of one’s self in relation to the object of devotion and the acceptance of others as devotees. The profession of this devotion can take many forms, but is perhaps best described as an exhibition of fervor that smacks of religiosity—even cultishness. This cultishness is fed by sharing prized cultish knowledge with other fans, bringing the individual closer to delineation and, by extension, an identity formed through the fandom. Because of the near-hallowed character of this cultish knowledge, resistance to the mainstream as a perceived force of oppression and source normativity is a given, even a necessity. The knowledge gathered and produced about a particular fandom is rare, secret, and sanctified, and the act of sharing in the sacredness brings fans together, expediting the insular nature of fandoms

(Segal, 2011). Batchelor (2012) contends that various knowledges can be built around “a topic or individual [who] possesses a kind of compulsive, rampant, or enduring popularity, usually slightly or overtly outside the mainstream” (p. xi) because cult is about “humor, charisma, mystery, and love” (p. xii). These characteristics resonate with the quasi-magical qualities of cult fandoms, which seem almost too mystical to be captured with anything more concrete than this loose definition.

Certainly, though, this understanding of cult is not emic or etic, as it is too ethereal for either approach; even so, there are characteristics here that can provide insights into nerd culture’s ferocity toward its commitments. One of the most important

constructs is the notion of imagination: nerd culture imagines itself into being.3 Without the perception of cultish knowledge to be gained, there is no culture. This notion reverberates in Batchelor’s (2012) theory of “cult culture,” which operates not as a thing to apprehend, but as the “impulses that draw members of the global community to a person, thing, topic, or issue that arise out of the juncture of mass communications, technology, political systems, and economic institutions” (p. xv). These “impulses” become a foundation for the consumption of and participation in what Bob Batchelor

(2012) terms cult pop culture, with the caveat that cult pop subsists as a direct result of networks enabled by technology, especially the Internet; technology provides potential access points into cult networks, access which transitions cult knowledge from the realm of the rare, secret, and sanctified to mall of the mainstream where it may be consumed in all manner of unauthorized ways. Loss of mysticism around cultish nerd knowledge allows for new demographic possibilities and contributory potentialities, but not all are who are part of these cultish formations are interested in sharing the culture, especially without the oversight of authority, making peccadillos into affronts to sacramental objects, images, and narratives.

The Path to Authenticity in Nerd Culture: A Brief Study in Contradictions

The subsequent panic about losing the purity of fan culture helps explain why fandoms operate on the propagation of an insular cultural experience, regardless of the size of the fanbase. This insularity shapes discursive boundaries and encourages isolation from the mainstream, an isolation that is often viewed within nerd culture as the social

3 This understanding of the fandom’s imagination is not unlike the theory that comes from Benedict Anderson (2006) and his theory of the imagined community: “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (p. 6). Community is achieved through perception rather than solely from material interactions. 17

cost of practitioners’ devotion to the study and mastery of cultish knowledge. Like many forms of expertise, the deeper the knowledge, the more difficult it becomes for the practitioner to communicate with those of a more limited discursive depth. However, this inability is a kind of reward itself, allowing those with the greatest depths of knowledge to declare the greatest difference. In this way, nerd culture both begrudges and basks in its separation from the mainstream. The profession of this difference comes in the act of performing difference for the benefit of both other nerds and those outside nerdom. These acts of performative difference are about both participating in the insular instantiations of the culture and resisting the mainstream—in what and how nerds consume, how they spend their leisure time, and what they value. Difference not only exists as a measure of resistance, but also lends itself towards the accumulation of cultural capital.

In a similar and equally perplexing contradiction, nerd culture both revels in and resists consumption. The action of consumption itself is a means of maintaining intellectual and financial dedication to the objects of its affection and of gaining and demonstrating knowledge, the latter of which can be for the benefit of other nerds in as much as it benefits the individual. Equally essential to the maintenance of nerd culture’s identity of insularity and isolation is the refusal to consume—an act of defiance toward the pull of capitalistic forces that tend to rely heavily upon commodification. Refusal and resistance can confirm authenticity as much or even more so than the act of buying. Greg

Taylor (1999) explains that “[f]ans are not true cultists unless they pose their fandom as a resistance activity, one that keeps them one step ahead of those forces which would try to market their resistant taste back to them” (p. 161). For nerd culture, the path to authenticity is paved with knowledge gathering and making, but equally essential to the

identity is that participants resist the forces of capitalism that attempt to deter them from knowledge gathering or making or that seem to cheapen the value of these activities.

Williams (2012) describes this tendency as follows:

Years after a television series is cancelled (or perhaps because of its

cancellation), for example, fans hold very tightly to any aspect of the show

they can. They continue their fandom through consumption, but not in the

ways the culture industry expects. Fans resist moving on to the newest

show, preferring instead to maintain their investments in what would

otherwise become a relic of mass cultural history. In this way, fans locate

themselves in the intersection of commitment to and resistance to mass

culture, investing financially and emotionally in products they love, but

refusing to move on just because the culture industry prods them to. (p.

178-179)

Indeed, these fans will reproduce their fandom in a number of different ways, giving themselves new ways to consume it, regardless of the fandom’s popularity in the mainstream. Examples of such production can be found on websites like Redbubble and

Shirtpunch, where artists resist blatant commodification by offering designs that highlight obscure details about fandoms that only a fan holding encyclopedic knowledge would understand, including mash-ups that call upon the consumer to have cultish knowledge of reference points in multiple fandoms. These obscure references lend themselves to isolationism by separating those who know from those who do not. These reimaginings of fandom imagery and media seek to qualify authenticity in order to grip tightly the

secrets of the fandom that are slipping away or are misidentified while on their way to mainstream consumption.

These aspects of nerd culture—imagination, isolation, authenticity—do not limit its longevity in a cultural sense, but the culture itself is interlaced with the complications of industry. Objects of affection that come with official licensure and branding are dependent upon a diversified market that will always turn fickle eyes towards the brightest point of profit potential. In many ways, the comics industry has never departed from this expectation; the industry has always been willing to sacrifice the cultural formations of its more cultish followers for the larger profit found in mass media, mainstream appeal. Indeed, the success of the comics industry over the past decade is due mainly to a renewed interest in superhero narratives, the Disney-ification of the comics industry in general, and the ability of technological advancements, like Comixology, to reach more diverse audiences.4 The conditions for a boom in comics industry have been facilitated by the systematic heterogeneity of the popular culture experience throughout the last five decades or so—a fragmenting of popular culture that has provided a rich environment not only for the (re)birth of innumerable fandoms, each with its own specialized knowledge, but also for the normalization of fandom as part of everyday life.

The Proliferation of Everyday Fandoms

A discussion of contemporary fandoms is really a discussion about the pop culture industry within the US and the proliferation of technologies that have allowed for the ubiquity of entertainment experiences. Within the contemporary moment, it is easy to

4 Comixology is an application-based comics reader for smartphones, tablets, and e-readers that offers patrons the ability to read comics on a subscription, much like Netflix or Hulu, or on an individual basis, like Amazon Instant Video. This app has expanded the market in many ways because it is not necessary for readers to purchase comics from a comic book shop, which have historically been fan-only areas. 20

forget that entertainment has not always been as accessible and as diversified, in the sense that popular culture within the US has not always been as prodigious as it is today.

Limited choice in the 1940s gave rise to a citizenry that shared the same viewing experiences regardless of class, race, gender, or politics. Umberto Eco (1983/1986) describes this time of a unified pop culture experience this way:

Then we were all (perhaps rightly) victims of a model of the mass media

based on that of the relationship with authority: a centralized transmitter,

with precise political and pedagogical plans, controlled by Authority

(economic or political), the messages sent through recognizable

technological channels (waves, wires, devices identifiable as a screen,

whether movie or TV, radio, magazine page) to the addressees, victims of

ideological indoctrination. (p. 148)

Selling the idea of culture was as easy as promoting a unified cultural consumer, one who was looking for goods, services, and identity within their purchases. Storey (2003) perhaps best describes this action of culture as a “practice” in which meanings are communicated: “Culture is not in the object, but in the experience of the object: how we make it meaningful, what we do with it, how we value it, etc.” (p. x). During a post-

WWII world, a uniformity of culture was more than an expectation: the US had refused economic collapse through the production of uniform weapons, and the war efforts, although behind them, had taught the citizenry to be suspicious of difference. This suspicion quickly led to a media panic about disruptive media, like the comic book, which many feared as a vehicle for communist recruitment. Drotner (1992) explains this tendency through her term “media panic,” which she defines as the following:

From the advent of mass-circulation fiction and magazines to film and

television, comics and cartoons, the introduction of a new mass medium

causes strong public reactions whose repetitiveness is as predictable as the

fervour with which they are brought forward. Adult experts—teachers and

social workers, cultural critics and politicians—define the new mass

medium as a social, psychological, or moral threat to the young (or

mixture of the three), and appoint themselves as public troubleshooters.

Legal and educational measures are then imposed, and the interest

lessens—until the advent of a new mass medium reopens public

discussion. That spiraling motion characterizes a media panic. (p. 43)

The technologies that deliver culture and propagate its many ideologies were themselves objects of cultural meaning making and communication. In the mid-1940s and especially in the 1950s, many people in the US benefitted from the rise of technologies, like the home television set, which held near-ubiquitous status by 1960, with nine out of every ten

US households in possession of at least one (Jordan, 1996, p. 798). The “Big Three” television networks controlled the programing for these 60,000,000 televisions: National

Broadcasting Company (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and American

Broadcasting Company (ABC). The limited forms of media enabled the proliferation of a coalesced, hegemonic experience—Eco’s “ideological indoctrination”—that became the unified popular culture of the 1950s. While effective in a time of a rising 1950s post-war middle class whose appetite for conformity was practically insatiable, this orthodoxy had been splintered into iterations of “hipness” by the 1970s, a time when selling culture became about helping the consumer navigate an ever-expanding sea of pop culture

choices through the subtle suggestion that the act of purchasing was about finding one’s self—identity formation through media consumption.

However, by the 1960s, the momentum of the decade lead to resistance to authority within this nascent mass media consumer identity. Such a movement was almost inevitable, as the consuming populace’s pining for a personal identity through cultural consumption could not be restricted to the boundaries of one unified vision of

Americana. Storey (2003) contends that “cultures are both shared and conflicting networks of meanings,” rejecting the notion that they are “harmonious, organic wholes”

(p. x). These conflicts provide the vehicle of cultural expansion as the culture industry attempts to answer the insatiable demand for more. While advancements in technology became more financially accessible (and, therefore, more widespread), the expansion of choices during this period (in terms of more networks and programing) cannot be solely attributed to the greater affordability of television sets. Rosenthal (2005) situates the

1960s as a “time of liberation; more precisely, an ushering in of greater independence and opportunity for many who had been relatively disadvantaged” (namely minorities, women, and youth), asserting that “[t]he objective was not equality but freedom.

Freedom to choose one’s lifestyle” (p. 169). Rosenthal’s (2005) vision of the 1960s as a time of blossoming potentiality is somewhat incomplete when considering that those

“relatively disadvantaged” groups still strive for better representation and choice overall; even by today’s standards, there seems to be little freedom offered in an expansion of choices that all lead back to the same hegemonic vision. This is perhaps the reason that mass media entertainment continues to perpetuate itself through unending splintering and cross-pollination. For Eco (1983/1986), the multiplication of media enabled an

“incontrollable plurality of messages that each individual uses to make up his [or her] own composition with the remote-control switch. The consumer’s freedom may not have increased, but surely the way to teach him [or her] to be free and controlled has changed”

(p. 148). In other words, the given plurality of choices allows for the individual’s own arrangement of consumables, giving the illusory feel of freedom—thereby extending agency in resistance to a perceived authority as a trifle exchanged for power. Within this context, identity formation is really only possible through the new religion of consumption, the opium of an age of fragmented culture and consciousness. This identity formation, born within the act of consumption, is further substantialized through a connection with others who bear similar identities, and this is how fandom is naturalized within everyday life. Every consumer becomes a cultist with a personal savior derived from the continuous reconstitution of how and what is consumed. The rare and the secret—the different—hold sway because they offer the potentiality for obtaining an ultimate authentic experience.

What was once mastery of a shared hegemonic experience is now, from one perspective, a superficial understanding of an array of media experiences, altering the individual’s relationship to these experiences and enabling new methods of consumption that question in nearly every way the wisdom of devotion-based cultic consumption.

From three channels on one device to the present contemporary moment, with nearly unfettered access to culture on multiple platforms through Internet-based applications, websites, and streaming services, access allows for fandoms to grow in strength because viewing episodes is not limited to a one-time experience. The advent of these services has allowed for the consumption of cult materials (like cult television series Supernatural)

without the same commitment of time; a consumer may binge watch all eleven seasons in just a few weeks, skirting the years some fans have dedicated to taking in the series one episode at a time. Access holds the potential for not only joining a fandom that is already well developed, but also for assuming that fandom in a short period, increasing the possible fandoms one can join. The fragmentation of entertainment consumption has created a state of concurrent fandoms that stretch from the obscure to the trendy:

As we have moved from an era of broadcasting to one of narrowcasting, a

process fueled by deregulation of media markets and reflected in the rise

of new media technologies, the fan as a specialized yet dedicated

consumer has become a centerpiece of media industries’ marketing

strategies. (Gray, Sandvoss, & Harrington, 2007, p. 4)

The marriage of continuous access and niche programing has left consumers a patchwork of fandoms to choose from—and an ability to move between them as fluidly as changing the channel. Moreover, it is this mechanism of fragmentation that has transformed viewers into fans, positioning fandoms as part of everyday life, a phenomenon that greatly contributes to the rise of geek chic.

Rise of Geek Chic

The fragmentation of media experience not only facilitated the transition toward a more fandom-based mainstream, but also fractured nerd culture generally. Storey (2003) posits that culture is discernable by struggle, which attempts “to articulate, disarticulate, and rearticulate particular meanings, particular ideologies, particular politics….

[M]eanings can be ascribed to the same thing, meaning is always the site and result of struggle” (p. xi). These meanings produce camps of thought, which, in turn, bring about

installations of authority and brand loyalty that command differing amounts of power through the amassing of cultural capital. Nerd culture functions very well on this model because knowledge accumulation and production are among its key tenets and because the expansion of the group’s cultural capital only lends itself to further endearment. Even so, this fracturing has left lines of demarcation, separating nerd culture fans into smaller and smaller subgroups until mash-ups and reproductions are closer to hard-sought authenticity than new media production. Eco (1983/1986) summarizes this thought with an astute example: “thus the spaceships of Star Wars [(1977)], shamelessly descended from [the spaceships in Stanley] Kubrick’s [2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)], are more complex and plausible than their ancestor, and now the ancestor seems to be their imitator” (146). Nerd culture is constantly rearticulating itself to the point that even with the array of choices at hand, each choice is the same one: even before fans experience the rehash, they already know the ending. Arguably, this mechanism is what allows for easy entry of non-fans into what was once cult knowledge, as mass media consumption is less about finding the authentic in newness and more about learning to appreciate simulacra built upon the smelting together of palimpsests and sub-articulations. In one of his most influential texts Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard (2006/1981) begins to describe the simulacra as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (p. 1). He goes on to explain that representation is an outgrowth of “the equivalence of the sign and of the real,” but simulation derives from “the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value….Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum” (p. 6).

I contend that nerd culture has so readily adopted the simulacra of its own invention that it can no longer see beyond the smelting together of myriad simulacra that simply regurgitate a pop culture goop, one that becomes more authentic than the real behind a simulacrum that never had a real to represent—a hyper-hyperreal. This is the concern of

Oswalt (2010) to some degree, but this concern goes beyond a vacuum of creativity and towards a greater and perhaps more personal concern that I have for nerd culture—which

I fear may ultimately be more toxic to the culture than geek chic could ever be. In other words, nerd culture cannot blame the state of its culture on would-be appropriators alone.

Indeed, it is this absurdity that becomes authenticity, cementing the foundations of a nerd culture firmly upon the rehearsals of creativity.

Going Geek: The Rise of Geek Chic Culture

Within the past decade or so, there has been a trend toward the commodification of nerd culture on a mass scale, ushering in change in the way the nerd culture relates to the mainstream. This trend is best described as “it is chic to be geek” (Cohen, 2014;

Harrison, 2013). Geek chic fervently consumes all things nerd culture, always ready to receive the next blockbuster movie and the promise of its many paratextual delights. The transformation of the pop culture scene has staggered nerds, as they have conventionally occupied the fringes of society, but now there is no doubt that nerd culture is front and center. This shift has been both welcomed and rejected by nerd culture at large, with many nerds finding themselves feeling as though the tenets of nerd culture are at risk.

They are not wrong. The mainstream is opening up to full acceptance of nerd culture.

Nerds are no longer isolated; cult-nerd knowledge is everywhere—hyper-visible and hyper-accessible, even though the parts of it that are visible and accessible are but hints at

the larger knowledge-base of the fandom. Consequently, many nerds are not celebrating their culture’s adoption by the mainstream because many feel that their culture has been appropriated. Yet increasingly, nerd culture fans cannot deny “the old stereotypes to which they were formerly subject” have been transmuted to geek chic, wherein nerd culture “has been mainstreamed as a model for the new ideal active media consumer”

(Stanfill, 2013, p. 117).

The Accessibility of Nerd Knowledge. Geek chic as a cultural trend taps into the content of nerd culture, finding admittance through buying power, rather than the accumulation of deep knowledge, thereby equivocating the act of consumption with participation. Dave Goetsch, co-executive producer of The Big Bang Theory, muses that

“‘Growing up, pre-Internet, possession of knowledge was such an identifier….That is no longer true; the Internet flattens things out’” (as cited in Cohen, 2014). Part of what makes nerd culture possible is its limited nature. In this way, nerd culture is anti- commercial and inbred, producing and propagating knowledge for its own sake. The tenets of nerd culture hold that knowledge is hard-won over years of experience, thousands of life-hours spent, and (many times) immense financial dedication. However, there is no denying the mechanisms of commodification when it comes to a culture industry in possession of its full capitalistic capabilities, leaving nerd culture in a tenuous relationship with the market.

In stark contrast, geek chic challenges the tenets of nerd culture through easy access to networked banks of knowledge available through the Internet. Urbanist and political theorist Virilio (1984/2005) forwards the term dromocratic superiority, referring to the power of technology to compensate for inferiority in numbers; in other words,

through the use of superior technology, one group may gain an advantage over the other, and this advantage comes in the form of greater movement and speed. In traditional nerd culture, knowledge may be amassed over years, not minutes; for geek chic, knowledge transitions to consumer choices nearly instantaneously. Virilio, in conversation with

Armitage (2000), draws a link between the factors of speed and territory: “Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.” Geek chic has both the technology and the population to pose a reasonable threat to the sustainability of nerd culture, which operates on secrecy—a secrecy that is immediately lost in a techno- globalized world in which cult knowledge is now accessible on Wikipedia and other social media sites.

Like T. S. Eliot (1948), who feared educating the masses on the culture they consumed, there is a distinctive fear within the larger nerd community that mass adoption will undo the quality of nerd culture instead of stabilizing it.5 There is tremendous suspicion on the part of nerd culture fans toward this speedy accumulation of superficial knowledge, suspicion that likely stems from the time dedicated to first-hand knowledge gathering and production. A nerd culture fan may spend years watching a story arc come to completion, waiting for each monthly installment of a single comic book title, while the same knowledge is now accessible to anyone who buys a trade paperback or reads a

5 Eliot (1948) writes that educating the masses towards a better understanding of culture is to “cheapen what you give. For it is an essential condition of the preservation of the quality of the culture of the minority, that it should continue to be a minority culture” (p. 106-107). In this instance, Eliot (1948) uses “minority culture” to mean the high culture of the elite. The social forces of privilege are “essential conditions for the growth and for the survival of culture” (p. 16). While the tension between nerd culture and geek chic hardly constitute the oppressions of class structure, there is a resonance here between the two in which the preservation of a culture is only maintained through the participation of a few who are educated in its ways and can act with dexterity to further its ventures. 29

character’s bio. Those who seek this information do not need to search multiple comic book stores for back issues; they can accumulate their knowledge through rapid digital access. In this way, geek chic (unwittingly) conquers nerd culture territory, obscuring the observable distinction between cult and non-cult—nerd and interested party. Moreover, this division seems to matter less and less in terms of market viability.

Nerd culture is not alone in the seemingly antithetical tendency towards hierarchy.

Within goth culture, established, practicing goths may refer to people only familiar with the more superficial aspects of the culture as “baby bats,” a derogatory term many times applied to those with little experience who might simply be “going through a phase.”

However, within the goth culture, there is much resistance to the use of this term, as it implies that a person may be “more gothic than thou,” calling into question some of the foundational values of goth culture that support free expression and condemn bullying.

Similarly, with the loss of distinction between who is in and who is out, nerd-based fandoms seem to demonstrate an inward-facing hostility, as more traditional members of nerd culture question the authenticity of geek chic fans. Again, there are correlations between these tendencies: between nerd culture and geek chic and between the current goth culture of more established “ultragoths,” who have seemingly committed their lives to the culture. These proponents of a sustained goth culture lament the loss of the

“underground,” which Porter Smith (1997) describes as “secret, obscure, hidden, and rare, only for a selected few who are knowledgeable enough to pursue it.” Those who have dedicated themselves to the study and mastery of their culture

view themselves as having suffered (persecution, harassment) to become a

part of something rare and unusual. They dislike those who have not

suffered to join the culture, those who are following a trend. The trend-

followers defile what was sacred and make common what was once rare.

The elitists view that culture as something they had to search for, discover,

and suffer ridicule for; they despise those who had it handed to them.

(Porter Smith, 1997)

Those with investment and those with buying power resemble each other in kind; however, there is a distinction between those who seek the rare for the sake of its near- sacred quality and those who seek it because it is rare and, therefore, a commodity to fetishize. There is abounding skepticism about the authenticity and intentions of those who become a part of the fandom for seemingly artificial reasons. For many in the nerd culture, the loss of secretive knowledge is the loss of culture, even if the acquisition of that knowledge is limited. With nerdness poached for mass consumption, there is a sense within the larger nerd culture community that reappropriation is not possible because of the overall loss of secrecy. Once the comic con becomes “cool,” that space is lost. The con is no longer about the sharing of interests; it becomes an opportunity to buy one’s way into a fandom and to profess difference that may or may not exist.

Manufactured Resistance. Nerd culture is an assimilation of different kinds of media and the values extracted from experiencing those media. Nerd culture emotes an ethos of resistance, and this ethos translates to a style in which nerd culture fans approach their consumption, production, and participation. Moreover, this style accounts for the ways in which many nerds approach life and interactions with the mainstream, which

many see as antithetical to their culture. Brummett (2008) asserts that style is a rhetorical act, always communicating:

Style is a complex system of actions, objects, and behaviors that is used to

form messages that announce who we are, who we want to be, and who

we want to be considered akin to. It is therefore also a system of

communication with rhetorical influence on others. And as such, style is a

means by which power and advantage are negotiated, distributed, and

struggled over in society. (p. xi)

Like many articulations of style, nerd culture style presents the values and preferences of the nerd—and, in no small way, presents a worldview on display, challenging others who would question this ethical core. As with other alternative cultures or subcultures, like goth or punk, nerd style is a way to communicate one’s position within the fandom and the world through representation.

When geek chic fans make their purchases, they are buying into an aesthetic; quite literally, they are consuming the surface of a thing, taking in the sensory qualities that constitute its style. As Brummett (2008) reasons, “[t]o aestheticize is to strategize….

An aestheticized life is not one lived spontaneously but is governed by impulses to stylize, by an awareness of signs and images in the smallest detail of life, to be constantly attuned to appearance” (p. 17). Aestheticization is a condition of late-capitalism, and nerd culture, while deeply embedded in a quasi-religiosity of its own, is, in the eyes of the market, another style to be commodified for mass consumption. While the version of the culture that is rearticulated for mainstream consumption might be only a surface-level understanding, the sweetness of the purchase is in owning the “humor, charisma,

mystery, and love” imbued within the media (Batchelor, 2012, p. xii). In this way,

Taylor’s (1999) notion of the “true cultists” is lost on geek chic. Instead of resisting the mainstream, geek chic is a mainstream seeking to reclaim that which it had previously condemned. In the case of comics fans (and much of nerd culture), media panic in the

1950s forced the medium underground where fans were able to relish their cultish reverence without concerns about vice societies. In a state of advanced global capital in which identity formation is found within consumptive choices and fragmentation and mashups have diluted choice into a nauseating myriad of consumables, the only “real” seems to be found through the reconstituting power of nostalgia. Nostalgia facilitates an amnesia in which what was once old becomes both new and familiar. In this way, the notion of nerd resistance is turned on its head and replaced with a residual manufactured resistance that is part of nerd culture’s appeal and that constitutes much of its cultural capital via the fetishization of nostalgia and the assumption that all consumers, not just those within nerd culture, may lay claim to the fandom’s devotion. In the least, geek chic is not a cultural formation as much as it is a passing indulgence in the heady seduction of sentimentality for a comics culture that was never nearly as well received as nostalgia would intimate.

Struggle and Tension: The Heart of the Market

Ultimately, the connection between industry and identity is the rhetorical interest of this project because there is no clean division among the production and the product and the person and the participation. All of these elements overlap with such frequency that it is difficult to establish whether or not the discursive act of buying composes the identity or the identity manufactures the discourse. Very likely, these are interconnected

in the same way that cultural formation and market vitality are mutually dependent. If the state of advanced globalized capitalism demands that identity be formed through the market, then there are very real risks to personal identity and cultural formations, even within what some consider a silly hobby or frivolous form of entertainment. Therefore, two cornerstones need to be set: (a) popular culture is never innocuous, and (b) there is no one, single-most legitimate cultural formation that transcends all others in relation to popular culture. In other words, nerd culture’s reliance upon the token of authenticity may be remarked upon, but from a rhetorical perspective, it cannot be the measure of how a person assimilates into a fandom. This is because authenticity—under the shadow of advanced capitalism—may be found in any of a number of expressions that all ultimately lead back to the act of consumption—an act that is irrevocably married to an industrial complex that both feeds and feeds upon consumers.

The Chapters of This Manuscript

The following manuscript discusses the impacts of media panics about comics- like forms through three major time periods. Chapter Two explores the rise of the comics form in the mid-1800s and the media panic that followed by tracing emergent mass readership and the reactions of a parental bourgeoisie. Chapter Three accounts for the post-WWII US’s media panic about the rise of the comic book and its potential influence on juvenile delinquency. These first two chapters establish a long history of media panic about the comics form. Chapter Four contextualizes the comics market crash of the 1990s and the ways in which the speculators market, controlled by multinational corporations, nearly sunk the comics industry and created distrust among fans. This chapter also explores how the media panic once belonging to the bourgeoisie of the mid-1800s and the

US public at large in the mid-1900s has been transferred to nerd culture, as it grapples with the potential loss of influence over the fandom’s cultish knowledge. Chapter Five situates the cultural tension between nerd culture and geek chic within the space of the comics convention, where this struggle plays out in a performative, consumer-driven arena.

CHAPTER 2

Policing Culture: The Rise of Working-Class Readership and the Media Panic of the Bourgeoisie

Fandoms, at their most active, represent a type of expertise that fluctuates between gathering and producing knowledge. As a result, fans often seem to carve out identities for themselves based upon the work of both gathering and producing; fans become subject to their own devotion. While there are surely singular fans who are devoted to completely obscure items of cultural production, fandoms are generally the unified practices of fans who share a reverence. Because the depth of personal investment in these fandoms produce culturally shared identities, the community delineates the individual fan. Looked at in this way, fandoms are cultural identities that are no more or less valid than any other cultural identity in the broadest sense; it is thus no small wonder that nerd culture fans would see an emergent faction, like geek chic, as a threat to the stability of the culture itself—especially because despite its religiosity, nerd culture is one that is steeped in the consumption of industrial products—forever tying identity to that industry and the fluctuations of the market. Once subject positions are defined by their relationship to industry within this state of advanced global capital, there is an ever- present tension over who controls mass culture: one must be a nerd in order to practice being a nerd.

How does one teach the rules of practice—decorum and convention—to an emergent group whose interested in expertise and the disciplinarity of becoming is perhaps driven to prerogative of consumption? As a vital element in these identity formations, mass culture is serious business, but any culture that reaches the undisciplined masses without the oversight of expertise is likely to experience tension

comparable to that between nerd culture and geek chic. This kind of tension is expressed through power relations and the posturing of authority, and from this contest comes the drive of experts to police the culture. The one who yields the most cultural capital strongly influences the way that a culture (in this case a fandom) is received, processed, and expanded. Through this influence comes the need to regulate, often through socio- cultural shaming, ridicule, dismissal, or infantilization.

These tactics are not altogether new in image-text culture; in fact, they allude to power struggles laid in place during the mid-1800s, when an emergent working-class readership was just beginning to threaten a number of embedded power structures built upon expertise and, by extension, the policing of reading materials. During this period, and into the early-1900s, there was fear among the aristocracy and rising bourgeoisie about the increasing accessibility of reading materials available to the working class as a result of advancements in printing technologies that made it possible for the functionally literate common people not only to buy print media because of decreased purchase prices, but also to read freely without the guidance of disciplined institutional supervision. Many of these inexpensive and abundant texts, like penny dreadfuls, contained stories of murder, mystery, explicit sexual relationships, bawdy humor, and curiosities; these topics often scandalized the bourgeoisie, causing worry that such reading might lead to the working class’s moral decay (and then, potentially, to their revolutionary action).

Workers were considered vulnerable and suggestive. While the comics industry as we know it today did not form in earnest until after the 1930s, the foundations for what would become comic books began in the mid-1800s, when the working class became consumers of texts—when they became readers. The overall project of this dissertation is

to better understand the emergence of one of the most recent expressions of this fandom—geek chic—which is arguably closely connected to not only the emergence of new media forms of comics, but also to the myriad ways that fans participate in this fandom through complex identities made possible by advanced capitalism.

In order to lay the foundation for these complications, Drotner’s (1992) theory of media panic will be used as a lens to better understand the long-standing relationship between cultural consumption and power. More specifically, this chapter explores some of the major shifts in print media consumption during the period between the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, when the use of print media became interdependent with market expansion; an emergent readership; and the struggle for authority, control, and power over culture. While it would be faulty to draw a direct line from the bourgeoisie’s attempt to shield and, later, to guide the great unwashed through their newly acquired literacy, there is a correlation between (a) the attempt of mid-19th century bourgeoisie to protect readers through vice societies and (b) the entrenched prejudices about the danger of comics-like forms that arose during the post-WWII 1950s era in the United States, when comics were literally put on trial for corrupting young minds. When comics and the comics industry were called before a Congressional Committee that had convened specifically to determine the dangers of these texts, the resulting 1954 restrictive content code for comics irrevocably altered the comics industry and its fans, leading to the insular nature of nerd culture as a response to mainstream culture shaming.

The following history establishes the context for the distrust of comics-like forms that marry both textual and visual elements. This review is not meant to be a compendium of comics history or a comprehensive look at the rise (or restriction of

literacy) during the 1800s, but rather as a glimpse into the history of the introduction of visual print media and the accompanying media panic of authoritative bodies. This survey provides a historical contextualization for the attitudes that exist even today within contemporary comics fandom, and thus allows me to effectively address the structures of nerd culture that subsequently become troubled by the later emergence of geek chic. In so doing, I establish this period up to the beginning of the 1900s as a preamble to the events of 1954, which will be discussed in Chapter 3. These two moments establish a pattern of comics and comics-like forms as interlopers of sorts that came to be viewed by powerful elites as requiring restriction and regulation in order to make them safe for mass consumption. While this pattern helps explain the insular, isolated, and anti-mainstream tenets of the current nerd culture, it also establishes the opposite point: when nerds are the elite figures within a culture, then they, in turn, police that culture with the same aggression as the bourgeoisie in the mid-to-late 1800s and the psychoanalysts and moralists of the 1950s. Importantly, this point is not just an academic contradiction in terms, irony, or paradox: it is one of the fundamental mechanisms of identity formation that occurs through the popular-culture-industrial-complex, a space in which the market holds no favor towards those who are dedicated to its many consumables and where the globalized market is always stretching forth to find untapped consumers who might be interested in its ever-diversifying array of products.

The Destabilizing Threat of an Unmonitored Readership

In the same way that fandoms have today become a part of everyday life through the vast diversification of available entertainment media, in the mid-1800s, reading became a part of the working class’s everyday life, even though there were still many

restrictions on the teaching of some groups, including African Americans in the US. Until then, the available reading materials were few for a functionally illiterate population that had little spending money for expensive print materials. As advances in printing technology increased, however, the availability and decreased cost of such materials meant that the working class experienced increasingly greater access to things to read.

The patriarchal intelligentsia of the United States and Europe, who had political and social sway, would not give up their expert hold on reading texts—even everyday disposable texts—without making every effort to police access, content, and format. As such, the 1800s were particularly ripe with sentiments against any literacies that might subvert social class or undermine religious institutions. In the US South, there were great fears about the education of slaves and freedmen and women, especially after Nat

Turner’s Rebellion (1831) in which Turner, an educated and highly religious slave, led an uprising in which 60 white Southerners were killed. This event caused Virginia and other

Southern states not only to increase the severity of laws regarding the of teaching slaves to read, but also to form anti-slave rebellion militias as a response to concerns about the potentially dangerous side-effects of African-American education. Women of influence and wealth were literate, but were denounced for reading certain materials, particularly novels, despite their station.6 Primarily, the European bourgeoisie’s worries focused on

6 Many women took to meeting in secret as a means of forwarding and sharing their literacies: “Perhaps it seems ridiculous to think of book clubs as subversive, but historically, book clubs offered a way for women to break out of their traditional, well-carved-out spaces” (Pantelides, 2012, p. 4). Beyond book clubs, the parlor of the 19th century became an essentially rhetorical space for teaching young women a curriculum of decorum and civility. In her study of gender and rhetorical spaces during the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, Nan Johnson (2002) explains that while “[r]hetorical training was marketed as tantamount to an advanced formal education,” the obvious good achieved by the successful promotion of rhetorical training to the general public in the postbellum period and the late decades of the [19th] century is complicated by a tension in parlor pedagogies between egalitarian education and ideological conservatism that plays a 40

the working class and poor and their reading materials targeted to these groups: “both specific novels and particular subgenres—Gothic romances, penny dreadfuls, Newgate crime stories, sensation novels, Zolaesque naturalism, and so on—came under attack for rotting the minds of their readers, promoting vice, and subverting cultural standards”

(Brantlinger, 1998).

While the working class is often used as an umbrella term for those not born into aristocracy or part of the bourgeoisie, this demographic deserves a more nuanced understanding as read through the relationship between class and culture. The working class as a readership is a subject position. Hammond (1997) suggests that the emergence of this subject position, one that is defined by the rise of the reader is the narrative of white mass media consumers of the early 19th century whose presence facilitated the rise of the commodities upon which this subject fed. This relationship is part of the driving panic on the part of the bourgeoisie that could not control the explosion of the print market and its offerings. Further, the bourgeois worry about the misguided and malleable minds of the mob was more likely a recognition of the potential of the working class to read, think, and grow restless with its position. These were not unwashed masses; they were diverse, encompassing “groups of workers as artisans and small tradesman, street hawkers and entertainers, farm-labourers, servants, and factory operatives” (Anderson,

1991, p. 6). The application of Anderson’s (1991) description of what is reductively termed “the working class” indicates that there is a social diversity within mass media production that supersedes the actual production and acts as the most significant evidence

dominant role generally in nineteenth-century discourses about gender and rhetorical performance (p. 21). In other words, although a rhetorical education promised women the opportunities to speak in public, the content of encyclopedias, conduct literature, and etiquette manuals normalized gender roles. 41

to support the rise of a culture of consumers. Even as the bourgeoisie feared the potential of a working-class readership, the drive of the market dictated diversification and expansion to reach new demographics of reader-consumers.

Private Reading and the Risk of Interpretation

In these transitional years, the greatest threat of the ever-fragmenting print market was felt by the upper-class, which grew anxious about losing control over how materials were read and interpreted. Low production costs translated to low costs of print materials on the streets, meaning that more people could purchase their own copies of reading materials. While this shift may seem insignificant at first, it is crucial in the development of a new readership. With these individual copies in hand, a working class person was empowered to do something that had never before been realistic—reading at home by oneself. According to Aliaga-Buchenau (2004), the readership before the 19th century was “a rather predictable group. In France, reading before the 19th century was a very public event. Reading aloud to others took place in the church, school, or in the salon among the aristocracy” (p. 4). For the working class, this lack of private reading resulted from the expense of reading materials and the scarcity of leisure time to dedicate to reading, ensuring that reading materials were limited in the circulation and variety before advances in print technology that allowed for faster, easier, and cheaper production.

Limited circulation of texts guaranteed a canon; the type of “intensive reading” conducted in public places (the church, school, or salon) bred a “communal understanding” of the texts that “insured the acceptance of the ‘correct’ interpretation,” safeguarding that the readership might not stray too far from the authorized meanings that

affirmed the existing social strata (Aliaga-Buchenau, 2004, p. 5).7 The introduction of reading by one’s self threatened these authorized meanings and let lose imagination, perhaps one of the most dangerous forces against the social order.

The Ascension of the Professional Author and The Rise of a New Readership

The Professional: Practice and Being

The mediated world of the 18th and 19th centuries gave rise to a new subject position in which one could become what one practiced through the application of theory.

The professional as a subject position is one that is born of discursive construction, including (a) advanced specialization or education; (b) a code of ethical conduct that determines how the profession as a whole and the individual professional should interact with the world of the layman; (c) enjoyment of an elevated socioeconomic status; (d) a seizing of the market for self-advancement and access to services; and (e) the ability to move within professional arenas with more ease than a manual laborer (Broman, 1995;

Freidson, 1988; Larson, 2013; McClelland, 1991). Broman (1995) posits that this list is incomplete because most professions marry theory and practice.

In the study of rhetoric, scholars refer to this dyad as praxis, a term that is itself concerned with the ethical translation of theory into material practice. In this way, a professional may be seen as interested in the practice, not the exact application of his or her professional theoretical underpinnings as applied to the problems of non- professionals who seek professional advice. The understanding that professionals are to be trusted comes from this notion. More specifically, this is where the idea that the professional application of theory is only a practice of that theory—i.e. “the practice of

7 Aliaga-Buchenau borrows the term “intensive reading” from p. 39 of Borus, D. (1989). Writing realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the mass market. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 43

medicine” or “the practice of law.” One might wonder from where the aforementioned trust comes. Perhaps one answer is that many professionals are what they practice, carving out their personal identities through the application of their professional praxis.

Professionals are often said to be what they do: a doctor is a doctor whether she is at her private practice or stopping at the scene of a car accident to help the injured. The difference between these two is the commodification of professional labor, which occurred more rapidly during the period of the Industrial Revolution and giving rise to a number of professions that had not previously existed. The rise of the professional is a matter of historical context, as industry and the rapid advancement of technology facilitated a commodification of labor, professional or otherwise. Fields of technical expertise became professions through the value placed upon their work, hailing a new moment in which an individual could practice gained skills and expect to be that skill.

It is precisely this mechanism that gives rise to the fan: the fan is an expert, but only so far as that subject position is established within the presence of the community.

As noted earlier, becoming through practice is the apparatus by which a fan can become part of the cultural community of nerd culture. The world of nerd culture rewards the gathering and production of nerd knowledge and the professing of one’s nerdom through cultural capital that is dependent upon the recognition of the community. It is through these practices that a nerd can become in the gaze of the community and, therefore, within his or her own self-recognition.

The Rise of the Professional Writer

Perhaps one of the best examples of such a shift occurred with the formation of writing as a profession in the creation of the author, a discursive distinction resulting

from a particular historical formation wherein taking ownership of one’s work was accomplished not only through legality, but also through the “possibility of transgression attached to the act of writing,” which according to Foucault (1977) could only occur with the commodification of discourse and a departure from a bipolar field of comprehension, wherein discourse could be only “sacred or profane” (p. 212).8 Writers of the early modern period (late-17th to early-18th centuries) did not necessarily consider their work valuable in the sense that writing was not a commodity to be bought and sold in the way it might be considered in more modern times. These writers were artists, meaning that what they wrote gained them cultural capital to seek an improved station in life

(Hammond, 1997). However, in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, copyright law placed ownership of writing with the writers themselves. For Foucault (1977), the legalized ownership of writing moved the discourse and sparked social change by giving the property of writing to the authors, metamorphosing authors into dangerous subjects with the capacity to appeal to the masses of society through their writing, “thereby restoring danger to a writing that was now guaranteed the benefits of ownership” (p.

212). However, Foucault (1977) goes on to explicate that the author-function is not spontaneous: “It is, rather, the result of a complex operation that constructs a certain being of reason that we call ‘author,’” thereby attributing a continuous revision of what we mean when we use the word author, as the aspects which are attributed to an author are forever embedded within a discursive context (p. 213).

8 While the exact language is not used here, the sentiment recorded of writing’s being either “sacred or profane” by Foucault (1977) relates to the rhetoric of the “guilty pleasure” as told by Brottman (2008), who challenges the categorization of reading as either “educational” or “entertainment.” The categorization of reading in these ways severely limits their social impacts. 45

The transformation of the author in the late-18th and early-19th centuries led to the shift from writer-as-artist to writer-as-professional. Firmly entrenched ideological formations made some of this transition arduous, as beliefs were clearly against the creation of literary texts—works of art—for monetary compensation. The shift from cultural capital to the economic-based value model is more than just the advent of the market as an industrial-capitalistic inevitability; it is a shift in the way that writing was valued and, therefore, commodified. In so doing, revisions were made to the subject positions which had until this historical moment relegated the author to a patron-endowed contributor to the cultural wealth of the nation. Alternatively, authorship became a new subject position even as it became a profession, and the moment when practice of the professional becomes something that receives financial compensation, then this subject position becomes an identity based upon the commodification of expertise and practice.

Hammond (1997) summarizes the historical formation of the professional writer as follows:

Authorship could only develop as a profession when educated, literary

individuals who possessed imaginative fecundity could earn sufficient

money to purchase for themselves a standard of living commensurate with

this stock-in-trade. That, in turn, could only come about when there were

no longer enough aristocratic patrons around to subsidize authors in the

provisions of manuscripts that bookseller-publishers needed to turn into

printed books, and when there were enough readers around to create a

demand that could be satisfied by interested amateur authors of

independent means. (p. 27)

The shift away from patron-support to market-support relied not only on the technology of the book publisher, but also on the emergence of a body of readers who can receive these texts—creating a market. The necessity of the reader means that authorship, as a budding profession and subject position, provides for the simultaneous and symbiotic rise of another subject position—that of an emergent readership.

Pictorial Magazine: Visuals Enter the Market

The emergent readership was contingent upon the new profession of the author; likewise, the profession was reliant upon the vitality of the readership. The growth of the market meant the growth of the profession, but this growth could only occur as new potential consumers were identified and their needs met. The shift to a market-based system transformed texts into a more consumable product, and in true capitalistic form, the objective of publishers became discovering how the market’s appetite for new consumer groups might be satiated by new products. While some of the readership body in the early 1800s was functionally literate, professional writing was not accessible to the masses. Certainly, a more elevated, literary publication was in need of a more professional literary consumer, the body of which was comparatively small, even with advancements in public education efforts.9 The functionally literate, along with another portion of less dexterous consumers, were a yet-untapped market. To reach this market and seize upon the potential of expansion, publishers began to base their more broad- reaching and inexpensive print media on visuals—illustrations—that could be enjoyed by consumers of all reading levels. This innovation, coupled with a series of technological

9 For more on the public education efforts during this time period in the United States, England, and France, see The “Dangerous” Potential of Reading: Readers and the Negotiation of Power in Nineteenth- Century Narratives by Ana-Isabel Aliaga-Buchenau (2004), specifically her first chapter, “Reading and Power in the Nineteenth Century.” 47

improvements in printing between 1803 and 1827, facilitated a revolutionary print medium that would forever change the market—the pictorial magazine.10

As much as one may want to attribute the rise of pictorial magazines to the working class’s lack of literacy, it is more likely that the consuming public’s interest in pictorial magazines increased as its capacity to devour more diverse media forms also grew. With the development of reader appetite came the diversification of print genres and of the forms within a genre. Anderson (1991) attributes the rise of the pictorial magazine to the “draw of greater novelty”: the pictorial magazines “found a readier market among a public whose taste was increasingly for new and varied sources of knowledge and amusement” (p. 2-3). With the introduction of these publications, weekly readership would range from 80,000 to more than 400,000 per issue—with the weekly pictorial magazines Penny Magazine (1832-1845), London Journal (1845-1906),

Reynolds’s Miscellany (1846-1869), and Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (1853-1932) being the most popular with over 1 million readers each (Anderson, 1991, p. 2-3).11

In the race to find the print form that would attract the largest viewership and increase circulation, editors worked with experimental new comics-like forms, such as the cartoon (c. 1840), which was political, satirical, and humorous. According to Harvey

(2009), the first cartoon (in the modern sense) was published in Punch (1841-1992, 1996-

2002), a highly influential English publication of humor and satire that inspired the

10 According to Anderson (1991), “The introduction into England of mechanized paper-making (1803), the steam-powered press (1814), and the multiple-cylinder stereotype printing (1827) permitted the low-cost, high-speed dissemination of the printed word” (p. 2). 11 Anderson’s (1991) note: “The circulation of these publications ranged from the Penny’s Magazine’s 200,000 in the early 1830s to the London Journal’s 450,000 in 1855. The ratio of 1:5 is widely accepted as a conservative estimate of the relationship between circulation and actual readership—hence the text’s reference to a million or more readers for each of the magazines in question” (3). 48

insertion of cartoons in US publications—for example, Wild Oats and Phunny Phellow— but weekly humor magazines did not find their footing in the US until the 1880s, with the introduction of Puck (1871-1918), Judge (1881-1947), and Life (1883-1972). Cheaper publishing and wider reception allowed for the presence of illustrations in the home12 to be far more common and, by extension, the prevalence of images in daily life to increase.13 As images became more ubiquitous, the demand for print culture increased as well. Anderson (1991) observes that while print culture would have certainly emerged during this period without the “added impetus of illustration,” it is also very likely that it would not have done so as “rapidly and dramatically” (p. 2).

The arrival of the pictorial magazine signaled an inherent drive within the print market to satisfy the reading populace. While this statement may seem innocuous, the drive of the market cannot be underestimated, as the agility of its ever adapting forms indiscriminately disregard the conventions of ideology, in so far as ideology might limit access to potential consumers. In this way, the pictorial magazine provides a means to see the progression of visuals in the print market and to recognize the market’s incessant drive to thrive, regardless of how its products might undermine social convention or contribute to the troubling of social orders of all kinds. Certainly, this drive is not limited to these emergent comics-like forms, as this same market momentum is again observable

12 Anderson (1991) admits that it is possible that working class people may have saved images from popular print publications during the first decades of the 1800s, even scenes of murder and its punishments, using these images “to relieve the bareness of their walls” (p. 25). Although these scenes may seem grim to our contemporary imagination, Anderson (1991) contests that “in a world where pictures were often expensive and difficult to come by, it was simply the appeal of any wall decoration, rather than the specific image, that most mattered” (p. 27). 13 According to Anderson (1991), imagery became a part of the public scene during this time: “In both country and city, then, but with varying frequency, working people saw print imagery, usually woodcuts, providing diverse kinds and levels of entertainment. The walls and windows of inns, shops, and other premises were a source of information and at least occasional pictorial diversion….The interior walls of many public houses were also a source of printed imagery” (p. 20-21). 49

in the US public’s media panic about comics 1950s and nerd culture’s media panic around the rise of geek chic today.

The Danger of an Emergent Readership

The Parental Bourgeoisie

The simultaneous rise of the professional author and the burgeoning technology of inexpensive print media production made way for three important social developments: (a) the rapid growth of a functionally literate to literature readership, (b) the beginnings of an inevitable tension between the new readership’s unrestricted access to print media, and (c) the launching of campaigns intent on saving the emergent readership from itself. Those leading the charge had traditionally relied upon the system of cultural capital from a pre-professional age, and these pervasive reading materials would be a powerful menace to the system upon which that system relied. The threats were many from a bourgeois perspective: not only could a system of social hierarchy based upon cultural capital and high culture consumption be in danger, but also the free consumption of texts by an otherwise poorly educated mass public meant unrestricted textual interpretation that could further damage prevailing social structures. For the

French bourgeoisie especially, it was necessary that these texts be tightly controlled in number, circulation, and interpretation because unregulated reading held the potential for destabilization and even revolution. Lyons (2001) describes the 19th century French bourgeoisie as afraid of the rise of a new reading public, one that was “reading too much, in the sense that a mass of inexperienced consumers was reading indiscriminately and without guidance. They were considered innocent readers, potentially easy prey for unscrupulous publishers and ruthless propagandists” (p. 11). Through this ideological

projection, the bourgeoisie became stewards of the working class’s reading because this emergent readership was a threat to the bourgeoisie’s “sense of order, restraint, and paternal control” (Lyons, 2001, p. 11). The emergent readership in France, particularly in

Paris, was a threat to the existing social order in the post-revolution 1840s, which was characterized by French historian Louis Chevalier as a time of “growing apprehensiveness of social elites, and their sense that the barbarians were at the gates”

(Lyons, 2011, p. 12). The fear among the bourgeoisie can be seen as a dread of the totalizing loss of existing social structures, essentially, an inability to police reading or the streets.

The Animals in the Street

In France, the government and Catholic Church attempted to control this new working class readership through a complex social matrix designed to limit readers’ exposure to potentially harmful texts. England’s upper class also felt a sense of parental duty to the emergent readership, especially in the area of providing moral, accessible literature to the working classes through controlling the kinds of materials that were available to them. For Aliaga-Buchenau (2004), this fear of the masses’ access to literature was effective, mainly because “reading in itself is a destabilizing factor. What is read reflects the dominant discourse of society and can manufacture desires that lead the reader where he or she should go—‘safely’” (p. 10). In other words, the hegemonic characteristics inherent in the act of reading can act to reify the social order, at least in the minds of the bourgeoisie, who saw the hoi polloi as animalistic. In his study of enthusiasm before the existence of fans, Cavicchi (2014) traces the evolution of enthusiasm as a “catchall pejorative” used by the British with rising use of the term

during mid-17th and 18th centuries by writers like John Locke and Thomas More to distinguish and condemn religious emotionalism and the Enlightenment values of civility and reason: “this distinction increasingly took on class overtones, pitting refined elites against unruly lower classes, outsiders, and agitators” (p. 64). These connotations were then carried over to the 19th century, especially in the United States where rapid urbanization caused those in power to fear the mobs in the streets, and “the concept of enthusiasm was often used by those in power to malign the anonymous masses of immigrants from Ireland, Britain, and Germany, as well as thousands of new migrants from the countryside” (Cavicchi, 2014, pp. 64-65). The press coverage of theater and music crowds during this time made a clear distinction between the “beauty and refinement of the middle- and upper-class attendees” and the “disorder of the lower classes, with an emphasis on crowd violence, lack of control, and metaphors of savagery and animalism” (Cavicchi, 2014, p. 65). In this time of cheap and readily available print media, there was no restricting the drive of the market, and the only recourse for bourgeois stabilization was through the production and distribution of “safe” texts. It is no surprise, then, to see publications emerge with just such an objective.

The Penny Magazine: The Moralization of Visual Literacy

One example of the union of both a vice society and the “safe” knowledge distribution that could contribute to a moral and domesticated lower class is The Penny

Magazine. Matthew D. Hill (1792-1872), a British lawyer, penologist, and Member of

Parliament, shared his concern about the lack of affordable and upright reading materials for the masses with his associate Charles Knight, and the two men set out to rectify this social plight by publishing a four-page penny magazine, of the same title, beginning in

1832. The Penny Magazine consisted of near-full page illustrations, followed by criticism of the artworks that explained their moral contributions to culture. The pairing of large illustrations and explanatory text was to ensure that the emergent readership would not only be exposed to culturally relevant materials, but also be able to internalize an interpretation of the content that stabilized the “beauty and refinement” mirrored in the behavior of the working class’s betters.

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), a vice society of which Knight was a member, financially supported the project, and Knight himself became the primary editor and contributor. For Knight, The Penny Magazine was more than just a successful business venture (and it was very successful at an estimated readership of one million throughout the first three years of its publication); it was an avowal—a mission. The magazine was “a mission into the field of popular education.

Like most of the members of the SDUK and other reformers of the time, [Knight] was worried about work unrest and the potential threat to social stability of the radical press”

(Anderson, 1991, p. 53). Knight (1832) himself made this mission evident in the first issue of The Penny Magazine:

For these we shall endeavour to prepare a useful and entertaining Weekly

Magazine, that may be taken up and laid down without requiring an

considerable effort; and that may tend to fix the mind upon calmer, and it

may be, purer subjects of thought than the violence of party discussion, or

the stimulating details of crime and suffering….We consider it the duty of

every man to make himself acquainted with the events that are passing in

the world—with the progress of legislation, and the administration of the

laws; for every man is deeply interested in all the great questions of

government. Every man, however, may not be qualified to understand

them; but the more he knows, the less hasty and the less violent will be his

opinions. The false judgements which are sometimes formed by the people

upon public events, can only be corrected by the diffusion of sound

knowledge.

It is interesting that, for Knight (1832), articles about ancient Grecian statues and the exotic, far away island of Madagascar—the “calmer, and, it may be, purer subjects of thought”—were thought to satisfy the “duty of every man” to know the happenings of politics around him or her. Knight (1832) is careful to state that not every person who reads something in the press is “qualified” to understand its contents, alluding to the potential for these innocent, fledgling readers to be misled or to misinterpret. Herein is the message of Knight and others like him that while the new readership may not be stopped from consuming texts, they can be fed “sound knowledge” through which all ideological errors of perception may be corrected and social order ensured.

For Knight, the epitome of British morality was William Hogarth. No other artist’s work was reproduced more in The Penny Magazine than Hogarth’s, including twenty-four prints in 1834 and 1835 alone. Hogarth’s work was not only imbued with

English morality, but it had the added quality of being easily reproduced, as most of the reproductions were lithographs. Hogarth’s heavy-handed moralism was plainly displayed in the works themselves, speaking to such ills as drinking and other indulgences, a

“dreamy belief” in genius instead of industriousness, and idleness (Anderson, 1991, p.

64). In what would seem to be Knight’s most beloved series, eight of the twelve panels of

Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness were reprinted, detailing the fate of an idle printer’s apprentice who is sentenced for the crimes of thievery and murder (apparent results of idleness) by his once-fellow-apprentice-turned-successful London magistrate who had always been diligent in his work. The obvious moral is that idleness leads to ruin, leading to the stabilization of the social order. But if the moral is about idleness, then what is the reader to do with the “idleness” of reading? Perhaps this is one of the greatest successes of The Penny Magazine, which categorized the reading of such material could fill the quota of “every man’s duty”—reading as a kind of industriousness in and of itself—one that ultimately quells the potential for social unrest through moralization. The wholesome and affordable literature that Hill and Knight wanted to provide directs the reader’s gaze back toward himself or herself by directing attention away from the political unrest of the day and toward the moral deficiencies of the individual. This redirection is one of the bourgeoisie’s most successful means of stewarding the emergent readership—by harnessing the fervor of the barbarians at the gate and reconditioning it into inward critique.

From Illustrations to Comics: The Continuing Struggle to Protect the Masses

The Illustrated Magazine: Now Daily!

The ever-expanding mass printing market of the late-19th century found new avenues to circulation in competition for market shares. Industries began to form around the products of the market in which readers might choose between two or ten similar print forms. One example of the formation of industry at work is that of the illustrated magazine, one of the most popular forms of the day due to its whole-page illustrations and depictions of events. During this time, The Illustrated London News (ILN) (1842-

2003) was the world’s largest and most successful illustrated news magazine, and boasted that it was the first weekly illustrated magazine of its kind. While the first few decades included illustrations alongside text, later issues (c. 1890s) featured at least 32 wood carved illustrations in its sixteen pages, with the cover itself usually comprised of a full- page illustration and logo at the top (Hibbert, 1975). The ILN was determined to give the consumers the large, detailed visual experiences they craved and could not find comparably in any other publication. By the 1850s, none of the ILN’s imitators could touch its success—until The Graphic (1869-1932). William Luson Thomas, a wood- engraver and former artist for the ILN who had grown tired of the treatment of artists at the publication, created The Graphic as a direct competitor to the ILN (Bills, 2004). As an artist himself, Thomas was able to attract some of the most sought-after talent in England and the praise of many artists of the age.14 By 1889, The Graphic surpassed the ILN in quality and efficiency, to become The Daily Graphic, which, as the new title suggests, became a daily, rather than a weekly, illustrated magazine.

Illustrated magazines offered readers daily or weekly delights of full-page wood engravings and etchings depicting not only current events, but also faraway places and adventures. For example, the May 18, 1889, cover of The Graphic depicted a nine- paneled assemblage of wood engraved scenes of a river trip on Tsu-Sima Island, Japan.

The contributions of publications like these cannot be overestimated because while penny publications were instrumental in invoking an era of visual literacy these illustrated magazines were also pivotal in the growing education of the mass reading populace.

14 Seemingly, Vincent Van Gogh was an admirer of Thomas’ as well, with a few words by the artist included in Thomas’ obituary in The Times: Thomas “did more … than improve illustrated journalism, he influenced English art, and that in a wholesome way” (“Obituary,” 1900, p. 9). 56

These magazines sold glimpses of the world beyond. Once publishers discovered that illustrated magazines could be sold containing educational materials, which consumers coveted, they scrambled to fill the market void. For generations of people who had little access to the world outside the city and who suffered from alienation from the goods they produced, escapism filled a necessary void hollowed out by the monotony of daily life.

Once again, the marriage of the visual and textual threatened instability through imagination, and the vice societies were not far behind.

Vice Societies: The Moral Protector of the Middle Class

Vice societies had launched campaigns against indecency and the moral corruption of the working class through crusades against pornography. After the turn of the 20th century, most pornographers had turned to underground production, and vice societies found themselves in need of a new cause. Predictably, they turned their attention—and vitriol—to illustrated magazines, as well as dime novels, which were cheap, disposable publications (more like pamphlets than books) that featured salacious, yet simplistic, stories about anti-heroes, like Jesse James and Billy the Kid (Broun &

Leech, 1927; Nyberg, 1998b). Not surprisingly, although dime novels were written for adults, they were soon discovered by youngsters who, like their older counterparts, were intrigued by the depictions of crime, implied sexual relationships, and drinking. Beyond these textual concerns were those for the shocking cover art, which routinely depicted gun fights, stabbings, and kidnappings. This kind of content, although not readily available in the same sense as the illustrated magazines, pointed toward a future in which these types of indecent and erotic stories would be told with more frequency, occupying more of the public’s imagination. As the content of newsstand and underground print

materials became readily available during the turn of the 20th century, the fears of more educated readers grew, not only about the susceptibility of working class readers, but also about the resilience of their moral constitution.

Just as the soul of the public at large was at stake, new print forms were popping up on newsstands and in general stores across the US; these forms were changing rapidly and with little attention to quality. More disturbing, some of these print forms were actually decreasing in cost as readership increased and competition grew stronger. The competition and proliferation of such magazines actually saw

falling prices and new marketing strategies….The Saturday Evening Post, for

example, increased its readership from 3,000 in 1897 to 2 million by the end of

World War I. In this period the cover price of magazines went down to 10 cents

and then a nickel, making it an affordable item for many, including many young

people. (Reynolds, 2005, p. 165)

A newly evolving middle class was developing in the States that ensured that children had spending money, and the magazine publishing industry utilized new youth magazines for the promotion of not only products, but also ideologies and values.

The Sunday Supplement: Comics become Part of the Market

With the growth of the market, large publishers, like those in New York City, were constantly vying for supremacy. Working for New York World, Joseph Pulitzer felt the growing competition in the newspaper industry and decided that the only way he could attract new readers and expand circulation to current readers was to appeal to the functionally illiterate and immigrant populations by broaching new content that would appeal to the multitudes. Pulitzer bought the only four-color printing press capable of

mass production and began to run a supplement in the Sunday paper: “a four-page, seventeen-by-twenty-three-inch carnival of illustrated stories on ostensibly exotic and titillating subjects (Paris! Ballerinas!), political cartoons, and what quickly became

America’s first comics sensation” (Hajdu, 2008, p. 9). By 1894, newspapers were printing weekly Sunday supplements featuring comics, the earliest of which focused on bawdy, physical humor and nonsensical narratives of misbehavior by hooligan immigrant children against figures of authority, such as the police and middle-class businessmen.

These early instantiations of the form were often filled with colloquial language that intentionally disregarded correct grammar and spelling. Most famous of Pulitzer’s first cartoon series was “The Yellow Kid” from Richard F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley (1895-

1898). The vulgar antics of the naughty children of Hogan’s Alley did not escape those concerned about new readers’ abilities to understand blatant errors in speech and writing that were used for humorous effect, as in the Yellow Kid, or downgrading of the language by cheap labor for quick turnarounds, in the case of dime novels. In The

Atlantic Monthly, Ralph Bergengren (1906) wrote a foot-stomping critique calling the supplements “pictures without humor and color without beauty.” Bergengren (1906) rails that the humor is “reduced, since usage insists on reducing it, at this lowest imaginable level, to such obvious and universal elements that any intellect can grasp their combinations.”

The rising concern about comics as a form of literature increased throughout the

1920s and into the 1930s, when popular comic strips and Sunday supplements were reprinted in cheap bound editions that would become the US’s first version of the comic book. After the end of the Second World War, concerns escalated around how

Communism could be stopped in parts of the world not directly damaged by war. The morality and uniformity of the late 1940s and early 1950s is reflective of a deep-seated panic to control the fragile youth of the US who were reminded every day that the US was not only the hero of the world, but also that the world could end in a ball of white-hot atomic fire. The rise of the superhero, like Superman and Captain America, during this time is a testament to the need for saviors and super soldiers. However, questions about the impressionable minds of children reading comics would be for the psychoanalysts and religious experts to debate in the public eye.

CHAPTER 3

Rise of an Authentic Comics Fandom: Deviance and Defiance in the Comics Industry

I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry. —Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (1954)

If the comics industry were a person, it would have a deep, webbed scar directly below the left shoulder where a bullet narrowly missed its heart. The reverberation of that near-death experience marks the fandom’s every intra-cultural norm as a reaction to the institutional power structures that narrowed the industry’s choices down to two: censor yourself, or we will censor you. Although comics were a reaffirming space for nationalism, heterosexism, and American moral superiority, the assumptions that comics were merely a reflection of dominant culture and its values are only partially correct. As they became a form of entertainment mainly for children, rather than adults, comics took on a new role as cheap reading material and—in some cases—propaganda. However, while comics would become an entrenched part of the American media landscape, comics themselves continued to face criticism from authority. Nostalgia for comics obscures the debate about them that captured the public’s attention in the late-1940s and early-1950s, when concerns about comics’ spread of communism and psychopathic violence became came to the foreground.

In the bleak aftermath of the Second World War, 1950s United States was looking for societal rebuilding and found a foothold in the condemnation of non-conformity.

Much like the war effort itself, the expectation was for full cooperation and sacrifice on the part of all—society would be rebuilt under a flag of unwavering unity. It is through efforts to identify and dismantle “anti-American” ideas that blame for social unrest fell

upon the mass media of the day, a source suspected of radical communist recruitment.

But more than that, the late-1940s and early-1950s was a time of pretending that the barbarism of the war had not occurred and that WWII had not opened up opportunities for minorities and women. Forces of authority sought to return to pre-war social conventions—traditional gender roles and entrenched segregation—by redirecting the population’s attention towards innovation and opulence. The denouncement of the comic book industry by social activists during the early part of the 1950s culminated in a public outcry that could only be satiated by governmental intervention. The resulting Senate subcommittee hearings, known as the Kefauver Hearings, were captivating for a public whose taste for rooting out and disposing of societal subversion was heightened. With growing unrest about “the comic book problem,” the hearings came to an ultimatum that would sate the public’s demand for legal action while still allowing a multimillion dollar industry to continue to exist; the comics industry was given a choice to agree upon a means of self-regulation or to step aside as the federal government set boundaries for the industry. The result was the formation of the Comics Magazine Association of America

(CMAA), which created the Comics Code Authority (CCA) to impose the Comics Code of 1954 (CC 1954), a painfully restrictive set of editorial rules that would put some of the industry’s more risqué out of business, while also reconfiguring the entire industry.

The CC 1954 did more than just restrict the content of comic books; the Code solidified the industry’s guilt as the corruptors of children’s minds and as saboteurs of the

US’s effort to rebuild civilization. The pre- and post-hearing attitudes towards comics shaped the reading of comics into an act of social deviance, thereby molding the fandom that grew in the shadow of the industry’s self-inflicted censorship. Comics fandom

suffers from the same inhibitions as the whole of nerd culture: deviance is woven into each and every fiber. Nerd culture can never be distinguished as apart from its consumptive practices, so if what the culture consumes is deviance, then the culture itself is deviant. While public attention soon waned, turned to other matters of “social decay” in the late 1950s, the CC 1954 remained, shaping white nerd culture into an underground, cultish revelry with a headlong path towards insularity, isolationism, and resistance to a mainstream that—by the 1960s and 70s—had basically forgotten the immediacy of containing the rampant fascism of comics. Indeed, many of the comics titles, characters, and narratives condemned in the 1950s were resurrected and, with the help of a heavy dose of nostalgia, were re-remembered as the substructure for Americana, becoming popular television shows like Batman (1966-1968) and Wonder Woman (1975-1979).

This pattern of rejection and acceptance is one repeated throughout the history of mass media technological advancement because as technology advances the availability and diversity of media forms, those owning the means of cultural production lose their grip on the capital of distribution and interpretation. These factors translate to concerns about how a nascent explorer might misunderstand or incorrectly process the conventions of an established cultural institution without the disciplinary knowledge base to proceed with decorum. However, this panic on the part of the culturally elite does not necessarily translate to embattlement on the side of the emergent cultural faction. Put succinctly, geek chic probably has no idea that it is even fighting for the soul of the fandom. The greatest contributor to this one-sided panic is the notion that popular culture is for the populace. However, this chapter will explore the rise of nerd culture and how what was once popular became cult by being driven underground. While comics have always

occupied the mass public’s attention, reverence for comics has been exaggerated by nostalgia—that is until the last decade or so, when the content of comics again became public through the appropriation of its narratives. Like the bourgeoisie of the mid-1800s, nerd culture has little say in the frequency and speed at which new forms enter the market. While the identities of these cultural elites are embedded in a disciplined knowledge of the cultural materials, not even expertise can halt market expansion. The industries behind these cultural products—these devotions—are ultimately concerned with their own survival found by tapping into the ever-driving force of market potential and greater consumer buy-in.

This chapter begins with a contextualization of the comics industry in its mid-20th century incarnation in order to better understand the rise of nerd culture as the result of a culture war that began decades before nerd culture was a developed subject position or geek chic existed. Beginning with the Kefauver Hearings, the analysis below establishes how the resulting Comics Code Authority (CCA) established comics readers as social and moral deviants—the resulting connotations of which continue to haunt nerd culture even today. Deviance is a nearly impossible shroud to toss off, even for a culture, like nerd culture, that seems to embrace this status to some degree through its resistance to mainstream. However, resistance to social norms has consequences that cannot be easily forgotten, especially if they are stamped with the seal of the US federal government. In this way, the relationship between the media consumed and assumptions about that person’s capacity for violence, sexuality aberrance, and transgression are intertwined, even given the quasi-condemnation of criminality through the lawfulness of a public hearing. In the period after the installation of the CCA in 1954 and up to the emergence

of geek chic in the present day, there have been remarkable assumptions made about nerd culture, both from the outside and inside. The fan, as an adopted identity, is at risk for condemnation and rebuke, forcing nerd culture further into underground cultish spaces that stabilize the “authentic” fan with each bit of knowledge gathered or produced. The insularity that has become a foundational characteristic of nerd culture comes from this movement towards avoidance of the mainstream and even resistance in the form of comix, underground comics. Even as these avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 70s pushed back on the notion of a restrictive code controlling content and its presentation, the advent of direct sales would further encourage a semi-cultish culture towards isolation and insularity. Direct sales changed the distribution of comics, enabling the creation of fandom-only space in the form of the comic book shop. Being cut off from contact with the mainstream, nerd culture was free to insulate itself from outsider concerns, further establishing a centralized set of customs and morals, some of which are disturbingly hostile to both outsiders and other members of the fandom who seemingly lack authenticity. The context builds the reasoning behind the insular, isolated, and mainstream-resistant culture of the nerd and begins to unravel the panic around the emergence of geek chic.

Terror in the Homeland: The Threat of Comic Books

The end of World War II (1945) brought sharp attention back to the homeland in the US. The Berlin Blockade (1948-1949), the victory of the communists in the Chinese

Civil War (1946-1950), and the breakout of the Korean War (1950-1953) insisted that

American democracy was threatened by encroaching communism. Unlike the World

Wars, the US was threatened by a barely tangible idea, not military aggression, and the

world knew that ideas were powerful because they had seen the ascent of Nazism in

Germany and fascism in Italy. General paranoia and suspicion brought on by the beginning of the Cold War (1947-1953) was rampant, as well as the spread of

McCarthyism. As much as the Atomic Age was a time of innovation, it was also a time of increasing social and racial unrest in the US, as returning African-American veterans were subjected to beatings and murder for attempting to assert the values of equality for which they fought during the war (Geselbract, 2010). The new dream of middle-class white America did not appreciate nonconformity, as difference was the friend of anti- democratic politics, and punishments for deviance were often swift and public. While nostalgia now favors the 1950s as a time of great affluence and US exceptionalism, there were ever-present and brooding social concerns beyond the growing demands for racial and gender equality and the creeping fear of Communism—both of which threatened a well-entrenched white, male-dominated society. During WWII and certainly after, as more was revealed through newsreels, photography, and documentaries, US citizens saw the limits of human cruelty exceeded over and over again. The technology of bomb dropping had made it possible for those not involved in the actual conflict itself to be harmed. The war took place in cities, devastating a barely recuperated Europe. The modern world, with all of its apparent civility had produced acts of violence with a new kind of mechanized war that dwarfed the haunting past of The Great War just a few decades before.

Youth in Crisis: The Post-WWII Panic about Juvenile Delinquency

Doubt about the stability of the nation fell on the present, but there was grave concern for the future as well, specifically this concern manifested in an anxiety about

American children. The family, the core of values, became the focus of efforts to restore a broken sense of social trust and natural law. There was particular concern about children, many of whom had become fatherless or were part of the baby-boomer generation. Post-WWII children were fussed over by a number of authority figures in addition to their parents—including politicians, teachers, preachers, and news outlets.

The rash of juvenile delinquency after the First World War weighed heavy in the minds of these authority figures, who, according to Gibert (1986), were all expecting a repeat of just such a bump, which may have actually been as imagined as it was real. Gibert (1986) refers to this as an “episodic notion,” an old fear (i.e. juvenile delinquency or the corruption of susceptible minds) that seems to become inexplicably epidemic overnight during times of social unrest (p. 4). As with the concerns of the bourgeoisie in the mid-

1800s, concerns about the exploitation of children became a focal point for larger social anxieties bubbling just below the surface. Newspapers, news magazines (like Life), and documentary shorts—such as Youth in Crisis (1943)—convinced many that roving gangs of teenage boys were roaming the streets thirsty for violence. They blamed the war’s psychological stress on the change, claiming that children had to “grow up too fast” by taking the responsibilities of the home while dad was at war and mom was working at the munitions factory. The end of the war left these youth with a feeling of free will that was incommensurate with their age, and they were lashing out. It seemed to many that the war had broken the family unit and pushed youth towards delinquency; therefore, it was only the family that could stop youth crime and waywardness (Gibert, 1986; Hajdu, 2008;

Lent, 1998; Springhall, 1998). So any hindrance to the rebuilding of the family unit was considered a threat to the nation, but households across the country were experiencing

difficulties—fathers returning from war with both righteousness and night terrors, mothers returning to the kitchen with the expectation that they would accept their place in the home for the family and the country, and children returning to being children with new unrealistic expectations for innocence. When family life did not come together easily, there had to be a reason, and many Americans were happy to shift the “blame from the family to outside influences,” thereby offering a simple solution to social unrest: investigate and control mass media (Nyberg, 1998a, p. 43).

The Scourge of Comic Books

Comics were quickly becoming the target of several exposés accusing them of being not only anti-family, but also responsible for violent acts. On July 6, 1947, The

Washington Post reported on the death of Melvin Leeland, who shot himself in the head while explaining the rules of Russian roulette to his best friend. Leeland’s mother told reporters that the boy had gotten the idea from a comic book (Hajdu, 2008). On

September 15, 1947, Billy Becker hung himself in the basement of his family’s home in

Pennsylvania, and the headline in the New York Times read “COMICS BLAMED IN

DEATH; Boy Hanged Himself Re-enacting Book’s Scene, Mother Believes.” In a radio panel debate about comic’s influence, Marya Mannes (1947) spoke out against comics, calling them anti-thought: “Comics in their present form are the absence of thought. They are, in fact, the greatest intellectual narcotic on the market...Every hour spent in reading comics is an hour in which all inner growth is stopped” (pp. 20-21). Nyberg (1998a) contends that comics were easy targets to paint as mass media corruptors, mainly because they were for children, whereas other media were shared with adults; additionally, she explains that comics were the least regulated of all mass media, “making them

particularly vulnerable to criticism” (p. 43). Children made up the greatest percentage of comic book readership during this period. According to Nyberg (1998b), “more than 90 percent of the children in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades reported they read comic books regularly, averaging at least ten comics in a month” (p. vii). The Police

Commissioner Harry S. Toy (1948) called for banning of comics, claiming they were

“loaded with communistic teachings, sex and racial discrimination.” The same year, under the leadership of Toy, Detroit was the first city to ban the sale of comic books, and

Toy himself dispatched officers to seize copies of comics from newsstands all over the city. This act would be followed by other cities and states in which comics would become nominally unlawful.

1948: Signs of Things to Come

Two important events occurred in 1948. The first was the comic book industry’s response to public outcry and the accusations that comics were causing violence and depravity. This response came in the form of a six-point code announced on July 1 to be enforced (so to speak) by the year-old Association of Comic Magazine Publishers

(ACMP) (Appendix A). The main focus of the code was about the respect shown to law enforcement and some provisions against racy subject matter, including comics containing explicit sexual references and slang. The comic book industry had become a multimillion dollar industry during the 1940s. As Hajdu (2008) explains, comic-book publishers were “prospering entrepreneurs who, a few years earlier, had been printers, pornographers, and jobbers on the fringes of legitimacy,” but now they were selling between seven and ten million comic books a month (p. 45). Even so, the publishers knew that there was a storm brewing after the war, one that was making its way to their

medium; unfortunately, despite the placating gesture of the ACMP’s 1948 code, the condemnation of comic books was unavoidable. Blame had to be placed squarely on the shoulders of someone or something, and those held responsible would not be the same ones who supported mass media enjoyed by adults.

The second important event of 1948 was a meeting of the Association for the

Advancement of Psychotherapy (AAP), which met in New York City at a symposium entitled “The Psychopathology of Comic Books.” Panels and presenters discussed

“pictorial beatings, shootings, stranglings, blood puddles and torturings-to-death,” questioning the deeply traumatizing effects of reading comics, especially for children who were their intended audience (“Puddles of Blood,” 1948, p. 68). The article published in Time about the symposium focused on the president of the AAP, who concluded, “We are getting to the roots of one of the contributing causes of juvenile delinquency….You cannot understand present-day juvenile delinquency if you do not take into account the pathogenic and pathoplastic influence of the comic books"; the journalist goes on to summarize by stating, “In plainer language: comic books not only inspire evil but suggest a form for the evil to take” (“Puddles of Blood,” 1948, p. 68).

With that statement, the US had a new face of the anti-comics movement: Fredric

Wertham (1895-1981).

Setting the Stage

White dominant society’s concern about rising movements of social progress could be seen in the adherence to its ideological normativity, even though there was no denying that change was coming, whether in the form of rights for the those disenfranchised. Much of the repression of social progress came in the seeming innocent

call for strict adherence to the hegemony. What would become McCarthyism played on the notion of a secretive movement within the US to undermine the foundations of democratic society, but there were other, lesser known waves of government intervention that brought these bubbles of uncertainty to the surface in public ways, feeding fears.

There had long been vice societies and social activists who sought to save the public from the dangers of corruption by mass media influences, but these were government supported interventions that sought to ferret out pockets of anti-American values. The first few years of the 1950s were an open invitation not only for the selling of cultural normalcy through a shared media experience, but also for those waging war against nonconformity. The same mass media outlets that were supposedly corrupting the minds of the American people became the avenues to disseminate the ugly truth about comics.

Will Eisner, comic book innovator and creator of The Spirit, would recall later that in

1954, he was convinced that his decision to exit the comic book business in 1952 was the best move he could have made, despite his efforts to legitimize the art form:

When Dr. Wertham came out with his book [and] he started plugging it on

TV and in the papers, everywhere, I felt like I was hearing the voice of

every comic-book hater I had ever met, and I knew that I could no longer

function in that atmosphere….I knew I was smart to get out when I did,

because the walls were starting to fall down. (as cited in Hajdu, 2008, p.

229)

The fight to save the souls of children everywhere was just beginning, and Wertham was heading the crusade. Wertham pulled no punches when it came to warning parents— mothers—by printing early findings on the corrupting influence of comic books in

articles like “What Parents Don’t Know About Comic Books” appearing in Ladies’ Home

Journal in 1953. While Wertham wrote many public and scholarly works about the detriments of mass media to corrupt children, his most famous book Seduction of the

Innocent, released in 1954, would become the foundational “evidence” needed to condemn the comic book industry.

Fredric Wertham: The Responsibility of Judging and Condemning Mass Media

It is unfortunate, yet understandable, that Wertham has been, and likely will always be, the great enemy of the comics industry. There are few, if any, apologists for

Wertham, and his impact on mass media and culture for the better part of four decades is, for the most part, lost to history.15 While his name is often used in the most derogatory sense within the comics fandom for his criticism of comics, his motivations were a byproduct of his time, the post-World Wars’ atmosphere of mistrust and disillusionment.

Wertham was a humanist. In comic books, he saw the violence of the World Wars come to life in blurry four-color carnage. Mass graves became zombie invasions. The execution of six millions of Jews and the deaths of over sixty million soldiers became the same depravity that would position serial killers as the protagonists of “true crime” comics.

Even more worrisome to him (and the many others he represented) was that comics targeted children. During a time when concerns about propaganda were focused on the dangers of mass media to draw citizens into totalitarianism, Wertham saw comics as the

15 Bart Beaty (2005) laments the scarce attention scholars have given to Fredric Wertham and his contributions to mid-20th century mass culture psychology and politics: “At present, little secondary material exists that assesses [Wertham’s] contribution to the debates about popular culture….Wertham’s name fails to even emerge in recent histories of communication research (Rogers 1994), suggesting that he has become a nonentity as far as the history of communications is concerned” (p. 4). What concerns Beaty (2005) the most is that many of Wertham’s contributions are dismissed or left out completely from discussions, a tactic that Beaty (2005) contributes to an emergent pop culture studies’ concerns about legitimacy within academics within the late 1960s. 72

single most devastating mass medium because it targeted impressionable young minds.

Wertham feared what many grownups did at the time: the desensitization of an entire generation through overexposure to violence in the media. Although his many critics would come to see his work as “monocausationist,” there was no voice of conviction raging against the pollutive potential of mass culture, especially of comics, as well known and respected as Wertham’s during the 1940s and 1950s (Beaty, 2005, p. 104; Brooker,

2001, p. 106).

Born in Germany, Wertham immigrated to the US in the 1927, where he began social psychoanalytical studies, inspired by his correspondence with Sigmund Freud, on the ills of mass media culture, specifically on portrayals of violence across media forms.

Becoming a criminal psychologist in the early 1930s, Wertham took a position at the

Bellevue Mental Hygiene Clinic, in New York, where he evaluated the mental capacity of violent criminals (Webster, 1981). It was in this position that Werthman became a public figure, testifying on behalf of the defense in the case against Albert Fish, an US serial killer whose decades-long rampage both shocked and intrigued the public. For

Wertham’s part, he argued that Fish was insane and could not be held accountable to stand trial, but the horrific nature of Fish’s crimes, the rape and cannibalization of children, could not prevent his execution by electric chair at Sing Sing (Schechter, 1990).

These beginnings shaped the way that Wertham saw the relationship between psychology and the law, as he saw insanity as affliction, not criminality. It is this aspect of his psychoanalytical approach that would lead him to condemn comic books not for their violence or gore, but for the ways in which they provided blueprints for how feelings of hate could translate to acts of murder.

Wertham separated himself from the popularity of psychoanalysis performed in the public eye by denouncing his fellow psychologists who he saw as elitists acting in the interests of their own intellectualism. Still, Wertham was not shy of the spectacle, making a name for himself as a psychoanalytical expert. For example, Wertham took a firm stance in condemning the work of four psychiatrists whose evaluation of expatriate Ezra

Pound determined that Pound was too insane to stand trial for treason in 1945. Wertham saw this kind of psychiatry as an assertion of authority without supporting evidence—yet another illustration of elitism within his field. Pound’s commitment to St. Elizabeth’s

Hospital instead of a prison cell was all the more scandalized when the US Library of

Congress attempted to award Pound the Bollingen Foundation Prize for poetry for The

Pisan Cantos in 1946, considered by many, including his friend Hemingway, to be

Pound’s greatest work. While the thought of awarding Pound, who was seen by many in the US as a traitor, such a prize contained its own controversy, the situation was further complicated by the fact that the name of the foundation referred to a home owned by Carl

Jung, who was accused of Nazi sympathies (Beaty, 2005). For Wertham, there was no greater evidence that the violence of WWII was still evident in everyday life than the encroaching sympathies of anti-democratic factions, many of whom, in his eyes, were comprised of creative people. Wertham (1949) saw this as the problem of the age: “the unsolved question of why so many intellectuals in different countries—writers, musicians, painters, psychiatrists—have succumbed to the blandishments of Fascism” (as cited in Beaty, 2005, p. 40). It was through this and other experiences post-WWII that

Beaty (2005) contends Wertham established the direction of his career: in order “to reconcile violence—especially violence on a grand scale—it had to be judged and

condemned” (p. 40). Wertham set his sights on mass media consumption, more specifically the noxious medium of the comic book.

The road to protecting the masses was to better understand the individual’s relationship to society, and for Wertham, this meant a deep examination of mass media culture, which united the citizenry through a shared experience. Social alarmists were fixated on the idea that media detracted from interpersonal communication and relationship building, and prolific new media forms, like television and comic books, were immediate cause for concern. However, panics like these are cyclical, emerging whenever new media is introduced, as Drotner (1992) explains with her term “media panic.” The recurrent nature of media panic is seen in the reaction of the elites in the

1800s to highly visual forms of new reading made possible by advancements in print technology. In the post-war late-1940s and early-1950s, media panic fell on a form that survived both the Great Depression and WWII, only to become suspect during the mid- century—the comic book.

US Horror Comics: The Global Nightmare of American Violence

While Wertham’s work was probably the most respected and well-known during this time, there were other rumblings even before the publication of Seduction of the

Innocent. As expressed in Chapter 2 of this manuscript, there is a long history of uncertainty when it comes to comics-like forms as legitimate reading materials. In post-

WWII America, comics were not only “crude, illiterate, badly printed,” but also

“salacious, addictive, stunting, fascist, Communist, [and] conducive to wrongdoing of all sorts” (Hajdu, 2008, p. 92). According to Lent (1998) and the contributors to his global account of the great comic book scare of the 1950s, Pulp Demons, the worldwide anxiety

about comics in the US, Germany, Canada, and Asia derived from the distribution of US- printed horror comics. In 1953, just a few months before the Kefauver Hearings, a British organization by the name of the National Committee of Teachers for Peace, comprised of many of the nation's’ most respected educators held a conference on the theme of

“International Tension and Education.” The keynote speaker, Peter Mauger (1953), a member of the British Communist Party, warned:

War preparations include the education of the minds of men to an

acceptance of war as a natural part of man’s activity. Normal people do

not like fighting wars; they have a rooted objection to killing people; they

have an even more rooted objection to being killed! To overcome these

objections sufficiently a long and thorough process of indoctrination is

necessary. (p. 7)

Mauger’s evidence was the US obsession with death, murder, dismemberment, etc. found in its horror comics. Concern about comics moved from the back of US newspapers to the front pages, as church groups and religious organizations adopted anti-comics views and brought their concerns to women’s clubs, parent-teacher associations, and other civic groups. Then, in turn, these groups presented their concerns to local governments, which were asked to restrict or even ban comics, and the police departments, which were expected to enforce anti-comics bans (Gabilliet, 2005/2010; Gardner, 2012; Hajdu, 2008;

Nyberg, 1998b, 2017).

William Gaines: An Unlikely Hero against Censorship

William “Bill” Gaines (1922-1992) never wanted to be in the comics business. He hated comics almost as much as he hated his father—Maxwell Charles (M. C.) Gaines.

According to one account by Ivan Klapper, a writer who worked for the publisher, the elder Gaines hated his son:

Charlie [M. C. Gaines] was a nasty man, the last person you’d want to

have as a teacher or a father. He never said a kind word about his own son.

As a matter of fact, he hated him, and he made no bones about it, and Bill

[Gaines] felt the same way about him. They kept as far from each other as

possible. (as cited in Hajdu, 2008)

M. C. Gaines laid the groundwork for the comics industry by collecting the most popular

Sunday supplements from the past few decades and binding them with saddle staples. He called them Famous Funnies, and these ten-cent reprints were the first forerunners to comic books. M. C. Gaines, who published comics style interpretations of the Bible after he ran through all of the historical material of the previous decades, created Educational

Comics or EC, which he envisioned as a supplement to children’s religious and social education. However, M. C. Gaines did not seem to understand the market or even what children wanted. Other pioneers like Will Eisner and Samuel “Jerry” Iger were creating original stories, narratives and adventure stories, realizing that the surplus of previously printed work would one day run out. But M. C. Gaines focused on what he considered to be wholesome reading for children with titles like Picture Stories from American History,

Picture Stories from Science, Tiny Tot Comics, and Animal Fables. In a way, M. C.

Gaines saw the writing on the wall; he saw that public concern about the effects of

comics on children was transitioning from a sin to something more like a crime. While

M. C. Gaines’ decision to sell his fifty percent interest in All-American Comics was likely ahead of the curve, separating him from further association with the contentious content of those titles, the sale drove his half-million in assets into $100,000 in debt accumulated over the next three years.16

Around the same time as EC was facing financial freefall, Bill Gaines was studying to become a science teacher at the NYU School of Education. In the final year of his degree, Bill Gaines broke the news to his mother, Jessie, that his wife had left him, infuriating and devastating Jessie, who had arranged the marriage herself. To give Jessie

Gaines some time away from her disappointing son, Bill Gaines’ parents and a few friends went to a small cottage owned by M. C. located on Lake Placid. The weekend took a tragic turn, however, as a few days into their visit, M. C. Gaines and a friend were killed in a boating accident—for which Bill would always blame himself. Upon returning to New York, Jessie and Bill Gaines inherited M. C. Gaines’ fifty percent interest in EC, and Bill Gaines’ mother begged him to keep the family business going. Guilted, Gaines agreed (Hajdu, 2008; Nyberg, 1998b; Reidelbach, 1991). He wrote that EC was “the

16 While M. C. Gaines is often credited for the success of Wonder Woman as a character by publishing her on the cover of the first Sensation Comics #1 in 1942. M. C. Gaines had always imagined himself as a teacher to children—someone responsible for their moral and Christian development. However, after the publication of Sensation Comics #1, Gaines found his publication for the first time on the list of indecent and Communist literature led by the Catholic members of Bishop Noll’s National Organization for Decent Literature (NODL). However, Gaines’ protest letter to Noll, in which Gaines mentioned the work of his company to publish comic book versions of Bible stories, was met with even more condemnation and a list of all of the ways that Wonder Woman offended the NODL’s “Code for Clean Living,” including her skimpy costume. Of course, Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston (Charles Moulton) did not help Gaines when he admitted in an interview that he believed the US was headed towards a matriarchy, one that should be welcomed. Moulton was obsessed with BDSM, especially scenarios involving dominant women, which he embedded in both comic books and Hollywood films with great enthusiasm, claiming that his work satisfied the urge of the subconscious—the desire of men to be mastered by women who care for them. It is likely the implications of Moulton’s work that led M. C. Gaines to dump his half-interest in All-American Comics. 78

smallest, crummiest outfit in the field...a mess of titles competing with each other to lose the most money” (Hajdu, 2008, p. 90-91).

Within a year, Gaines had turned the label around (essentially by going against his father’s legacy completely). He changed the title of the label to Entertainment Comics, instead of Education Comics, and hired new artists. Within six months, the label was producing both western comics and crime comics. Beginning in 1950, Gaines, a pathfinder like his father, began producing the first horror comics, with titles such as

Crypt of Terror (later Tales from the Crypt), Haunt of Fear, and Vault of Horror, for ten cents each—the equivalent to the cost of a bottle of Coke and a Hershey’s Milk

Chocolate bar. These new horror titles were so lucrative that by the end of the year, EC’s money troubles were over. However, the same domesticated content that had nearly sunk

EC under M. C. Gaines had also saved it from the brewing public controversy about the ills of comics. Now, with Bill Gaines as the innovator of horror comics, all blame fell on him and EC, despite the nearly forty monthly horror titles being produced across the industry (Hajdu, 2008; Jacobs, 1971).17 So when it came time for the senator to call for witness testimony about the effects of comics on juvenile delinquency in the US,

Kefauver willingly accepted Bill Gaines request speak on behalf of the comics industry.

The Spectacle of the Kefauver Hearings and The Aftermath

Estes Kefauver, a Democratic Senator from Tennessee, was a well-known public figure several years before he presided over the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate

Juvenile Delinquency in 1954. In 1950 and early-1951, Kefauver headed the Senate

Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce. Beginning in New

17 The exact number of titles is unclear, as some scholars, including Nyberg (1998a) claim that there were over one hundred horror titles being produced during its short-lived arch of success during 1950-1954. 79

Orleans and ending in New York City, Kefauver’s hearings were a kind of traveling show of intrigue held in fourteen cities and featuring over 600 witness testimonies, including those from some of the most notorious crime and mob bosses of the era. By the time the tour reached New York City, Con Edison, the NYC electric company, had to add a generator to its grid just to support the strain of over 70 percent of New Yorkers

(seventeen times the number who usually watched daytime TV) who would tune in daily to watch the Kefauver hearings. According to Hajdu (2008), the hearings were all the rage:

Those without [television] sets filled bars and restaurants...or watched

through appliance-store windows. Two theaters in Manhattan, finding

their seats vacant during the “Kefauver hours,” set up systems to project

the broadcasts on their screens and welcomed the public for free.

Homemakers had “Kefauver parties” and formed shopping clubs to limit

their time away from their TV sets. Several schools dismissed students

early so they could watch the hearings at home. Sales of Pops-Rite corn

for home popping more than doubled during the eight days of the New

York hearings. (p. 248)

In January 1952, a few months before the Special Committee would submit its final report, one that suggested no legal action, policies, or actions, Kefauver announced that he would run for the Democratic presidential nomination. While he won the vote in all of the key primaries, the outgoing Truman administration and the DNC were against his candidacy and grounded his bid for president in 1952 (as they would again in 1956).

The Kefauver Hours: The Criminality of Youth

Following the pattern set by Kefauver, Senator Robert C. Hendrickson, a

Republican from New Jersey, established his own hearings in 1953. Hendrickson’s traveling Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency was soon joined by

Kefauver, who assumed the unofficial helm of the hearings, making them the second to bear his name in casual conversation. Together, the senators began the investigative hearings with great interest in causes of youth crime and misbehavior. Senator Robert

Hendrickson (1954) told the press before the hearings had even began that he had

“received about 15,000 or more unsolicited letters from people all over the country. Of this ‘man in the street’ reaction, nearly 75% seem to me to reflect some concern either over comic books, television, radio or the movies” (as cited in Gilbert, 1986, p. 150;

Hajdu, 2008). While the committee investigated a number of potential causes for the rise of delinquency, “lack of recreation, poor schools, broken families,” critics and experts focused their testimonies on the influences of mass media (Gilbert, 1986, p. 143).

The goal of the hearings that focused on comics specifically focused not on how comics could encourage delinquency, psychosis, or violence in children in which those tendencies were already thought to exist. Instead, the focus was on whether prolonged exposure to comic books might not only implant ideas of violence, deviant behavior, or increased early sexuality, but also give children ways to act upon these ideas through comic book’s four-color depictions of (implied) rape, theft, murder, suicide, etc. Again, comics were seen as models for how one might act upon feelings; they were suggestive; as Wertham would famously state, they were seductive. While the hearings were ultimately unbalanced in their focus on the influences of mass media—comics

especially—these hearings, like the McCarthy hearings later during the same year in

1954, were a way to reify the social contract of civilization. In the wake of the horrific reality human beings could dress the part of civility, yet be far more sinister in nature, publically viewed hearings like these ensured that the US would demonstrate to its citizens and the world that it did not have an appetite for violence and that no group would again eviscerate another in the name of nationalism, science, and military power.

Perhaps, for those who remembered the World Wars, these were unspoken promises etched into their very experiences and the fatigue of decades of global conflict. But could the adults of this era raise children who would never repeat the same acts of barbarousness?

The Hearings: Gaines, Defender of the Indefensible

A small man with a hawkish nose and small round spectacles, Wertham took the stand in the morning. His testimony was hours long, comprised of his decades-long study of the effects of comics on children. Wertham ultimately asserts that there are “no secure homes” in the US “as long as the crime comic book industry exists in its present form”

(“Juvenile Delinquency,” 1954a, p. 84). Wertham’s testimony is predictable. He buried horror comics in anecdotal accounts of children’s impulses to act upon what they read in comic books and to think nothing of the violence therein.

Bill Gaines saw the hearings as an attempt to slit the throat of free speech and press. Enraged by the newspaper notifications a few weeks before the Kefauver Hearings that the senators would be examining comic books as a potential cause of juvenile delinquency, Gaines whipped up an editorial asking readers to write in to the subcommittee with their defenses of comics (Appendix B). Because no comic book

readers, writers, artists, or publishers had been invited to testify, Gaines saw this letter writing campaign as the only means to connect actual readers to members of the committee who seemed determined to reject the arguments of minors. Further, Gaines created an advert titled “Are You a Read Dupe?” to go out to all of his subscribers, an insert that essentially portrayed the members of the subcommittee as communist, book- burning members of the KGB (Appendix C). In a fit of spite, Gaines sent a first-run version of the insert directly to Hendrickson, who took it with him to the floor of the

Senate, denouncing Gaines and disavowing any association between freedom of speech and the investigations of the hearings. No comic book artists, writers, or publishers were called to the hearings to testify, and (as many admitted) they had no interest in doing so.

However, Gaines, believing in his heart, that the matter at hand was one of freedom, volunteered to testify. The result was probably more devastating than if Gaines had let well enough alone, allowing the inquisition of the moment to pass.

Figure 1. Cover of Crime SuspenStories, No. 22, by EC. The cover of this comic book was presented as evidence during the Kefauver Hearings to illustrate the graphic violence of horror comics.

Awake all night before his testimony, Gaines worked throughout the night, until around five or six in the morning with one of the label’s writers drafting and redrafting his statement. Throughout the night, Gaines popped No-Doz and Dexedrine, which he took as a weight-loss supplement. When he was brought in as a witness in the Kefauver

Hearings, Gaines was asked about the cover of Crime SuspenStories #22 (above), a title from his EC Comics label. Sweating from a nauseating combination of Dexedrine and allergy medicine on an empty stomach in the 2:00 PM session, Gaines was irritable and, in all appearances, nervous. Kefauver asked “Do you think that is in good taste?” pointing to the cover featuring the close-up of the decapitated head of a woman held by 84

her blond hair by her ax-wielding husband. Gaines replied, smugly as ever, “Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic” (“Juvenile Delinquency,” 1954, p. 103). This statement would be the bell that could not be unrung, as Kefauver cornered Gaines and pressed him like one of Mafia tycoons of his 1951 hearings. In that moment, the industry was changed forever: the “indefensible” violence of comics truly lacked a satisfying defense.

The Aftermath: The Criminalization of Comics

The CCA’s stamp of approval (below) took the form of a literal postage stamp, with what appeared to be perforated edges on all sides. The stamp, which appeared in black and white, regardless of the comic book or printing label, was placed conspicuously on the front cover of every single comic book that passed under the watchful eye of the

CCA. Candy stores, general stores, newsstands, and the like refused to carry comics that did not include the stamp of approval because of the backlash of the public. Any comics printed without the label were no better than pornography, and distributors and retailers refused to do business with labels that would not submit to the CCA because they feared for the reputation of their own businesses.

Figure 2. Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval. Appeared on all comics that met the content regulations of the CCA.

The code itself was stricter than it needed to be (Appendix D). In this way, the industry was demonstrating to the public its sincere desire for reform. Horror comics would be all but eliminated by Part B of the editorial portion of the code:

1. No comic magazine shall use the word horror or terror in its title.

2. All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes,

depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted.

3. All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated.

4. Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be

published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no

case shall evil be presented alluringly, nor so as to injure the

sensibilities of the reader.

5. Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead,

torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and

werewolfism are prohibited.

Likewise, the code limited sexual content and violence, attempting to alleviate the concerns of the Legion of Decency, an offshoot of the Catholic Church, and other similar vice societies that had laid heavy criticisms against the industry for immoral content

(Gilbert, 1986; Nyberg, 1998). According to Nyberg (1998), the industry adopted many of the same restrictions as the film industry, but then went even farther to ensure acceptance; for example, both the film and comics codes prevented the use of profanity and obscenity. However, the CC 1954 included the following provision: “Although slang and colloquialisms are acceptable, excessive use should be discouraged and, wherever possible, good grammar shall be employed.” In this way, the Code could claim that it was

promoting education and good reading habits in children. In all, the Code was a pledge of

“good taste,” the very element that had condemned comics during the Kefauver Hearings, a catchall for the new administrator of the CCA: “All elements or techniques not specifically mentioned herein, but which are contrary to the spirit and intent of the code, and are considered violations of good taste or decency, shall be prohibited.”

Charles F. Murphy was likely the best and worst that the CMAA could have chosen to become the administrator for the CCA, which would oversee the implementation of the CC 1954. Murphy had been a New York City magistrate for over nine years, and with his law background as a judge, Murphy believed in the strict adherence to the code. He was given a two-year contract at $17,000 a year; Murphy’s time as administrator of the CCA was like a crusade. Married with three children of his own, he saw this position as an opportunity to affect direct change to the industry, to clean it up, as he had wanted to do for so long during the late-1940s and early-1950s during his involvement with several organizations concerned about curbing juvenile delinquency in NYC (Harrison, 1954). The comics industry, represented by the CMAA, chose Murphy because the members wanted to demonstrate to the public at large that they were serious about adhering to the code and self-censoring. On the surface, Murphy was the perfect third-party to examine the comics before publication: he would be impartial, thorough, and carry the esteem of the judicial system. Murphy also promised the public a quick turnaround of the industry; appointed on September 16, Murphy took his position on October 1, pledging to have the industry purged by the end of November

(CMAA Files as cited by Nyberg, 1998, p. 110). If the industry wanted to distance itself from the mantle of criminality that it had earned during the Kefauver hearings, then

hiring a judge was not likely the best decision. While such a move might have kowtowed to the public panic about the industry’s influence on minors, it also sunk many publishers because the seal became the ultimately stamp of approval. Even Gaines, who fought against the CC 1954 even after the formation of the CMAA and refused to join, ultimately did join when boxes of EC comics were returned to the publishing office, unopened.

Figure 3. Comics Code Authority Advertisement. The CCA released booklets to the public that included the new Comics Code restrictions and encouraged reading of comics to continue with reassuring advertisements like the above.

Perhaps publishers thought that Murphy would see the position as a figurehead, but Murphy took it very seriously, hiring staff to help him sort through the hundreds of submitted manuscripts. Publishers of work sent in during the first month of the code’s implementation were sent back—strictly rejected—or were so heavily edited that the narrative crumbled. Without time to rewrite or redraw panels, some publishers simply blacked out panels that were inappropriate according to the code or used white corrective liquid to remove things like guns or knives from character’s hands. The cost of the code’s implementation was heavy on the side of the industry. In October and November of 1954 alone, the CCA received and reviewed 285 comic book titles (38 of which were cancelled

immediately) and 440 issues in all. Murphy and his editors rejected 126 stories without the possibility of rewrites and required changes to over 5,600 panels of art.

Gaines attempted new titles, but none of them were as profitable as the previous horror comics that had saved EC; his time in the business was coming to an end.

Somewhat famously, Gaines ended his career in comics with a phone call. While examining other titles from comics labels were the work of the CCA staff, the submissions from EC were always read by Murphy himself. A proposed issue of

Incredible Science Fiction was accepted with the one caveat—one that would drive

Gaines to leave the comics industry forever. In a story entitled “Judgement Day!” an astronaut from Earth travels to a distant planet on a mission of diplomacy. Inhabited by self-replicating robots that are identical mechanically, but painted either blue or orange, the blue robots had been subjugated by the orange. The astronaut ultimately leaves the planet without welcoming the robots into the intergalactic union. In the final panel, the

Earthman removes his helmet revealing that he is a black man (below). In an interview with Hadju (2008), Al Feldstein, long-time employee of EC, recalled that Murphy read the last panel, looked up at Feldstein, and said, “No. You can’t have a Negro.” Feldstein demanded to know where in the code it forbid the depiction of people of color. “I say you can’t have a Negro.” Feldstein returned to the EC office, “Bill, this is impossible. It just can’t work. They are after our ass, and they’re going to find any excuse to give us a hard time.” Gaines called Murphy, who refused to budge on the matter, until Gaines threatened to call a press conference to tell the public that the CCA was racist. Murphy relented. “Fuck you,” Gaines said, hanging up on him. While Gaines would go on to

publish the comic as it was drawn, he would never again be a comic-book publisher (as cited in Hadju, 2008, pp. 322-323).

Figure 4. Final Panel of “Judgement Day!” in Incredible Science Fiction by EC. After Murphy attempted to censor EC’s publishing of this comic, Gaines left the comics industry forever and began Mad.

As his horror comic business dried up in the wake of the CCA’s censorship,

Gaines found his footing in a comic-book-turned-magazine (to avoid the CCA) he began in 1952 titled Mad, which became one of the most influential satire publications of the last fifty years. With the mainstream market narrowed to include only those who were willing to submit to the CC 1954, many comics went underground in the 1960s, in the form of comix. Akin to today’s alternative press comics, these underground comix were everything the code stood to oppose, but even with the objections to self-censorship and self-restriction, many of these comix would only be distributed within small circles of like-minded artists and vanguard. In an interview with Robert Crumb in the early 2000s,

Crumb recalled being an adolescent growing up after the 1950s, trying to locate something less censored and more genuine than the self-regulated comics of the day. He

and his brother were too young to be fans of the original EC comics, but they had come to recognize both the quality of the comics and their martyrdom. Crumb muses

By the time I was old enough to appreciate EC and Mad magazine, it was

all over—the great stuff was over….That made me a nostalgist at a young

age and a seeker of the culture of the past at a young age….Me and the

other guys who ended up drawing underground comics grew up loving

these crazy comic books of the pre-Code period, when comics had a lot of

vitality. (as cited in Hadju, 2008, p. 333)

In remembering the first time he saw Mad, Crumb remembers being confused because he had never seen highly respected American institutions mocked in such a “crude, weird way”: “A big part of the appeal to me was that [Mad] was so strange and esoteric and outside of the mainstream” (as cited in Hadju, 2008, p. 333).

Comics!: They Are Just for Kids Now

The moral panic of the 1950s rendered comics a near crime, but the damage to the medium was far greater than its association with criminality. When the scare over juvenile delinquency was at its prime, the fear about comics was that their influence would give children ways to act upon their feelings and inclinations. If you are angry, you might chop someone’s head off. If someone cheats you, then you burn down their house. Those in positions of authority and power were terrified of a generation that would grow up without an inner-sense of disgust towards violence. Although figures like Stan

Lee and Jack Kirby were able to resurrect the industry in the 1960s by establishing a new focus on superhero comics, which continue to reign over the market even today, the ultimate damage to the medium was deep. Comics were not illegal (with the exception of

a few cities and states), and they were regulated strictly by an outside entity in the CCA; however, there was still great concern about comics as a medium for children.

The notion that comics were for children produced a few effects that are still felt today. The first is that the regulation of comics content and the portrayal of their narratives were limited until the publishing labels finally refused to adhere to the Code in

2011. For nearly 60 years, the CCA regulated the industry, restricting its potential and rejecting the kind of “strange and esoteric and outside of the mainstream” artwork and narrative that inspired a generation of underground comics. Because comics were meant for children, the intrinsic value of comics was based upon what the medium could do that was positive for children. The notion of comics as educational comes from this implication. Comics must teach something, a moral or lesson; otherwise, they are just mind-dulling entertainment, which many parents considered them to be even after the CC

1954 was put into place.18

The second effect is that the audience for comics—children—impressed upon the medium a kind of age limit. Readers over a particular age, early teens, were expected to give up reading comics, in the same way that they shuck the other items of childhood for approaching adulthood. This effect is still imposed upon the fandom today, as comics have been dismissed for years as relics of childhood—something to be easily shed after

18 This understanding of comics no doubt greatly contributed to the surge of pedagogies that arose during the 1990s and early 2000s that focused on the use of comics in the classroom. Defensive and practical guides to the use of comics to teach students reading, writing, and composition made their appearance in droves, even though, but the 1990s and early 2000s, very few children actually read comics. Almost like a justification for their continued reading and reverence of comics, scholars and educators pushed for the acceptance of comics as literature for all audiences, not just children.

one’s twelfth or thirteenth birthday—rendering readers past this age to be socially deviant in their own way, unable to forgo the simplistic, innocuous narratives of comics for more

“appropriate” reading materials. To read comics beyond the age demographic suggests that a person has a stunted sense of personal development or is, in the very least, an escapist, longing for the insipid feelings of awareness before adulthood. This reading of comic book readers as socially deviant because they refuse to connect with a more mature set of “realistic” responsibilities, aids in the separation of the mainstream and the fandom because the fandom recognizes narrative possibilities beyond a particular age demographic and are willing to participate long afterwards.

With Great Power Comes Great Propaganda?

While underground comics blatantly refused the CMAA’s Code, those labels that were a part of the mainstream were beholden to the Code without deviation until 1971.

President Richard Nixon was fighting against a rampant counterculture that was heavily invested in the use of drugs as a means to protest and escape the social unrest around the

Vietnam War. While efforts had been made to curb the drug problem, there were concerns about the upcoming generation that was in its pre-teens, so in a move that was essentially against everything the Code meant to appease, Nixon’s Department of Health,

Education, and Welfare called upon Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Stan Lee, asking him to write a story arc in the popular Spiderman (#96-98) depicting the ills of drug use

(Tondro, 2011). Lee sent a request to the CCA asking for permission to print the story in which Peter Parker (Spiderman) helps his friend Harry Osborn with his addiction to pills.

When the CCA refused to sanction the narrative, Marvel published the comic without the

CCA’s stamp of approval, without an impact on sales and without public outcry. In

essence, the public had moved on. There were deeper concerns in the world than whether or not comics were going to corrupt the minds of the young.

Figure 5. Cover of The Amazing Spider-man, No. 96, by Marvel Comics. This was the first mainstream comic to appear without the CCA Seal of Approval.

The publishing of Spiderman #96 had several effects. The industry realized that, for the efforts of educating children upon the dangers of drugs, violence, and the like, the

Code could be broken. There was a brief moment of triumph, as the existence of comics could be justified because they could become a tool for “good”—for the reproduction of national interests and ideals. Moreover, comics could be used as a space for puzzling out

real-world issues. Unfortunately, because of the set of circumstances around the breaking of the Code for the first time by a major publisher, the unspoken rule was reified: comics are for educating children. A special meeting of the CCA was called to chastise Marvel for breaking with the Code, in which Marvel representative Charles Goodman, assured the CCA that no other Marvel publications would go to press without the seal. The incident did bring about small revisions in the Code, including lifting the ban on horror and crime comics, depictions of sexual situations, and drug use.

A Place for the Faithful: The Invention of the Comic Book Shop

Around the same time, in the early 1970s, a drastic change in the distribution of comics led to the creation of a space for fandom—the comic book shop. Prior to the

1970s, most comics were sold at newsstands, and distribution to newsstands was through general newsstand distribution companies, which relied upon magazine sales to generate the largest percentage of their business. The publishers sold comics to distributors at a high percentage of the cover price—between 60 and 80 percent of the cover price.

However, the comics not sold were returnable. This system made sales nearly impossible to calculate for a few reasons: (a) distributors often dropped a random cross section of comics off at newsstands; (b) similarly, newsstands stands could not preorder titles that were popular with their customers; (c) the randomness of the dropoff meant that buyers were forced to be casual in their interests; (d) customers had no way to know when new comics (or even their favorite comics) would appear. The audience for comics was growing in the 1970s, but newsstands, general stores, and other mom-and-pop businesses that carried comics were disappearing from the American landscape, replaced by supermarkets and chain stores that had little interest in carrying comics. Changes in the

consumption habits of the US called for a new way of doing business—a new kind of distribution. Comic book stores began to pop up in response to growing interest in comics. These specialty stores were a response, perhaps, in part to the pattern of counterculture businesses, like head shops, that had come into vogue during the 1960s as a space for alternative goods not approved by the mainstream. While underground comics found a home in some of these head shops, comics still carrying the seal needed a place where a fan could go to find specific items.

Phil Seuling: Censorship and the Move to Underground Spaces

In 1973, Phil Seuling was arrested for reportedly selling an underground comic to a child. Seuling was a high school teacher whose love of comic books had led him to become the creator and organizer of the New York Comic Art Convention (1973).

Seuling saw that comics were underappreciated and that there was a growing fanbase for them that had no way to collect all of the issues of titles they loved. As a result, Seuling formed conventions as a way to provide back issues of comics to fans. He called his once-a-month gathering the “comic book marketplace” or “Second Sunday,” in which dealers and fans could come “together for a day of buying, selling, and trading” (Seuling,

1973, p. 5). Arrested at the Second Sunday market place, Seuling was handcuffed and led to a patrol car. He (and two young women who worked for him) were booked into holding for 21 hours, during which an announcement of his arrest for “selling indecent material to a minor” (and his home address) was broadcast on radio and TV, as well as printed in the New York Times. In an editorial published by allies at the underground magazine Vamperilla, a publication of some renown for its sexuality and bloody violence, Seuling questions the motivations behind his arrest with not so subtle

accusations that much of the impetus came from the desire of a priest to find publicity in condemning Seuling. Events like this one caused an even further rift between mainstream culture, embodied by institutions of power like the police and the Catholic Church, and an emerging fan culture. Seuling (1973) laments:

Can I trust a system which lets this happen? Can I cooperate ever again

with police who have set traps, and sworn they saw what never happened?

Can I ever know again, as I once did know, that living without hurting

anyone, or destroying anything, was a guarantee that my life would be

peaceful and free from the malice of others? No, on all counts. (p. 5)

A few months afterwards, in 1974 (twenty years after the original CC 1954), Seuling went to Detective Comics, more commonly known as DC, with an offer to buy directly from the publisher and sell the comic books at comic book stores. Once the deal was finalized, Seuling created Seagate Distributors, through which he could request specific titles in specific quantities at a substantial discount to the newsstand percentage. The only hitch was that the comic books that did not sell were non-returnable. This facet of the deal would become one of the most fundamental functions of a comic book shop— making back issues available for purchase. The advent of back issues meant that a fan could collect all comics of a particular series or title. The difficult to find items had a selling platform, and their value was dictated by the market of the comic book shop.

Moreover, the space of the comic book shop was like its own club, with rules of decorum and standards of cultural interaction that could be learned only through participation. Spending time at the comic book shop was a way not only to purchase the items of fandom, the comic books, but also to interact with others who shared the same

interests. Further, with a mainstream still bent on the restriction of comics content, as evidenced by Seuling’s controversial arrest, the fandom could become more insular and isolated. Without concern about what might appear publicly on newsstands, comic publishers, especially independent labels, began to publish and circulate in earnest, as many comic book stores began to feel freer to sell comics that did not bear the seal of the

CCA. It was in these spaces, as well as at conventions, which also came about in the mid-

1970s, that fans were able to share in the gathering and production of knowledge about their fandoms, creating a system of hierarchy based upon fan knowledge. It is through this concept that cultural capital took hold of the fandom. While it may be more simplistic to argue that nerd culture’s hostility is born out of a disgust for what is potentially “inauthentic,” the more complicated answer to this hostility is in the history of the fandom: as with Seuling’s conclusion, “No, on all counts,” there is a definite suspicion of outsiders, and the deep sense of risk to the individual, the fandom, and the industry at large still holds sway, even if the reasons and events behind these feelings have been long forgotten.

Contemporary Nerd Culture and the Moral Panic of Death and Victory

The tenets of nerd culture have placed it in a moral panic. Maturing as a fandom that resists the mainstream because of the impositions placed on the fandom throughout its existence. Now, the mainstream seeks to claim the heritage of comics as popular culture, something that is accessible to all—owned by all; but the resounding fact of the matter is that the mainstream long ago traded its own moral panics for a mere glimpse of what the fandom had to offer. Now that the walls of its cultishness have been punctured by a resilient mainstream that seeks access to its knowledge and the stylistic value of

otherness, nerd culture, the elite of what others desire to culturally plunder, is undermined to its core.

Resistance is a product of rejection and withdrawal from the mainstream to the fringes of society. Revenge of the nerds is not just the title of a movie; it is the quintessential revenge narrative that nerd culture holds dear, even if it is only tongue and cheek: the nerd, the victim of harmful stereotypes, ridicule, and dismissal, who is made to feel inferior and deviant, leaves high school, college, or the video store using her deep knowledge of computers to become successful and wealthy. This is victory over a mainstream that taunted, pushed, and bruised a person who was not understood. This central narrative is echoed by the character John in Daniel Clowes’ cult-classic graphic novel Ghost World (1997/2001): You want to fuck up the system? Go to business school.

That’s what I’m gonna do. Get a job in some big corporation and, like, fuck things up from the inside.” This revenge narrative is Virilio’s (1984/2005) dromocratic superiority at work. Perhaps, though, the plan worked all too well: nerd culture’s access to the mainstream has allowed the mainstream access to nerd culture, like a door that swings both directions.

This simultaneity operates at the heart of nerd culture’s moral panic. For Fredrick deBoer (2014) nerd culture has been so wholly adopted by the mainstream that the culture must accept its triumph. The future of nerd culture is the mainstream, and there is no stopping late-capitalism when it happens upon a new market opportunity. If deBoer

(2014) is accurate, then geek chic has overcome the drive to resist the mainstream by, in fact, transforming nerd culture into the mainstream—ostensibly forcing nerd culture to accept its totalizing victory. Not only has nerd culture annexed the mainstream, but also

has all of the commercial success to ensure longevity, regardless of how recognizable (or not) nerd culture is on the other side. In other words, the resistance to the mainstream that helped define the fandom is now (but not historically) inconsequential because of the commercialization and commodification of all things nerd culture. Certainly, a victory could be assumed, but this victory has a weighty cost. For Oswalt (2010), the rise of geek chic is less about the progression of nerd culture to a “chic” status and more about the out-and-out demise of the culture: with the forfeiture of resistance and marginalization, nerd culture is essentially dead already. In fact, nerd culture began to die the moment that it began to be accepted by a mainstream that had defined the fandom through rejecting it.

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CHAPTER 4

The Disneyfication of Nerd Culture: How Capitalizing on the Religiosity of the Fandom Almost Crashed the Comics Market

Nerd culture is mainstream now. So when you use the word “nerd” derogatorily, that means you’re the one that’s out of the Zeitgeist. —BenWyatt, Parks and Recreation (2011)

In so many ways, fans are the constituency of an industry: both dictating and reflecting the industry that produces their devotions. As discussed previously, nerd culture is defined by its resistance to the mainstream, a mainstream that rejected comic books in the 1950s through media panic. This rejection was similar to that of the media panic that occurred nearly a century before in the mid- to late-1800s, when the bourgeois values attempted to restrict or to repurpose the form of comics. While the media panic of the 1800s sent some comics-like forms underground, such as illustrated penny dreadfuls and pornography, much of comics was reconstituted to reach an audience beyond the

Sunday supplement (or funnies) that rose to prominence in the early-20th century. This media evolution is mostly attributed to M. C. Gaines, who revisited the early forms of comics, bound them, and sold them for a dime each—offering the US its first comic books. By the 1930s, comics were geared less toward a general working-class adult reader, as they had been in the 1800s. Instead, comics of the early-Golden Age were marketed towards children. In the years following WWII, concern arose in the US about how the civility of society would be rebuilt, with a focus on the homeland and the family as the core of those efforts. National fear about juvenile delinquency, especially its causes, turned towards mass media—foremost among the media in question were comic books. Pressure from various interested parties, vice societies, and government officials

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convinced the comics industry to self-censor through the enactment of the Comics Code of 1954 (CC 1954).

While the CC 1954 was an extremely restrictive editorial and advertising code, the results of the Code’s implementation by the Comics Code Authority (CCA) gave rise to a new generation of underground comics in the 1960s and predominantly in the 1970s, when it was still against many city and state ordinances to sell comics without the CCA’s seal of approval to minors. These underground comics, in conjunction with a change in the distribution of comics via direct sales, transformed the mass media form of comics into something that was no longer mainstream.19 This new fringe status enabled those who read comics, many of whom were not children by this time, to form a fandom.

Comic book stores began to support newsletters and other fan communications, deepening the sense of community and insularity, as well as to promote the production of nerd knowledge. So while the CC 1954 was destructive in many ways, it was also the catalyst for the formation of the comics fandom and nerd culture present today. In other words, the very media panic that restricted and attempted to domesticate the comics industry for years through the CCA’s policing of the industry was the same facilitating factor that led to the creation of the fan culture.

The fandom generated in the shadow of these media panics is one that has come to resist mainstream intervention and commodification by modeling (or perhaps by mocking) the institutions study given over to high art culture. Williams (2011) explains that by “investing so heavily—emotionally, culturally, and economically—into an object of mass production, fans challenge what the bourgeois have institutionalized as natural

19 For the foremost work on underground comics (comix), see Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art by Roger Sabin (1996). 102

and universal standards of ‘good taste’” (p. 181). In this way, nerd culture at large and comics culture specifically have crafted kangaroo experts who are actual experts whose knowledge and presence establishes cultural hierarchies and levels of investment. Like those of influential social and cultural knowledge, the experts of nerd culture are both powerful within the fandom and most at risk to lose their positions should they be challenged by the undermining forces of those who care nothing for their disciplinary practices and knowledge—i.e. like the geek chic. In the media panics of the mid-1800s

(Chapter 2) and the mid-1950s US (Chapter 3), the elites were those whose power over culture and social expectation stemmed from economic and educational superiority.

However, because power within nerd culture is found in cultural capital amassed through the gathering and production of nerd knowledge, the most elite are those who have gathered and produced the most—those who are most active within the fandom and who make names for themselves as experts. The mechanism of cultural capital enables the elites of nerd culture to take power positions, but it also establishes them as those with the most to lose as the media and, by extension, culture of comics is appropriated unchecked through the marketing strategies of multinational corporations. In this way, the panic is insular—radiating out from a small fringe community that is losing hold of a culture formed in the wake of mainstream rejection.

However, a media panic is again assailing the comics industry, but in a new and heretofore unseen manner. The panic to which I refer is an offshoot of the media panic coined by Drotner (1992), but with the slight twist of being insular in nature. This insular media panic is one characterized by the same concerns established by Drotner: a new medium or media appropriation is disrupting power relations between those who have

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expertise and those who are emergent users. In the case of comics, however, this particular kind of media panic is about adaptation and appropriation: the controlling elite—experts in nerd culture—lose their grip on the interpretation of media and the decorum of the culture because emergent consumers are not beholden to this disciplining.

Consider the following diagram:

Figure 6. The Impact of Media Panic and Disneyfication on Media Culture.

In this visualization, what was once mass media is subjected to a media panic, thereby pushing consumption towards a narrower market, one that is eventually underground.

This market then forms a culture based upon the specific practices of its consumers— isolation, mainstream resistance, profession of the culture, and community delineation.

However, with the introduction of Disneyfication, a thorough, campaign-like spread of appropriated media, the elites of the fringe community—nerds, in this case—face a media panic originating from the insularity of the fandom. From the standpoint of the nerd, what was once singularly the property of the fandom is now a rhizomatic nightmare of cultural appropriation in which the complexities built into the fandom—such as the

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emphasis on cultural capital and cultish nerd knowledge—are simplified and made accessible to the mainstream. Herein lies the paradox of the fandom—the simultaneity of death and victory—wherein the fringe has infiltrated a mainstream culture that had once rejected it, but by doing so dies because resistance to the mainstream is the first tenet of its cultural consistency.

Inasmuch as this is an insular media panic, it is also a moral panic because nerd culture is a formation that is inextricably linked to the survival of the comics industry. In other words, from the perspective of nerds, mainstream adoption is good for business, but it is bad for nerd culture. The loss of cultishness through the exposure of the culture to the mainstream means that what was once rare, secret, and sacred is now open to simplification and misinterpretation. Further, the movement towards Disneyfication points to another truth about the relationship of the fandom to the industry of its devotion: the industry moves with the currents of the market, not on the demands of the cultish fandom it has inspired. Efforts to preserve the fandom and its culture take various forms—several are possessive, radical, and even harmful. Others are meant to welcome newcomers and to see the culture go out into the light of day. For these reasons, the rise of geek chic is complicated and ripe with contradictions. The purpose of this chapter is to unravel some of this complexity to better understand it, without asserting a moral or cultural high ground. As it has been stated several times in this manuscript, the identities afforded to the individual during this moment of advanced global capital are those that are cast within habits of consumption. Therefore, this project seeks to understand how these two cultural formations both based on consumption—nerd culture and geek chic—

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might occupy the same space (the comic con) and simultaneously alter the culture of the fandom.

It’s a Small World Afterall?: The Disneyfication of the Comics Industry

Disneyfication in terms of the comics industry is both theoretical and literal. For

Marvel Comics, which was purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 2009,

Disneyfication is not only an economic-cultural reality, but also a marketing strategy.

Walt Disney Company represents one of the most recognizable pantheon of characters in the world. Disney is media entertainment—with a smile. The representational nature of commodified narratives enables Disney’s many manifestations to be what McCracken

(1988) calls “bridges” to displaced meaning. Life within advanced globalized capitalism is filled with disappointments, and these disappointments, which are the emotional and social costs of capitalism, often hint at the fallibility of the system to make good on its promise of happiness through economic advancement. If the system has brought on individual alienation, then the means of concealing the disillusionment of guaranteed

“bootstraps” dreams is to continuously seek the ideal by reasoning that a person is close, but not close enough. The ideal is always just out of arm's reach at best; however, through a complex swapping of the void at the heart of the ideal and a symbolic commodity, the ideal seems temporarily attained or at least closer. This notion of working toward an ideal through continuous consumption is what supplants meaning with value in consumerist societies, like the US, which thrive on the production of commodities—explaining how a consumerist society can continue to consume even after its needs are met because these commodities are only bridges, not actualities.

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In the case of nerd culture, comics are a good—an object to buy or sell. However, as cultural value is placed upon these comics, they take on a specific kind of commodification in which their value is determined not only by the owner, but also by others who share the same set of values—forming a culture through culturally assigned value. This is the system of capital made small and based upon the ever-changing socio- emotional conditions and financial realities of its cultural members. This mechanism of capitalism—its agility—impacts the flow of cultural capital in nerd culture because inasmuch as nerds determine what is valuable through cultural filters, outside forces have the ability to manipulate cultural capital as well. In formations like nerd culture, the gathering and production of knowledge is only made possible through the disbursement of culturally relevant industry products. Herein lies one of the reasons why nerd culture both welcomes and rejects multinational corporations, like the Walt Disney Company: these companies often “spread the gospel” of fringe cultures with their economic might, but they also represent mainstream values and their mechanisms of mass appropriation easily undermine the cultural values held by the same fringe cultures. In other words, multinational corporations use the agile adaptability of capitalism to determine what constitutes cultural capital through controlling products and by appropriating culture into so many diversified forms that their products have near-universal appeal. Disneyfication is more than just the appropriation of a narrow market formation—like nerd culture— for the purposes of reaching a larger potential market. Instead, Disneyfication is the systematic mechanism by which MNCs, globalized corporations with diversified business interests, are able to capitalize on existing media by repurposing, revising, and redistributing it. The methods of Disneyfication are many, and not all of them pertain

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directly to Walt Disney Company. However, in the case of comics, many of their tactics and effects are extensions of the Walt Disney Company’s strategy of media replication, thematic merchandising, spectacle, and diversification of access through licensing.

Disneyfication has been described as both the rapid appropriation of media culture and its distribution throughout a vast global network of diversified business holdings, including

Lucasfilm Ltd.; Marvel Entertainment; the Disney-ABC Television Group (A&E

Networks and ABC broadcasting); ESPN Incorporated; and Disney parks and resorts in multiple US locations, Paris, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

While nerd culture has long been resistant to mainstream adoption, fearing both the simultaneous victory and death of the culture, it could have no greater fear than

Disneyfication because Disney is appropriation merchandized into thousands of collectible toys, furnishings, and animated spinoffs. At the core of Disneyfication is the conformity of its processes through an expectation of quality and aesthetic:

...that shameless process by which everything the [Disney Studio]

touched, no matter how unique the vision of the original from which the

Studio worked, was reduced to the limited terms Disney and his people

could understand. Magic, mystery, individuality...were consistently

destroyed when a literary work passed through this machine that had been

taught there was only one correct way to draw. (Schickel, 1986, p. 225)

Through Schickel’s (1986) critique of the Disney Studio’s animated films, there is much insight to be gained about the Disneyfication. This “machine,” as Schickel refers to it, stripped the magic from the works that it appropriates and adapts in its own versions.

Walz (1998) summarizes the expert efficiency of Disneyfication by stating that the term

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denotes Disney’s “bowdlerization of literature, myth, and/or history in a simplified, sentimentalized, programmatic way” (p. 51). The simplification of the characters and narratives in order to find mass appeal is stunningly straightforward, yet Walt Disney

Company’s ability to do so over and over again with fairy tales, novels, and now comics is unprecedented and unmatched. Nerds who fear that the rare, sacred, and cultish elements of their fandom will be simplified are right to fear the machine of

Disneyfication, as it scoops up any opportunity to expose consumers to hybrid consumption through paratextual interfaces that have little, if nothing, to do with the original source material.

Nerd culture’s fears, then, stem from the adaptation of the narratives, characters, and art upon which it has based its cultural values, and there is no guarantee that the Walt

Disney Company will respect the elements that, through the medium of comics, have fostered a media-based culture. The concern of fans is twofold: (a) Walt Disney

Company’s rapid acquisition of cultish property in companies like Pixar, Marvel, and

Star Wars, and (b) the undeniable eventuality that these established cultural fixtures will be simplified and appropriated into various media paratexts to reach new consumers who have little-to-no base knowledge of the original source texts. For example, an early 2017 controversy erupted within the fandom as Marvel revealed that beloved villain Magneto, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, is poised to join forces with Hydra, a former Nazi organization whose tactics were too extreme even for Hitler (Abad-Santos, 2017; Busch,

2017; Paur, 2017). In reaction to fan outrage about the evolving story, Tom Brevoort,

Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of Publishing at Marvel told Marston (2016),

“Not every story is for every reader.” The reasoning behind such concern comes from

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Magneto’s 55-year history as a symbolic representation of Malcolm X’s philosophy of black nationalism and Pan-Africanism. For nerds, changes like these seem like blatant misrepresentations (Magneto would work with Nazis) or over simplifications (Magneto is a villain who is evil without regard for the context) of the legacy of such pillars in

Marvel’s mythology. Further, geek consumers may be only inclined to seek out what is chic—to consume, as they do, in rapid succession—ever seeking the bridge that never quite fulfills their need to reach for the ideal, without regard for “accuracy” or

“authenticity.” Nerd culture’s hostility toward geek chic has little to do with geeks themselves and so much to do with the Disneyfication of its culture. As cultishness slips away, so does the culture itself, as well as any fleeting moment in which the magic, mystery, and individuality of nerd culture might have existed.

Retaining (Cult)ural Memory

The tactics of Disneyfication are not new to the world of comic books, as the comics industry has always had a precarious relationship with fans—both playing toward their demands and shrugging them off when greater profits might be obtainable. While

Marvel Comics changed hands a number of times in the 1970s and 1980s, the model of keeping readers plugged into the narratives never changed. However, in 1989, Ronald O.

Perelman purchased Marvel and began systematically changing the readers’ market into a collectors’ and speculators’ market, wherein Perelman fabricated the inflation of Marvel products, comics especially, leaving comic book shop owners, collectors, fans, and retailers holding thousands of comics that were literally more worthless than the paper upon which they were printed. Perelman and Marvel nearly brought the comics world to its knees in the mid-1990s, and it was through Perelman’s attempts to capitalize on the

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long-existing history of Marvel characters that such market devastation was accomplished. While many fans stopped collecting directly before or directly after the mid-1990s as a result of Perelman’s business tactics, the coveted narratives still existed, and many older readers turned to more adult themed comics that were self-emancipated from the restrictions of the CC 1954. It is little wonder, then, that graphic novels rose to popularity during the late 1990s and early 2000s, both as a means of legitimizing comics as literature and as a way to enter the world of comics fandom with little cultural or financial buy-in.

The Comic Book Store: The Den of Deviance and Fandom

The change in distribution of comics in the 1970s allowed for the creation of a space for comics readers. This space was private in many respects, as the only people who entered a comic book shop did so with the express purpose of purchasing comics.

The comic book shop is both a specialty store and a space to practice the performance of fandom through presence and consumption. The importance of the comic book shop cannot be overly emphasized because the comic book shop radically changed the way that readers consumed comics—enabling readers to form a culture through the performance of devotion. It is through the comic book shop that readers became fans.

While the formation of a fandom would likely have occurred without the advent of the comic book shop, the establishment of the direct sales market enabled readers to change their level of interaction with comics media. Through direct sales, fans would never miss an issue of their favorite comics titles because fans could pre-order through the shop. The direct distribution market also enabled shops to receive their orders on a regular schedule

(every Wednesday); along with this predictability of distribution, fans could also enjoy

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receiving their comics at shops at least one full week before they appeared elsewhere because local distributors could not match the efficiency of the two big national distributors—Diamond Comic Distributors and Capital City Distributing. Further, shops encouraged cultishness within the fandom by stocking long-boxes with back issues; for the first time ever, fans could potentially collect every issue of a series. With this new ability, a fan could have access to an entire narrative from the beginning to the end, without entering into the storyline en medias res.

Figure 7. Cover of The Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom, No. 1. This publication would become one of the most significant and well-circulated adzines within the fandom.

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The Adzine: Fan Communications and Community Building

Changes like these lead to a comics collecting culture that had not previously existed—at least not as widely. With these changes came the formation of the fandom through fan-created communications in the form of review publications, write-in columns, fan picks, etc. found in fanzines that began to appear in the 1960s and 1970s.

Some of these publications took the form of what are often referred to in the fandom as

“adzines”; often self-published (at least in their infancy), adzines were an important mashup of fanzine content and advertisements for upcoming comics, conventions, toys, merchandise, and more. In the 1980s and 1990s, these fanzines often featured price guides and grading systems that placed exchange values on comics and paratexts of the current and previous ages. One of the most notable fanzines is The Buyer’s Guide for

Comics Fandom (TBG) (1971-1983), an adzine that according to Ron Frantz (2000), a one-time columnist for TBG, was started by Alan Light in his parents’ basement. In 1983,

TBG was purchased by Krause Publications, most known for their enthusiast magazines and books related to coin collecting, and became the highly influential Comics Buyer’s

Guide (CBG) (1983-2013). In his article about the final issue of CBG, Miller (2013) recalls,

As a reader in high school, CBG gave me a sense of community; as an

editor, it gave me a chance to talk comics with thousands of people at

once, and to advance some of my historical interests. The magazine

changed my life, and I know that it touched others as well.

Publications like CBG provided fans with a much needed community of fellows.

Fanzines like Rocket’s Blast Comicollector (RBC) (1963-1983) were pivotal in providing

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a space wherein fans could buy, sell, and trade comics with others across the country, while also reading articles and interviews with creators, writers, and artists who had essentially gone underground since the CC 1954. RBC was also important because it provided a space for fans and aspiring artists to publish their comics artwork. These publications formed the basis for the fandom and thrived as direct sales shaped the landscape of collecting, reading, enjoying, and participating in comics.

“What’s a Rerun?”: The Influence of Syndication on Pop Consumption

Syndication changed the relationship between viewers and popular television; the simple act of re-viewing allowed viewers to become fans who could connect with other fans. In Chapter 1, I argued that the fragmentation of viewership through the diversification of television and other media allowed for the rise of everyday fandoms. In like kind, the role of syndication—the very idea of preserving and reexperiencing popular culture—opened up the way that consumers committed to their interests. Syndication facilitated the potential for the gathering and production of fan knowledge that could be shared with others on a scale much larger than previous decades, and this fan knowledge, in turn, manufactured hierarchies of investment and expertise about popular culture fandoms.

Syndication did not exist in the US before 1971. Before that time, episodes aired once because, at the time, television programming executives assumed that audiences had no desire to view an episode more than once. Before the 1970s, the Big Three television networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC controlled first-run production of television programming; the Big Three rented studio space from Hollywood movie studios, like

Universal and Paramount and made their money in advertising revenue that paid for

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studio rental twice over (Gomery, 2008). However, in 1971, Lew Wasserman of the

Music Corporation of America, a hodgepodge of entertainment media representation, approached President Richard Nixon about adopting new laws that would make it easier for the Hollywood studios to retain gain control of episodes shot in their studios by cashing in on programming revenues by running the episodes again networks aired them once. In this way, the studios stood to gain considerably because production costs were already paid and all of the revenues from advertising was theirs to keep, as production belonged to the networks. President Nixon, who had already felt misrepresented in the news on the Big Three networks, wholeheartedly supported Wasserman’s idea in what became the financial interest-syndication rules—the fin-syn rules. With these rules in place, networks had no claim to programming beyond the first airing of an episode and were forced to hand over the rights to the studios. Additionally, fin-syn rules gave studios the rights to programming prior to the 1971 implementation, meaning that decades of backlogged television gold in storage was theirs for the taking. The revival of old shows that had gone off the air during the days of black and white television were back in people’s homes, sealing their status as more than disposable culture.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, audiences became accustomed to syndicated television. Shows like The Adventures of Superman, Mr. Ed, and I Love Lucy were favorites. Shows with moderate success that accumulated cultish followings, like Star

Trek: The Original Series (TOS) (1966-1969), inspired other kinds of media that would follow, including a number of other series based upon the universe created by the original series, including books, movies, other television series, comics, toys, and more. While

TOS was certainly not the first cultural happening to be branded, the merchandising of

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the franchise helps explain the interest of the popular culture industry that was able to cash in on a mildly charting television program that ran for only three years by licensing it for decades. According to Stitt (2012), syndication of TOS began in off-network runs where it was eventually shown in 48 countries. Syndication of television promoted a mass media culture of re-viewing. As the culture of syndication became instantiated into

American popular culture, the idea of viewing “classics” became all the more important to the US pop cultural identity and to the formation of popular culture cultishness.

Through syndication, a canon grew, shaping the landscape of media consumption—no doubt leading to the kind of syndicated viewing that has become binge-watching through

Netflix and Hulu.

The Formation of a Fandom: The Cultivation of Cultishness

Like television programming, the assumption before direct sales was that comics were like any other cheap, monthly publication—disposable. During the great comic book scare of the 1950s, parents, teachers, and other authority figures tossed many comics in the trash; others were burned in public displays meant to demonstrate dissatisfaction with the way the government was handling the crisis and, likely, to incite other like-minded parties to join the crusade against the corrupting powers of comics. At any rate, the result was the same, comics from the 1930s-1960s, what is considered to be the Golden Age (1938-1950) and much of the Silver Age (1950-1970) became increasingly hard to come by. Comics were never printed with the idea of preservation or collectability foremost. While there were likely a number of artists who hoped that their work would live on after an initial read, the industry assumed that once a comic book was read, its usefulness as entertainment had been fulfilled. However, with the change in

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distribution and the creation of comic book shops, the value of surviving comics became greater because the issues of a particular series could be collected. Issues that were in short supply became desirable for their rarity, and shop owners connected across the country (and in other countries) to find rare issues. This change is significant because in addition to being able to complete a collection as a fan, shop owners could charge fans more than the cover price, making particularly desirable issues into collectables.

The Crossover: A Never Ending Story

Syndication ushered in a new kind of media consumption whereby characters could have extended storylines instead of just episodic adventures, like the spinoffs and movies associated with Star Trek. Similarly, the comics industry adopted this idea, linking story arcs, wherein readers were able to read along as one adventure unfolded over several issues. In fact, beginning in the 1990s, it was a policy at Marvel Comics that no story arc should ever end completely, thereby altering the model of storytelling that had once made comics so easy to pick up, read, and discard. In addition to collectability, it was essential for readers to have each issue of the arc to understand how the narrative had progressed. Within the last decade or so, it has become another model of the industry, mostly used by Marvel, but also to some extent DC, that story arcs are not contained solely within one comic book title. This “crossover” narrative storytelling creates a situation in which it is impossible for the reader to experience the entire narrative without buying all of the titles. While these methods create a stronger sense of a “universe” in which all characters from a particular publication label might interact with each other, the result is somewhat more surreptitious: in order to read the entire narrative, a person who usually collects two or three titles a month may have to expand to eight or nine. In other

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words, crossovers force readers into more buying—the more the buy-in through purchases like these, the more the fan is connected, making it more difficult to return to collecting only two or three titles.

*See the More Fun Comics #73 (November 1941) for the Full Story!

In a similar vein, publishers who had been in business for decades, surviving— even thrived—after the panic of the 1950s, turned to superhero comics, primarily Marvel and DC, began to include notes in their comics, a tactic that became increasingly popular in the 1980s and 1990s. These notes would usually be indicated with an asterisk that referenced a corresponding note at the bottom of the page. These notes would contain correlations between the action or dialogue on the page itself and a previous issue. Some of these notes would indicate events occurring just a few issues previous to the one being read or to events in another title that involved the character; however, in other instances, these notes would reference events occurring in issues decades before. Because of the relative scarcity of these issues, they were expensive to purchase, with comics from the

1950s fetching prices in the hundreds of dollars, even for highly damaged copies. In this way, the comics industry reinforced in every way that comics were a cultish undertaking with a high buy-in of financial dedication. Decades of back issues, extensive crossover events, and notes that insisted upon historical knowledge of characters and narratives, all contributed to the insular nature of comics fandom and made gaining deep knowledge of these narratives a kind of expertise in its own right. Because of the specificity, dedication of time, and overall devotion needed to gain this expertise, it is little wonder that fans often see themselves as outsiders.

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The New Comics: Giving the Middle Finger to the CCA

The height of the comic book shop occurred during the 1980s and early-1990s. It was during this time that new labels began to form that rejected the authority of the CCA outright in order to usher in a new era of comics that were not tied to the Code, even though it had become steadily more lax over the decades. Publishers like Image, Top

Cow, and Kitchen Sink were created by artists themselves and focused on what were deemed “New Comics.” McCue and Bloom (1993) describe this as an “internal pressure” in which the industry bifurcated “into both children’s publishing and adult publishing” and without a veil of innocence decided to confront “adult themes of violence, sexuality and obsession” (p. ix). Thought of as rebels, they pushed the envelope of what comics could be and do.20 It was in this moment of rebelliousness that artists began to reject the model of one writer, one artist, and one colorist—rebuffing the notion that one person could not be both writer and artist. Some of the more famous graphic novels were the result of artists who decided to do more than just write or draw. More importantly, these pioneers were unafraid to break the superhero mold, challenging the content of comics and pushing for real-world violence, sexuality, drug use, and similarly restricted content.

As the form of the graphic novel evolved from limited series into bound, book-length narratives, the audience began to change as well. The amount of knowledge needed to pick up a self-contained graphic novel, like Maus (1980), was far less than a copy of the

Fantastic Four #221 (1980), in which the reader had already missed nearly two decades of narrative. Additionally, the adult themes of these works and their rebellious qualities

20 For more on the creators behind the New Comics, see Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bissette’s (1993) Comic Book Rebels, which is comprised of interviews with 22 creators, including Alan Moore, Scott McCloud, Denis Kitchen, Frank Miller, Todd McFarlane, and Neil Gaiman. 119

endeared themselves to readers for their willingness to push the potentialities of comics beyond established regulations. Many of these New Comics authors began as near- underground creators, but with their increased popularity and accessibility they began to earn acclaim, as critics and academics began to see the potential of the comics form to be literature.

How Collecting almost Killed the Culture

Fans are terribly complicated. Each fan is his or her own person, yet there are enough similarities to constitute a fandom—something altogether different than a casual reader. Yet what are the differences between a reader, a collector, and a fan? Gabilliet

(2010/2005) advises that scholars who study comics should not confuse the difference between collectors and fans: “Collecting is only one activity, certainly a widespread one, among the numerous behaviors of the fan. Practically all fans are collectors, but the opposite is not necessarily true. Personal forms of investment that exceed simple accumulation can be observed among fans” (p. 256). For the fan, there is a personal connection with the objects she collects, and this connection helps to shape her identity— both in her own perception and in that of the fan community. These coterminous identity formations are in direct relation to the objects she collects—in how they make her feel and how they change her status in the larger community.

There is a differentiation to make here between collecting and being a fan.

Perhaps part of this difference is in the reason behind the collecting and what one hopes to accomplish. Because the community delineates the fan, the accumulation of knowledge proper and objects that exemplify knowledge likely changes the fan’s status within the community. Further, this status is based upon cultural capital, which is the

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byproduct of knowledge accumulation, so the system works to both ensure insularity and to distribute personal and community values. Therefore, without creating an inaccurate and problematic dichotomy, we can visualize a fan’s position relative to the community like a plotted point on a Cartesian coordinate system. Because of the dynamic nature of knowledge and cultural capital depending upon the context (what Bourdieu might call the

“field”), the plot for Fan A should be considered a soft plot only because of the ebb and flow of both knowledge and cultural capital.

Figure 8. A Visual Representation of the Field, According to Bourdieu.

While the above helps explain the function of collecting in terms of establishing both knowledge and cultural capital, through the delineation of the community, it does not explain the more personal nature of collecting. Chapter 1 discusses the near- religiosity of the fandom in order to provide an explanation as to why nerds see the rise of geek chic culture as “inauthentic,” perhaps because of geek chic’s immunity to the

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delineating principles of the fandom. For fans, their collections of both objects and knowledge do more than establish their status in the fandom because in order for cultishness to prevail on an individual basis, then there must be a devotional element that self-started. In this way, there must be a deep connection to the collection. Walker (2012) explains that to a collector-fan “prized objects convey a sense of the magical; they seem to possess mana, a life-force of their own” (p. 20). Through the cultish lense of the collector-fan who operates both in reference to personal taste and community delineation, this mana is a kind of aura that can be transferred to the owner, even though it is the owner and the community that assigns it. Further, the accumulation of the collection adds to the owner's personal connection because of the way that the individual’s life is intertwined with the act of collecting: a person finds a long-sought-after comic to complete her collection in a dusty book store in Vancouver while on a business trip. The memory of obtaining that object in that exact place knits the object’s aura with the owner’s experiences, increasing its value to the holder—and greatly informing her identity (and, potentially, her status in the community as well).

Oddly enough, mana value can cause what seems to be antithetical behaviors in fans, such as preserving an action figure in its box or bagging and boarding a comic without even reading it. In fact, in the world of comics, it is not unheard of to buy two copies of the same comic—one to read and one to preserve. Yet the impulse to preserve one’s collection was not always a tenet of the fandom. It is a learned behavior as a result of the changing conditions of pop culture consumption and the fandom’s relationship to the industry through the instantiation of “collectibility” that, despite its cultish ways, took a media-based cultural formation and turned it into a consuming demographic afraid to

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lose its cultural heritage and its economic investments in the material culture of the fandom. Much of nerd fandom is suspicious of collectors motivated purely by collecting, multinational retailers, or outside business elements that do not share in their piety. While the comics industry is both a producer of and supporter of the fandom, there has been a general mistrust of multinational corporations that see the arbor of nerd culture as a commodity to be leveraged. While nerd culture resists the mainstream, it also depends upon the value markets created by popular culture industries in order to remain vibrant.

Companies like Marvel and DC, then, become both a focal point of simultaneous love and spite.

Boom!: How The 1990s Speculator’s Market Almost Cost

the Industry Everything

While DC is a veteran of the comics industry, the success or failure of the entire industry rests on the whether Marvel Comics lives or dies. While that fact is evident in the current state of an emergent geek chic culture, it was even more apparent in the late

1990s, when Marvel was owned and operated by Ronald O. Perelman between 1989 and

1997. In 1976, Marvel had been brought back from falling sales by a new editor named

Jim Shooter, who turned Marvel around during his tenure. The quality of the comics being produced became the focus, and sales greatly improved, giving Marvel 70 percent of the market share with some artists and writers commanding half-million dollar yearly salaries. According to Shooter, the president of Marvel, James Galton, could not see that

Marvel “could be bigger than Disney, that comics could be hugely successful” (cited in

Raviv, 2002, p. 34). Instead, under Galton, Marvel had nearly diversified itself into extinction by investing in children’s books, animation projects, and anything that was not

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its comics division. With Shooter as editor, Stan Lee came out of semi-retirement and was willing to head up the West Coast branch of Marvel. However, Galton was not interestested in keeping Marvel as part of his holdings and sold out as soon as the company was turning major profits. Marvel’s success under Shooter did not last, however, as the new owners, New World Entertainment (NWE), a Hollywood production company, soon ready to dump Marvel after production of a few made-for-TV movies based upon Marvel’s pantheon of heroes had flopped. Its next owner, Perelman was determined to utilize the company’s assets and his business sense to turn a mighty profit, and it was Perelman’s venture that nearly cost the comics industry everything.

Marvel under Perelman: How an Industry Model Nearly Crashed a Market

In January 1989, there were about a dozen companies bidding on Marvel, but none could compete with Perelman, who simply overbid all the others at $82.5 million.

Perelman saw great, untapped potential in Marvel, equating its characters to a “mini-

Disney”—“at Marvel we are now in the business of creation and marketing of characters”

(as cited in Raviv, 2002, p. 12). As a business man, Perelman saw potential in Marvel as a short-term investment, and with his knowledge of Wall Street junk bonds, Perelman went to work establishing a speculators’ market within the comics industry.

The invention of the variant cover. On June 19, 1990, the comics industry changed forever with the publication of a comic that few people outside the fandom would recognize. Under Shooter, artists and writers were able to put their talents to work in the truest sense, crafting narratives and artwork that would increase the relatability, depth, and quality of comics. In the late 1980s, a young artist named Todd MacFarlane was assigned to The Amazing Spider-Man, and readers immediately noticed his dark, noir

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style and demanded more.21 A few months into Perelman’s tenure, MacFarlane was tasked with relaunching Spider-Man #1, in which he insisted on not only writing the comic, but also drawing and inking it. The comic sold 2.85 million copies. While this achievement in the industry was significant, the true change to the industry came with the way that the issue was released. Not only did Spider-Man #1 come in a sealed plastic bag, but also was sold in a number of different covers. A reader could buy a regular copy for

$1 with a larger, baseball-sized sticker on the front that read “Issue #1 Collector’s Item”; but for $2, a reader could buy the same exact cover with a metallic, reflective overlay

(known as a “Silver Edition”). The sales alone told Perelman that he had something big: readers wanted to be collectors because the value of rare comics from the Golden and early-Silver Ages had shown that the cover price did not indicate the value to a fan.

Collectors began to buy up more than one copy of a given issue—anything that seemed as though it might hold value in 20 to 30 years. Additionally, the changes brought on by

Shooter had changed the way that readers engaged with comics, buying them as an investment in the characters as well as a speculative investment in the issue itself.

The birth of the speculator’s market. Perelman’s investment was less tangible, as he put in $10 million from one of his companies and borrowed the other $70 million from investment banks, with the largest sum coming from Chase Manhattan Bank. Only a few months into owning Marvel, Perelman went public with the company and Marvel’s worth went from an investment of little over $80 million to $3.3 billion. Perelman personally bought up 60 percent of the stock, making it appear to be a hotter deal than it

21 Todd MacFarlane would eventually leave Marvel to start his own publishing company under the name of Image Comics, which is still the most successful, free-standing publishing label in which artists own the rights to their creative and intellectual property. MacFarlane is best known as the creator of Spawn. 125

actually was. With money from investors and other companies and in addition to owning a piece of the surging success of Marvel, Perelman bought up other interests rapidly. He made deals with toy companies like Ike Perlmutter’s Toy Biz, waving Marvel’s royalty fees so that Perlmutter could make more and would spread Marvel mania uninhibited.

With the empty investment, Perelman could pull out any time he wanted, regardless of the impact on the industry as a whole. Within the same decade, the speculator boom in comics was growing out of hand. The comics of the late-1980s and early-1990s were financially linked to the Gold and Silver Ages; “collector’s editions” and variant covers seemed to be an investment in the future of comics. Many thought that buying into comics as collectables would one day yield great financial rewards. In her discussion of antiques, Walker (2012) describes a similar compulsion: in addition to the qualities of the objects themselves, “the dynamics of collecting, especially collecting as industry and [as a] get-rich-quick scheme, as fuel the popcult craze” for more objects and more conventions. As the speculator’s market rose to peak fervor, readers and retailers were investing more in comics than could ever be retrieved. Get-rich-quick schemes left millions of buyers with stacks of worthless, well-curated comics, wrapped in plastic to protect them for a generation that would not necessarily be interested.

The comic book store bubble. The situation was further compounded by the sudden boom in comic book stores, which seemed to be fueled by a run on comics that was not actually occurring. After the implementation of the CC 1954, comic book stores opened as a way to give safe haven to readers and collectors. In the 1970s, the counterculture support of these stores was reasonable, but not overwhelming. The market began to break apart as newsstands and chain stores no longer carried comics in the ways

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they had in previous decades. Comic book shop owners and industry leaders worked together with distribution companies to lower the bar for entry into selling comics.

Rozanski (2002a), owner and operator of Mile High Comics, one of the most influential and long-standing comic book shops in the US, recalls that the requirements to become a comic book dealer were “so low that an initial order check for $300 could set you up with either [Diamond or Capital City] as a ‘bona fide’ account in good standing.” In 1979, the industry needed this kind of push or comics were going to disappear forever; by 1990, the

800 or so active comic book shops across the US had become 10,000. According to

Rozanski (2002a), these new shop owners had deep knowledge of the fandom, but were inexperienced and grossly undercapitalized. Distributors convinced these new shop owners to overbuy to fill a need that was not there. As the bubble popped in the late

1990s, many owners were left with a surplus of comics published between 1989 and

1999, most of which were worth only pennies—with decades to go before they would even sell for their original cover price.

Why did shop owners buy too many comics? The greatest part of the blame lies with Perelman’s strategy for expanding Marvel’s business and the speculative market encouraged by Diamond Comic Distributors and Capital City Distributing. By the mid-

1990s, these were the only two distributors left in the US, having pushed out the smaller, local competitors; then, in 1996, Capital City was bought by Diamond, leaving Diamond as the only remaining distributor of comics in the English-speaking world and a highly influential player on the international market even today. Before NWE, in 1985, under

Shooter, there were only 40 comic books at 65 cents each available to most consumers, meaning that a reader could actually buy the entire Marvel line each month for $26.00

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(about $59 in 2017). During its three year ownership of Marvel, between 1986 and 1989,

NWE raised the price of comics from 65 cents to $1, which brought some short-term profits, but forced some readers to cut back on the number of comics they read each month. However, in 1988, NWE had expanded the line to 50 comics a month at $1 each, nearly doubling the monthly buy-in to collect the entire Marvel line. When Perelman acquired Marvel in 1989, his goal was to expand the business, and he began doing so by expanding the line (number of titles published every month), increasing the cost of comics by a few cents at a time, and releasing several “special” comics that featured variant covers of monthly regulars. While the profits were initially good, especially for comics with variant covers, like MacFarlane’s Spider-Man #1, the higher costs of collecting forced more and more fans to cut back on their purchases, with some leaving the fandom altogether. According to Rozanski (2002b),

[f]ans who had been purchasing every Marvel title were frustrated that

they could no longer afford to purchase the whole line, and were even

more frustrated that they didn’t have the time to read them all. Rather than

cut back to what they could afford, this substantial portion of the comics

collecting community simply chose to quit collecting altogether.

By early 1993, the minimum cover price for a Marvel comic was $1.25, with several variants being offered throughout the line. The number of titles offered in the Marvel line had doubled to 100 as well. If a person collected the entire Marvel line each month, including variants, then the buy-in was easily around $150 a month. This is when the comics market began to break apart. The number of individual customers who walked through the doors of shops were fewer and fewer, and they purchased fewer comics. The

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direct sales market was established in such a way that comics that did not sell could not be returned, and many shops had to “eat” the losses of thousands of unpurchased comics.

This turn affected newly opened stores the most, as they had little in the way of back issues before the mid-1980s. Those attempting to get out of the comics business could not even sell their comics backstock to competing shops for a fraction of the cost because even the shops that did not close immediately had stock problems of their own.

The market collapse. There are no records that accurately capture the fallout of

Marvel’s bankruptcy on December 27, 1996. Perelman bought Marvel in 1989 for $82.5 million, but now owed Marvel’s creditors over $700 million. According to Raviv (2002),

Perelman convinced nothing short of a legion of investors to purchase $900 million in zero-coupon bonds, with the collateral backing being his 60 percent stock market interest in Marvel. Filtering the loss through his many company holdings, the shortfall hurt

Perelman very little. In fact, Raviv’s (2002) research suggests that Perelman may have even made out with around $300 million. The industry itself was not so fortunate. Some

5,000 comic book shops that had opened just a few years before closed their doors for good. Others, like Mile High Comics, saw their life’s work nearly lost. Startup publishers who were challenging the rule of Marvel and DC, like Image, were hurt the most. Most publishers saw a 70 percent drop in their sales during this time (Rozanski, 2002b).

Fans were deeply disillusioned with the near-crash of the market. Many of them felt betrayed by the industry and wounded by the financial and cultish devotions they had placed in speculative collecting. It has been claimed by several long-time members of the comics fandom that Perelman did more damage to the comics industry during his less- than-a-decade reign than Fredric Wertham ever could have. In the words of Rozanski

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(2002b), “at least [Wertham’s] efforts were initiated because of heart-felt convictions that comics were causing harm to children. Perelman simply wanted to make a buck, and seemingly cared not in the least if there was a world of comics left when he was through.”

A Whole New World: The Success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe

It would be nearly a decade before Marvel began to pull itself out of bankruptcy and chart a new course for the company and, with it, the entire comics industry. After the bankruptcy, the Marvel Entertainment Group merged with Toy Biz and reorganized under the title of Marvel Enterprises, which attempted to focus efforts on non-comics media. While it was Perelman who nearly brought the industry to its knees in the mid-

1990s by undercutting the market, his long-term strategy proved to be highly successful, enough so that within thirteen years, Marvel Enterprises would be poised to make a tremendous comeback and revolutionize nerd industries as a whole. The idea—a cinematic universe—was one borrowed from the comics industry itself, where crossover and label-wide events would connect the narratives of major and minor characters alike, making it nearly impossible to watch only one, pulling in new consumers and potential profits.

The Rocky Success of Comics Movies before the MCU

While there had been a number of one-off comic book movies, television shows, video games, and cartoons, the narratives, for the most part, have been only loosely associated. As mature readers began to gravitate toward the trend of more gritty reading materials found in the pages of graphic novels, the Big Two—Marvel and DC—began to appropriate their comics narratives to attract a new generation of readers. Fox

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Broadcasting commissioned Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995, 85 episodes), a new kind of animated series based upon the gothic and film noir stylings of director Tim

Burton’s successful live-action film adaptations of Batman titled Batman (1989) and

Batman Returns (1992).22 Fox also released an influential series, based on the characters from the Marvel universe, titled X-Men (1992-1997, 76 episodes). While non-continuous,

X-Men greatly increased sales for the X-related titles at comic book stores, and Marvel even released two limited series containing the same exact content as the animations— one series as comic books and one series as a translation of a manga version originally published for overseas readers. Arguably, these two animated series encouraged both

Marvel and DC to try their luck at the box office once again, but with far less success.

Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997) returned the live-action portrayal of the Batman character to the campy, vividly colored roots of the original 1966 series. Fans nearly unanimously rejected the films, especially the latter, accusing Schumacher of taking the rejuvenated characters into a nosedive of mainstream humiliation. In the minds of many critics and fans alike, the same could be said for the X-

Men series of live-action movies, although they were released beginning in 2000; of the ten movies within the franchise, the first four failed to impress the general public or fans.

Yet for all of the woes, the appropriation of comics characters, superheroes, storylines, and universes in books, television shows, movies, animation, video games, and other media has been the saving grace of Marvel—and the entire comics industry.

22 The movie adaptations by Tim Burton were somewhat controversial, as Burton brought his trademark dark style to the screen. The only Batman movie previous to Burton’s was the 1966 release of Batman: The Movie from director Leslie H. Martinson and starring Adam West, who portrayed the character throughout its 1966-1968 run. 131

At Least There Are No Bat-nipples: How the MCU’s Serious Treatment of

Superheroes Became a Multimillion-dollar Success

Around 2005, Marvel began an ambitious undertaking—to build a Marvel

Cinematic Universe (MCU)—something that had never been attempted before in film

(see Appendix E for a list of films). While there were films that had been released as sequels to one another, there had never been a planned undertaking like this in cinematic history. In order to break with the long histories of the characters within the Marvel comics universe, the company decided to create another, alternative dimension that it calls Earth-199999. Within the comics universe at Marvel, there are approximately four alternative universes in which characters from our reality (Earth-616) sometimes interact.

By constructing an alternative universe in which the events of the MCU take place, creators are able to bring existing characters to the big screen through narratives that pay homage to their origin stories and some major events plots. In this way, Marvel can make alterations and supply deviations from the original narratives. For example, in the comics, the character Nick Fury, the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., first appears in 1963 as a white, ex- soldier who fought in WWII with an elite group of special operatives called the Howling

Commandos. However, within the MCU, Marvel has broken with the character’s race by giving the role to Samuel L. Jackson. According to a story told by Jackson in several interviews about the role, he had walked into a comic book store nearly five years before his cinematic debut as Nick Fury only to see his likeness on the cover of a comic book.

Upon contacting Marvel, the company revealed that it was going to offer Jackson the role of Fury in the coming year after securing the lead for Iron Man (2008).23

23 The character of Nick Fury has changed little over more than five decades. However, since Jackson’s portrayal as the character, new readers were confused as to why the Nick Fury of comic books is a white, 132

In fact, it is very likely that Iron Man (2008) was the saving grace of the entire comics industry, as Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark, the eccentric, brilliant, and flawed billionaire inventor, cultivated audience appreciation by investing in the character of Stark as a man who just happens to have an arc reactor in his chest. It was through the foundation of this movie that the MCU was established. Moreover, the extensive success of the film both domestically and internationally, grossing approximately $585 million (adjusted), that the Walt Disney Company became truly invested in purchasing Marvel and developing the MCU. The acquisition of Marvel by

Disney in 2009 cost the company $4.4 billion, but the return of the MCU to date is nearly

$11 billion. Robert Iger, Walt Disney Company’s Chief Executive, was clear that the value of Marvel as far as Disney is concerned is in the acquisition of its character licenses: “This treasure trove of over 5,000 characters offers Disney the ability to do what we do best” (as cited in Goldman, 2009). Marvel, once thought to have the potential to be bigger than Disney was now owned by Disney. Comics culture has changed drastically with the masterful handling by Disney, which has produced a model of movie releases in the MCU that has left DC and its collaborators stupefied and unable to match Marvel’s mechanized media precision. It is only within the past three years that DC has attempted to follow in Marvel’s footsteps and launch its own cinematic universe. See Appendix F for an infographic containing both scheduled Marvel and DC movies until 2020 (Comics

Alliance, 2014).

not black, man. In order to remedy this situation, Marvel decided to create another character who would take over Fury’s position as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.—Nick Fury Jr.—a young black man who is actually the long-lost son of Director Fury and currently maintains his position in Earth-616. 133

The success of the MCU can be seen in the upturn of its comics sales as well.

Despite some early indications, the market for comic books is at an all-time high. Fans are buying more comics than ever, and many of them are new to reading comic books.

The MCU films have attracted new demographics, or depending on how one looks at it, old demographics—women and children. Chief Executive Officer of Internal

Correspondence version 2 (one of the nerd industry’s key insider publications) and co- founder of the now defunct Capital City Distribution, Milton Griepp explains,

The movies have helped expand the audience beyond the core young adult

male demographic to include females of similar ages, as well as older and

younger readers...That’s based on what comic retailers and publishers tell

us and on observing the mix of fans at comic conventions, rather than on

survey or other research data, but I believe it to be true. (as cited in Lubin,

2014)

Comic books have long been a staple medium within nerd culture. Perhaps one of the best performances of nerd culture happens in a characteristically non-nerd-culture fashion—in person and en masse—at the comic con. Recent visibility of comics characters via mass media, like those from The Avengers, has arguably emboldened the industry and ignited the consuming practices of the geek chic. Increased popularity drives new and existing fans towards points of contact, like the comic con, where they may solidify their fandoms through presence, ensuring that the community (and the industry) delineates the fan.

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Comic Con Is Big Industry

The comic con space was once semi-private and available to only a few “die- hard” fans; now, it is now open, visible, and consumable by the mass market. As fascination with the spectacle of the con grows, so do the numbers of attendees who want the tactile entertainment experience that cons offer; likewise, interest from multinational corporations grows as cons attract more consumers each year. Darren Tompkins, who began attending comic cons in the mid-1980s, recalls, “Really, it was just a small ballroom filled with cardboard boxes. I mean, there weren’t any actors or famous people or panels or anything. It was just a place for comic book dealers to get together and sell their wares” (as cited in Schneider, 2014). Financial backing from multinational corporations has changed the landscape of the cons from quiet gatherings where fans could flip through long-boxes of comics to crowded hotel ballrooms and convention centers packed with booths, teaser trailers for upcoming movies, artists and Hollywood celebrities, and shoulder-to-shoulder retailers all hawking nearly identical merchandise.

From 300 to 130,000 Attendees—San Diego

The San Diego Comic-Con is the standard by which all other cons—and the industry—are measured. The annual event began as The Golden State Comic Con, a small gathering of 300 in the ballroom of the U.S. Grant Hotel. In 1973, the con took on its new name as the SDCC, ran for five days, and attracted its first group of celebrities.

As the first of its kind to mobilize space, talent, and entertainment, SDCC remains one of the most attractive expositions of popular culture in the US. Within the past few decades, the SDCC’s attendance has grown rapidly by more than doubling the number of attendees every ten years. In 2012, SDCC boasted record attendance with more than 130,000

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attendees. Just ten years earlier, in 2002, SDCC hosted just over 60,000 attendees, and only 20,000 in 1992 (Leong, 2013, pp. 96-97). In fact, the SCDD has outgrown its space at the San Diego Convention Center, but because of the vast economic draw of the event, the City of San Diego has passed a $520-million-dollar expansion to the facility to entice the SDCC not to leave the city for another one with larger, more accommodating space.

The SDCC has become so popular that the process for buying online tickets has become complicated, placing would-be attendees into clusters of queues. From these queues, a few are chosen to enter a pool. Those in the pool have the ability to buy passes. In 2014, passes to attend the SDCC sold out in 90 minutes; in 2015, 60 minutes; in 2016, 40 minutes (Weisburg, 2015, 2016). MacDonald (2013) explains that, like SDCC, several cons have seen dramatic growth. For example, in only its second year, the Denver

Comic-Con seems to be responding to “pent-up demand” in the region with 61,000 attendees, more than double attendance at its first annual event that hosted nearly 28,000.

More than a few comic cons have been closed or highly monitored by fire marshals, like the 2012 Calgary Comics and Entertainment Expo, which had to turn people away who had driven over 12 hours to attend because of overcrowding posed a safety concern

(MacDonald, 2013).

While the San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) remains one the most attended and most significant events in the US, the non-profit giant seems unable to keep up with the growth of attendance, putting its once-solidified status as a site of nerd pilgrimage at risk.

And SDCC does not seem to be taking the change well. In 2014, SDCC’s legal representation, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, sent a cease and desist letter to

Dan Farr and John Sloan, the organizers of the Salt Lake Comic Con (SLCC) (See

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Appendix H). The letter claims that SDCC has a US registered trademark on the words

“comic-con” and that the SLCC had intentionally misrepresented itself as an affiliate of the SDCC while advertising for its con at the SDCC:

Use of “Comic Con” in connection with your convention is likely to cause

confusion in the minds of attendees, exhibitors and fans as to the source,

sponsorship or endorsement of your Salt Lake Comic Con

convention….As a result, SDCC is entitled to an award of damages

against your companies, as well as entry of an injunction prohibiting

further infringing conduct. (Hahn, 2014)

Litigation is ongoing in federal court for this particular incident, with SLCC’s main refusal to comply based upon its being the ability to trademark its own name because the words “comic con” were deemed be too general and nondescriptive (Romero, 2015;

“SLCC vs SDCC,” 2016). The battle to hold onto the largest market share of the comic con market does not stop with single cases like this one. For instances, in 2013, NYCC and SDCC nearly came to legal action as the NYCC claimed that it had surpassed SDCC with 151,000 attendees (Lovett, 2014). Several blogs, including the official SDCC blog, fire off critiques of NYCC, stating that the comic con did not know how to count its attendees correctly and overestimated the turn out. Rutz (2013), writer for the SDCC

Unofficial Blog, claims that SDCC is still “king of the hill”: “Tickets for NYCC sell out in a matter of weeks, not minutes as with SDCC.” While he was willing to concede that

NYCC attracts the same caliber of movie stars and fan-favorite celebrities, Rutz (2013) insinuates that NYCC cannot compete with SDCC in terms of fan enthusiasm, stating that the lines for panels “didn’t seem to cap as fast as with SDCC” and that “all these people

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love NYCC! On Twitter, at least….” Cattiness aside, the stakes are real for these conventions, especially for SDCC, whose supremacy has been greatly challenged over the past few years, with the Fan Expo Vancouver now pulling in 140,000 attendees in

2016 (“About Us,” 2017) and NYCC with 167,000 in 2015 (Salkowitz, 2015b) and over

180,000 in 2016 (Johnston, 2016).

The Growth of the Multinational-Corporation-Owned Comic Con

Petty as these squabbles may seem over con names or attendance numbers, there is a great deal at risk in losing ground because the growth of the comic con has created a new market—the comic con market. While many city-based comic cons are non-profit organizations or charity events, others are not. Backed by large multinational corporations, the race to buy up fan-based entertainment companies and their events, like comic cons, has gathered interest within the last five years or so. Multinational corporations like Informa PLC, a publishing and events company based out of London with offices in nearly 50 countries, are buying up comic con and expo parent companies.

For example, the 2013 acquisition of Hobby Star Marketing gave Informa the rights to the Fan Expo—the largest event of its kind in Canada, which annually occupies the

Metro Toronto Convention Centre, a 460,000 square foot multiplex. Now under the name

Fan Expo HQ, the events group hosts Fan Expos in Vancouver, BC; Regina, SK; and

Dallas, TX; as well as Toronto Comicon, Dallas Fan Days, and Megacon Orlando. While the inaugural National Comic Book Expo (1995) hosted 1,500 attendees, the combined events of Fan Expo HQ hosts over half a million attendees across its events in Canada and the US.

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None of the multinational corporations snatching up profitable fan-based events matched the prowess of ReedPOP. Formed in 1968, the parent company of Reed

Exhibitions created its pop-culture darling in 2006, with the inaugural NYCC. As a professional trade exhibition group, Reed Exhibitions could not have anticipated the turnout. While they had rented the main exhibition hall in the Jacob K. Javits Convention

Center, with a capacity of 10,000. By Saturday morning, when the con opened, there were so many attendees that the police and fire marshals arrived to control the crowd and ensure that no more than 10,000 entered at one time; the total attendees was around

33,000. In 2007, the Saturday opening left people waiting in line half a mile long for 2 hours in 20 degree NYC weather just to enter the Javits Convention Center (Toia, 2007).

Despite the expansion troubles, the NYCC hosted nearly 50,000 in its second year (Reid,

2007). Now ReedPOP holds the NYCC in a four locations around the city to accommodate 180,000 attendees and various events. But the impressive aspect of

ReedPOP is not even that it managed to surpass SDCC as the largest US comic con in a matter of only ten years, but that NYCC is only one of dozens of comic cons and events that ReedPOP holds globally each year.

Formally branded in 2009 (incidentally the same year that the WDC purchased

Marvel Enterprises), ReedPOP has created a pop culture mega-events group like no other, with events in the US, Australia, China, France, India, Singapore, and Indonesia, and partnerships in Mexico, Brazil, the UK, and France (see Appendix H). ReedPOP has also extended its support for nerdy ventures by supporting Kickstarter campaigns on its page, including graphic novels, video and board games, films (like Kung Fury), and more. The success and massive expansion of ReedPOP is a measure of the success of geek chic

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media experiences and how consumers are craving a way to connect with their consumption and productive creativity on a visceral level by physically touching it and seeing it beyond photographs and video. While companies like ReedPOP pull these attendee-consumers farther away from comics, they are also introducing them to the network of pop culture consumption that can support a stronger connection between comics, art, and technology-based creative and immersive experiences. In so many ways, these cons are becoming a globalized phenomenon of digital humanities wherein consumers can discover and form identities based upon their association with consumption—identities that might move beyond bridges to an unattainable ideal and, instead, might provide insight into connections and creative potentialities beyond just how many bodies can safely fit into a venue.

The Future of the Comic Con Business?

The boom in the cons market has made room for smaller, but growing, companies that preserve comic cons for fans interested in comics themselves. One such company is

Amazing Comic Con (ACC), a traveling con that moves from city to city bringing the same celebrities with them to each city, almost like a traveling circus or Broadway show.

Unlike the mega cons like SDCC or NYCC, the venues for ACC are smaller, ballrooms holding a few thousand people, and the cities the con visits are usually lesser known for successful cons, including Las Vegas and Hawaii. In addition, the bill usually hosts a number of well-known comic book artists, writers, creators, and inkers, as well as indie publishers, artists, and makers. According to Jimmy Jay, owner of ACC, the company was created by him and his brother, who grew up on the comic con circuit helping their parents run a retail-booth business based on nerd and pop culture paratextuals. After one

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day growing tired of what Jay called “lame comic cons,” they decided to form their own.

As a small company with only a few dozen employees, the business has grown over the years to include more and more cities, but the focus, for Jay has always been the comics themselves and keeping things small (personal communication, February 15, 2015).

Additionally, Jay has tried to focus efforts on finding yet-untapped markets, which means occasionally sacrificing shows in areas where the “geek market” is oversaturated. In a

Facebook message to people disappointed about the cancellation of the 2017 shows in both Phoenix, AZ, and Houston, TX, Jay (2016) remarked, “The marketplace is much different than when we started organizing conventions 6+ years ago-with a number of fan events in Phoenix (and in Arizona) have spring up, not to mention a strong store retail presence doing signings, sales, and p[romotions” (sic). Oversaturation is a grave concern.

The massive growth of the cons market begs the question of how just such a boom is sustainable with more and more cons entering into competition with one another to put on the biggest and most attractive shows, all of which are vying for the same (growing) consumer base. As so many dealers, comic book shop owners (past and present), and pop culture retailers know from the crash in the mid-1990s, there is always a bottom, and it can fall out at any moment that fickle consumer decide to move the market in a different direction.

The Growth of Geek Chic at the Comic Con

As with the growing sales of comic books, there is an equal uptick in the number of fans seeking out the participatory experiences of the comic con. These once small gatherings of a few thousand “true believers” have now exploded into a multimillion dollar industry of their own, sparking the expansion and corporatization of many events.

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Comic cons that were once small gatherings in the ballrooms of hotels now burst the seams of convention centers in some of the largest cities in the world. The exposure of the fandom to mainstream culture has encouraged adoption by geek chic consumers who bring their fervor for nerd culture to the cons. They are ready to experience, purchase, and cosplay. The space of the comic con, an ethereal pilgrimage for many nerds, has changed greatly over the past decade from one where collector-fans could mill around from booth to booth looking for rare items to a multimedia entertainment extravaganza— a spectacular display of media consumption and revelry—situating the con as the perfect contact point to measure the tension between nerd culture and geek chic.

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CHAPTER 5

The Insider Experience: Consumerism and Cultural Tension on the Expo Floor

Hence, this is the comicon: a struggle between being cool and being uncool, a capitalist dream, and an escape for those who simply want to flee from themselves for a few hours.

—Kurt Fawver (2012, p.13)

The focus of this project is to hypothesize the rise of nerd culture in the US by presenting a socio-cultural framework to explain why comics culture is what it is. By discussing comics as a fixture of nerdom, a larger framework for nerd culture has also been posited. With its fate continuously driven by media panics, the form of comics and its resulting culture have negotiated a place in the mainstream by simultaneously resisting mainstream demands and spearheading popular culture; this delicate and foundational dialectic has enabled the construction of a consumer identity that is paradoxical in its indulgence in and animosity towards popular culture. Formed after comics became deviant in the mid-1950s, comics culture has always been waiting for broader acceptance in the mainstream; yet, at the same time, the culture clings to its exclusivity, insularity, and normativity. As the consuming public moves into nerd spaces, there is a custody battle over the fandom that perhaps only nerd-culture natives may recognize, as they seemingly have the most to lose from encroachment. The comics industry’s move toward the pop culture limelight causes some nerds concern about how exposure of the culture to the undisciplined mainstream might disrupt some of the culture’s core tenets. The resulting tension takes the form of combativeness towards anything or anyone who seems to threaten the established culture.

In many ways, this project is about that tension and how ownership and power are

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challenged and ultimately altered through media panics, which, in turn, seat new drivers for established and emergent media-based cultures. While there are several locations where these tensions may be readily experienced (e.g., online discussion boards, comic book stores, and the American shopping mall), this project examines them where nerds and geeks most dramatically and publicly meet, perform, and clash—at the comic con.

The following chapter examines and analyzes this tension by first positing the emergent consumer identity of industry insiderism, an outgrowth of the accessibility of cultish knowledge and the promise of cultural capital via the value of “knowing first” about a product, franchise, etc. Geek chic is perhaps a forerunner to industry insiderism, as geek chic has a fascination with the deep and mysterious cultishness of nerd culture. But even more so, geek chic is about the desire to see and indulge in media through spaces that offer consumptive experiences. The demand for these spaces has opened a market for cons, inviting an era of cons owned by for-profit and multinational corporations that solidify the con space as one for entertainment consumerism, rather than as fannish piety.

The transformation of the comic con into an entertainment expo is a symptom of the formation of an insiderist consumer identity. The reactions of nerds, those who claim cultural superiority through the gathering and production of nerd knowledge, demonstrate their aversion to geek chic and the move towards industry insiderism in a number of ways that are compatible with the practices of nerd culture, which are infused with both intra- and extra-fan shaming. For some nerds, this aggressive shaming is directed towards the newly visible demographics of the fandom, as well as the institutionalization of new fan practices, such as cosplay, the act of dressing and acting like a character while in the con space. Finally, this chapter asserts some potentialities resulting from the disruptive forces

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of both unfettered media revelry and industry insiderism.

From Nerd Pilgrimage to Entertainment Expo Extravaganza for Everyone:

The Emergence of Industry Insiderism

Under advanced global capitalism, the association between doing and being are not possible for the vast majority, especially those within the US who are so alienated from the means of production. Perhaps this is one of the swaying mechanisms of capitalism that encourages the formation of identities through consumptive practices. In this way, commodities are “bridges,” as McCracken (1988) would call them, seemingly bringing consumers closer to the ideal, but all the while merely posing as actualities.

Consumption has become being, doling out consumerist identity formations that suggest social realities and material conditions stem from the “right purchases.” In this state, even social and political identity can be demonstrated in what and how people buy

(Murkherjee & Banet-Weiser, 2012; Richey & Ponte, 2011). People can be what they buy. When people buy nerd, do they buy and become mainstream resistance—a rebelliousness against industry’s predetermined commodity fetishism? Yes and no—in the same way that nerd culture both covets and renounces popular culture. While it may be true that “going nerdy” is a kind of subversiveness that embraces social imperfection, intelligence, and playfulness, there is something else that is being sold—the insider experience—through touching, however superficially, the cultishness of nerdom. Because nerd culture is inseverable from the industry that produces its devotions, the emergence of insiderism has leveled the field of pop consumption, tossing away conventions of knowledge ownership and cultivation, replacing them with the pace at which one consumes—paying the admission fee to the con to get the seat in the presentation where

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the first trailer for next year’s blockbuster superhero movie plays and leaking a cell phone video of it to Twitter.

An example of the shift to industry-produced insiderism is Hollywood’s undermining of Harry Knowles, a self-proclaimed nerd, who created an insider blog by the name of Ain’t It Cool in 1996 (Hanna, 2013b). A year later, Knowles became infamous for posting unreleased details about upcoming movie projects well before the studios themselves had the opportunity. Using what he called his “worldwide geek network,” Knowles is credited with swaying public opinion: condemning Batman and

Robin (1997) months before its release, assuring viewers that Titanic (1997) would be a hit, and facing legal action for releasing behind-the-scenes photographs of the shooting of

Starship Troopers (1997). However, within a few years’ time, Hollywood realized that

Knowles’ influence could be beneficial for both parties. Nonetheless, the more connected to Hollywood Knowles became, the less credibility Knowles had with readers; before long Hollywood began to “leak” its own teasers. While Knowles’ uninspired 2013

Kickstarter attempted to keep the blog afloat, it was likely the encouraging posts on the

Kickstarter message board from Hollywood darlings, like Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro, that sunk the blog once and for all. Knowles had lost his subversiveness as a deviant insider by becoming a tool of the movie industry. Hanna (2013b) concludes that

Knowles initial characterization as an “unruly and influential tastemaker” was eventually snuffed by his relationship with Hollywood because “pre-existing hierarchies actually reinforced the industry’s hegemonic power.” The rise of personal technologies and the proliferation of social media have made each consumer a possible insider, and pop culture industries are well aware of the power they have to make insiders of every

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consumer, giving each a kind of cultural capital for knowing.

Selling Insiderism: The Altered Con Space

Fans of comics started gathering together to share their interests in the 1960s, but it was not until 1970 that the US held its first comics convention in the basement of the El

Cortez Center, a hotel in San Diego, with a crowd of around 300. Created as a space for fans to safely meet and discuss their passions, the San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) is considered one of the largest and longest running in the nation, hosting 130,000 attendees each year. The popularity of events like the SDCC and others is undeniable, along with the certainty that cons themselves have changed. Fawver (2012) describes contemporary mega cons, like SDCC, as “gluts of promotion” where, at every turn, attendees are met with free toys, posters, t-shirts, and trinkets, all while waiting in line for hours to meet a movie actor or to have a picture taken with William Shatner: “Indeed, the primary function of the mega con is, somewhat ironically, to encourage further capitalistic investment in comic book culture, not comic books” (p. 8). Herein lies the great panic of nerd culture—geek chic means that the comics industry booms, but comic books themselves are not read. For many nerds, this kind of fan engagement seems inauthentic, superficial, and insincere, especially for an old-guard that saw the fandom built upon the gathering and producing of nerd knowledge. Yet if the assertions of this project are correct and there is no one consumerist identity formation more authentic than any other, then the tension between nerd culture and geek chic is a fallacy of superiority. The heart of nerd culture may be the resistance to and embrace of otherness towards the mainstream, but the cultishness of the fandom has been lost because the culture itself is so amenable to being bottled and sold. When the spectacle of the con is cut away, the

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only core that remains are the workings of media conglomerates that are always at the ready to peddle character licenses. Unlike the nerd culture that has long resented being told what to buy and when, preferring instead to cultivate its own deep knowledge and adhering to its devotions without care for the directions of the mass media market, geek chic is ready with open hearts and open wallets to receive “the next big thing” as it is dished out in promotional swag bags.

While the growth of cons might be just another kind of fragmented media consumption, there is likely something more critical taking place in the direct contact of consumers and industry—consumer insiderism, an identity forged directly between the industry and the individual consumer. This identity is experiential, participatory, and personal. While it may be argued that marketing since the Industrial Revolution has attempted to propagandize the humanity of manufacturers, this connection is different in that consumers are not just buying and using a product; they are being through immersive fannish participation. This shift likely began during the time that cultish or specialized information became accessible via the rise of Internet, which according to Batchelor

(2012) allowed for the distribution of cultish fan knowledge to a larger, more mainstream consumer. The massification of events like the SDCC, the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car

Auction, and the Consumer Electronics Show, have redefined not only the industries themselves, but also the consumer identity itself. In this sense, the nerd pilgrimage to the

San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) no longer exists as such; instead, it has become a place of social and political expression in the form of consumerism. This space, which was originally owned by nerds themselves and attended by the industry has now become an industry-controlled echo chamber and test kitchen amplified by celebrity appearances and

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exclusive promotional merchandise. The commercialization of the comic con is just one example of how cultish group knowledge has been commodified into “insider information.” No longer do people attend with the goal of sharing interests only; these events are ways to be “in the know” about what is coming next—a space where industry and fans converse about what will be consumed, shaping the next year of the market.

As the popularity of the comic con has increased and multinational corporations’ investment in cons has expanded, the people who occupy the comic con space have changed as well. Early comic cons were populated with comics artists hoping to sell their one-off sketchbooks or story ideas. Indeed, what is known as “artists’ alley” was a section of the con for new and emerging talent who hoped to catch the eye of comics publisher scouts and recruiters. Writers, artists, inkers, and colorists often worked together to create projects that might be picked up by labels large and small. Comics retailers brought boxes filled with ranges of comics, from freebies for children and rare comics that would fetch premium prices at the con. In the decades before Internet dealing made it possible for both buyers and sellers to connect virtually, comic cons were the places to buy and sell each year. The con was also a kind of celebration. Parties, masquerades of superheroes, and meetings were held, connecting industry insiders and fans alike. Later, panels became a part of the con experience, wherein fans could go to hear their heroes, like Stan Lee, discuss their processes in creating some of the most successful comics on the market. In the mid-1980s, comic cons began to recognize the work of the best in the industry. SDCC introduced the Eisner Awards (named after Will

Eisner), a much-sought-after, guarantee-of-professional-success award, that celebrates the best writers, artists, and publishers in the business. SDCC’s space now includes the

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massive airplane-hangar sized auditorium known as Hall H, which has become the bellwether of success in the coming year’s market; whatever preview plays in this hall has historically been the most popular and financially rewarded. which holds almost

7,000 people who wait up to five hours in line for the opportunity to enter. The lines to get a seat in Hall H and to see popular actors like those from the Avengers has created a new intra-comic con market of its own for “line-waiters.” Within the past decade, Hall H has become a predictor of blockbuster success, as the upcoming movies premiered there often become record setters in ticket sales for the upcoming year. Growing in popularity in the mid-1990s, Japanese anime and manga culture spread to the West and deeply affected animation, comics, and graphic novels in ways that are still visible today, and cosplay became a standard of con culture.

Today, mega cons like SDCC are big business, although representatives from multinational corporations and publicly traded companies will often claim that their presence at the cons is to thank the fans. However, the increasing presence of television and streaming company programming executives, chief marketing officers, and showrunners tells a different story—one that speaks to the altered landscape of the con

(Thielman, 2013). Marketeers use the space as a way to project the overall popularity of shows, filling SDCC’s many theater-like halls with thousands of people, often past capacity—leaving many to stand or to crowd the hallways outside hoping to get a peek at actors, writers, and producers of their favorite movie franchises or television shows.

Likewise, comic cons like SDCC are often the “publicity starter pistol around prime-time shows slated to debut in the fall,” and executives use these testing grounds to judge whether a show will be a hit or one for the chopping block by January (Thielman, 2013).

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These new additions to the comic con scene prove with their presence that marketing is progressively about fans selling to other fans. The craze—the popularity— these are all of the elements of buzz, but success now depends greatly on fans who demonstrate urgency to view to other potential consumers; this is the heart of geek chic and evolving industry insiderism. Changes to the landscape of the comic con have been met with frustration, fear, and some hostility, as those who have been participating in the cons since the 1970s see these transformations as inherently harmful to comic cons and comics culture at large. Many of these changes are the result of an “insider’s view” of the workings of entertainment popular culture. Hanna (2013a), a scholar of media interactions and popular culture, muses about the presence of Hollywood at mega cons like SDCC—a near omnipresence—that wraps areas, like downtown San Diego, in a saturated atmosphere of visual mesmerization that conveys in every way that the fan is walking through a kind of wonderland of bright, beautiful kaleidoscopic media consumption:

In the Gaslamp Quarter, restaurants and stores were occupied by Disney,

SyFy, and NBC, elaborate off-site experiences promoting Godzilla and

Ender’s Game were already underway, a massive advertisement for the

new SyFy show, Helix, covered the side of the Marriott Hotel, and within

several minutes a masked man handed me an invitation to a “fan

screening” of Escape Plan hosted by Sylvester Stallone and Arnold

Schwarzeneggar. Well before I even set foot in the convention center, it

was clear that even the space around it had been thoroughly colonized by

industry promotion.

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As with the loss of anonymity experienced by many behind-the-scenes showrunners, the proximity of fans to the object of their consumption becomes mere feet, and this closeness is the purview of the geek—to know first, post first, comment first. This immersion is the key to the comic con’s successful transition from fringe culture to splendiferous entertainment mecca.

Horizontal Hostilities: Intra- and Extra-fan Shaming

This project focuses upon the tensions that arise within the continuous state of transmutation experienced by the industry-based cultural formation of nerd culture.

Because of this approach, there has been little here to explain this formation in terms of theoretical frameworks; instead, I have relied upon a more Foucauldian approach by positing an alternative analytical history of the comics fandom. I have done so in order to establish what I hope is a novel and helpful framework for understanding the current tensions within the fandom that are based in socio-discursive models that are long in the making (Bucholtz, 2001). Indeed, it is less that these models were “made” in the sense that historical happenstance has brought nerd culture to a particular point, but more that the template for the current state is written in a deeper sociological language—one of power, privilege, and hierarchy. In other words, I am suggesting that plays for power based upon an established set of “rules” within a given social context are reflected in practices regardless of the size of that context. To better make this argument, I borrow from the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu, who throughout his career established terminology for navigating the complex properties of socio-cultural formations. Bourdieu

(1980/1990) posits the theory of habitus, a gained set of social rules and assumptions

(structured) and the way that one’s understanding of the existing structure informs

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present and future practices (structuring). But habitus is only one part of the equation;

Bourdieu also considered the play between habitus and cultural capital and how the combination of these two elements were then considered in reference to the field (le champ), a space in which actors determine power relations based upon both habitus and cultural capital. For Bourdieu (1986), this relationship is best visualized in the following equation (p. 101):

[(habitus)(capital)] + the field = practices

This configuration of social relations generates the perceptions, appreciations, and practices—what Bourdieu (1972/1977) terms dispositions—of the actor (individual, group, or institution) (p. 214). These dispositions are mirrored in practices that identify the unspoken rules of engagement. Maton (2012) explains that the term habitus

focuses on our ways of acting, feeling, thinking and being. It captures how

we carry within us our history, how we bring this history into our present

circumstances, and how we then make choices to act in certain ways and

not others….The structures of the habitus are thus neither fixed nor in

constant flux. Rather, our dispositions evolve—they are durable and

transposable but not immutable. (p. 51-52)

In this way, both habitus and the fields through which actors pass are always both

“situated” and “evolving” (Maton, 2012, p. 52; see also Bourdieu, 1980/1990,

1982/1991).

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Bourdieu’s theories explain some of the mechanisms behind cultural practices.

The practices of nerd culture are generated from its sense of habitus. Nerd culture is neither immotile nor mutable, and it is this sense of stationary motion that creates the powerful dialectic that assures death and victory are simultaneous inasmuch as perpetuation and reformation are as well. The habitus of nerdom is forged in its history:

(a) resistance to mainstream power structures and media panics, (b) recreation of those power structures within the fandom (i.e. the promotion of white male heteronormativity), and (c) the smelting together of the complex properties of consumption and quasi- religious cultishness. Borrowing from Bourdieu’s theories, I forward that the fandom has a habitus of its own—a sort of fanitus—that shapes the structure and structuring of individual, group, and nerdom-wide dispositions. As such, the historical context of an oppressive, restrictive, and appropriating mainstream cannot be overlooked because threats to power within the larger fields of mid-1800s European and mid-1900s American societies affected dispositions about comics and nerd culture. By extension, these media panics influenced a nascent fandom to adopt a particular kind of defensiveness: a deeply embedded distrust that permeates not only the structure of the fandom as it is, but also the way that the fandom apprehends and reacts to changes, especially those that seem to be imposing upon its sense of insularity and cultishness.

Adopting the Framework of the Mainstream

Although seemingly contradictory upon first glance, the habitus of the fandom is saturated with hierarchy, which is concurrently projected toward a perceived outside oppressor (the mainstream) and an inside threat (other nerds). The direction of the accompanying hostilities are perhaps made clearer by the notion that bullies are often the

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victims of bullying themselves. According to Brown (1997), by mimicking the institutionalized practices of bourgeois discipline,

[the] fandom offends the dominant class by applying the same standards

of appreciation to popular texts that are supposed to be reserved for elite

texts (p.18) …. The close scrutiny, collecting, analyzing, rereading, and

accumulation of knowledge is deemed acceptable for a serious work of

“art” but ridiculous for a mass medium. Yet it is by mirroring these very

practices of “Official” cultural economy that members of the fan

community seek to bolster their cultural standing within their own circle

of social contact, their own “milieu.” (p. 22)

I have postulated a correlation between the power position held by elites within the mid-

1800s and mid-1900s and the current status of elites within the nerd fandom. The inversion of power relations is interesting because the mainstream positions of power represented by the bourgeoisie in the 1850s and the societal governance of the nation state in the 1950s have now been turned topsy-turvy: the mainstream now knocks on the door of the fandom demanding entrance when it had originally been the evictor. In this sense, the mocking of disciplinarity and cultural divisions (i.e., low vs. high culture) through the adoption of the same institutional practices of disciplinarity used by the bourgeoisie has stagnated nerd culture to some degree. It seems as though nerd culture now believes in the disciplinarity that it once set out to misuse. Evidence of the institutionalization of disciplinarity can be found in the widespread reaction of nerds to geek chic because geeks do not understand the decorum of the culture, like the cosplayer mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 1. The influx of geek chic has challenged nerd

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disciplinarity—its doxa—with geek chic’s sheer indifference to the institutionalized practices of nerd culture that—like the bourgeois notion of “good taste”—opens up a discursive wound that if ignored will only bleed the beast dry.

The Authenticity of Antagonism: A Habitus of Shaming

Doxa pulls the fan in two directions: toward the mainstream acceptance of nerd culture and toward the cultishness of “authentic” fandom. In this way, fans openly adopt mainstream ideas of proper media interaction: for instance, the acceptable amount of time to spend with media and how deeply one should be involved before psychosis is called into question. Stanfill (2013) explains that when “subcultural pleasure” and “socially appropriate” behavior are divergent “it makes fandom a difficult subject position to inhabit” because the stigmas of fans as deviant becomes evident in the way fans think about themselves and, perhaps even more importantly, each other, causing “intra-fandom stereotyping” (p. 118). These stereotypes often lead to what Johnson (2007) terms “fan- tagonism,” a discursive mechanism that “constitutes hegemonies within factionalized fan communities” (p. 298). With antagonism so firmly rooted within the nerd habitus, it is little wonder that overt and implied forms of shaming and anger are often the response by a nerd culture under threat (Alters, 2007; Bee, 2014; Graham, 2014; Harman & Jones,

2013; Rosenburg, 2014). This puzzling phenomenon is one imbued with territorializing and reverse bullying, whereby nerds become the bullies of other nerds. Williams (2011) explains that comic book fans use their “private collections, their knowledge of comics’ and characters’ histories, and their participation at comic cons to improve their in-group status and prestige” (p. 181). This type of open discord is perhaps best understood as horizontal hostility, a term used by feminists in the 1970s to describe a form of prejudice

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against members of a similar, yet more mainstream, minority group (White & Langer,

1999). This type of infighting is seen across many minority groups, especially prevalent in cases where a potential representative does not exhibit predetermined ideal characteristics. A few of the more infamous cases are those of African American law professor whose appointment to a prestigious university was opposed by the Black

Students Association because she was not “black enough” because of her light skin, and

Heather Whitestone, a woman who would have been the first Miss America to be deaf had her status not been ridiculed by deaf activists who complained that she used spoken

English, not American Sign Language (White & Langer, 1999).

Many nerds consider the changing demographics of the fandom to be a threat to the integrity of traditional nerd culture. And they are right: the culture is changing with every individual who participates in it. The expansion of nerdom in the wake of geek chic has induced numerous backlashes, resentments, and scorched-earth initiatives, even in the face of those who see the expansion of the community as a phenomenon encouraging economic, creative, and cultural opportunities. For more conservatively traditional nerd culture fans, the trouble with the easy accessibility of cultish nerd knowledge via technology is its easy regurgitation, which creates what is derogatorily referred to as

“weak” geeks who threaten the stability of nerd culture with their sketchy knowledge. For

Oswalt (2010), geek chic “doesn’t produce a new generation of artists—just an army of semi-sated consumers. Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie?”

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The surface values of nerd culture—interests in technology, math, and science, nonconformity, and (at times) hyper-rationality—could lead those from a geek chic orientation to misunderstand the motivation behind innovation:

[F]ascination with what is new and undiscovered drives scientific curiosity

and novel invention. But unmoored from the desire to learn and create, the

search for the next tech is simply consumerism….We should use this

moment of [nerd] popularity to encourage people to delve deeper...to be

able to build, not buy. (Donath, 2014)

Troubled by authenticity and status, nerd hierarchies still hold true, regardless of the expansion of the fandom. These hierarchies are enforced largely by categorization: “fake geek girl,” for instance, is a term designed to insult girls and women considered to be unable to comprehend the culture. Even those who are seemingly interested in deconstructing categories based on gender, race, sexual orientation, and other factors still construct critiques that reinforce traditional hierarchies based on knowledge accumulation, means of participation, and financial dedication. Put more succinctly, the nerds who were bullied for their deviance have themselves become bullies of those deemed not deviant enough.

Visibility and Fandom: Conservative Traditionalist Nerds and the Market Trend

towards Diversity

These sentiments are reflected in the discursive rendering of the fandom as a homogenous group of predominantly white, heteronormative male comics readers in their twenties and thirties. This assumption about demographics of the fandom is evidence of an overdue conversation that nerd culture should be having with itself about what

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inclusion and expertise mean when it comes to those who have been traditionally on the fringes of this fringe culture. While some nerds are pushing every day for the acknowledgement of fans who do not fall into the traditional demographic, others would rather categorize newly visible fans of all ages, gender identifications, races and ethnicities, and sexualities as cultural tourists whose interest in comics culture will pass as soon as the pop culture market moves on (Ali, 2014; Bryant, 2014; Dockterman, 2014;

Kit, 2016; Schenker, 2013, 2014). Wider commercial acceptance through present-day geek chic has brought about a new era in nerd culture, one that is defined by greater representation and hope for progressivism in nerd culture (Oshillinoisin, 2015; Stuller,

2014). Unsurprisingly, these developments are causing some in the traditional demographic to be outspoken against change. What these instances of tension highlight is a deep trepidation in conservative traditionalist nerds about where the fandom is headed and how it will be affected by these newly visible demographics. These tensions lead to divisions, as the marginalized groups that always existed within nerd culture not only increase in their numbers and become more visible as participants, but also disquiet norms with their presence and increasing influence on the culture at large (Broadnax,

2013). The expansion of the fandom via geek chic has facilitated the growth of diversity within comics-related media overall. With this expansion, there have been calls to change the approach of television programs, movies, comics, games, and paratexts to reflect a more diverse fan population. These developments are much to the chagrin of traditionalists who assert that so-called “social justice warriors,” a derogatory term for progressives inside and outside nerdom, simply do not understand the culture enough to appreciate its ways. While there are deeply entrenched sentiments of heterosexism and

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racism, some of these reactions are also due, in part, to fears about encroaching outsiders generally, rather than specifically. In other words, some reaction toward the influx of geek chic is also a negative reaction to the dominant mainstream culture’s discursive characterization of nerds as

a sort of failed nonheteronormative whiteness that serves a regulatory

function, positioning the supposed inadequacy of fans as the result of

bad—but correctable—decisions, reinforcing rather than challenging

privilege as a natural property of white, heterosexual masculinity as it

produces fandom as a racialized construct. (Stanfill, 2011)

Again, this characterization stems, in part, from the stigma of deviance give to nerd culture during its departure from the mainstream during the mid-1950s. The defensiveness that has become a part of nerd culture’s habitus is problematic in that the culture can never see itself as part of the mainstream or as a normalizing force because of the way that deviance has shaped and oppressed its sense of self. For this reason, reconciliation is difficult, at best.

The simultaneous desire of the fandom to preserve a traditional demographic, with all of its insularity, and to embrace the inclusion of new fans has caused a kind of cultural dissidence. Some are open to change, like Mansfield (2014), who pleads, “Let’s celebrate this”:

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many long-time comic ‘nerds’ long to fight back against the bandwagon

hoppers and their relatively uninformed views on something [nerds] hold

dear. If the recent fill-in-the-blank #gates have taught us anything, it is that

with acceptance into the mainstream there comes a level of analytical

discourse previously unseen in that realm…. This means changes, sure,

and that is often frightening, which in turn is often expressed through

frustration and anger. But there’s still room for everyone.

The discourse to which Mansfield (2014) refers is one that nerd culture at large and comics culture specifically has resisted for decades—a critical conversation addressing issues of sexual harassment, heterosexism, racism, whitewashing, etc. For deBoer (2014), this is a simple case of a cultural members who have seen themselves as outliers for so long that they cannot realize their own privilege, especially now that geek is chic: “once you’ve cast yourself as a victim in your own mind, there’s no need to interrogate your own behavior.” Although some are welcoming, many others are not, holding their long- held isolation, resistance, and deep knowledge like a shield against the encroaching mainstream. But with geek chic fans closing in, there is little room for hardline traditionalism because the market has shifted and will continue to do so, with or without the approval of the fandom it has inspired.

As this manuscript’s analytical history of nerd culture has suggested, there is no singular authentic nerd culture—in the sense that there is not one century, decade, or moment in which nerds, as they may be thought of today, became their nerdiest. The changes are incremental. The fandom itself has always been at odds internally—looking for ways to expand diversity and inclusion, as seen with the launching of independent and

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creator-owned comics labels like Image, Top Cow, Vertigo, and IDW. The work of these labels is to deliberately undermine the market share held by the monopolies of the mainstream comics market held by Marvel and DC, which have juggled control of roughly 70% of the market at any given time (see Appendix A) . In the 2000s, efforts towards greater inclusion began to impact the industry, and along with this progressivism, there was a discernable doubling of efforts to fortify the industry against the inclusion of women, people of color, and non-heteronormative individuals. Threats against women

(sexual and physical) and reports of harassment had existed long before Gamergate brought such sentiments into public view (Curry, 2014; Kahn, 2014; Khouri, 2014). More recently, there have even been outcries against diverse representation in comics, claiming that comics with diverse characters are not selling or are being cancelled before they even get off the ground (Frey, 2016; Hoxmeier, 2015). Consumers, however, are voting with their pocketbooks, and given that, according to market research, comics fandom is more diverse than ever, there is hope that geek chic will ultimately yield a more inclusive nerd culture (MacDonald, 2016; Perry, 2016).

Playing Around with Convention: The Issue of Heterosexism

in the Con Space

While women had a fundamental role in the establishment of comic con culture, the 1960s through 1980s were mainly dominated by men. Women found more success in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the independent market grew and there were more opportunities through the genre of graphic novels. However, as with the space of the comic book shop, the comic con has long been considered a male-dominated space with serious and troubling issues of gender bias. The belief that women are not fully capable

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of possessing nerd knowledge has been disappointingly common, lending a “boys club” quality to parts of the con. However, with the new boom in comics-related media and the rise of geek chic, the marginalized fans are feeling safer in these spaces and altering them in ways that would be difficult to roll back. According to an online survey conducted in

2015 by the company Eventbrite, an event ticketing company used by many comic cons, gender representation is even between men and women, with 49% of male identifying and 49% female identifying individuals registering, and 2% registering as a non-binary or other gender. These numbers have balanced out since the previous year when an estimated 54% male identifying and 46% female identifying individuals attended

(Salkowitz, 2015a). The increased presence of women at cons has shifted the market significantly toward providing media experiences for and about non-heteronormative white males.

While there has been wide acceptance of these changes, there is an uglier side of the fandom that has been critical, even vicious. Hanna (2015) contends that this reaction is “a highly problematic and gendered anxiety about the increased presence and participation of women in a space/culture that has been traditionally male dominated,” but diverse populations have always been a part of the fandom. Jeanine Schaefer, an editor at Marvel who has worked on She-Hulk and the all-female X-Men series, contends that “[i]t’s not that they’re suddenly here. It’s that they’re suddenly more visible” (as cited in Dockterman, 2014). The visibility of these fans has caused harassment at comic cons to become a major issue. Safe con spaces have been created, like GeekGirlCon, which was started as a community-based effort of self-identified nerd girls after a panel at

SDCC 2010 entitled “Geek Girls Exist.” However, a survey conducted by Asselin (2014)

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reports that nearly 60% of respondents believe that harassment is an issue at cons; the results report that 13% experienced “comments of a sexual nature made about them at conventions—and eight percent of people of all genders reported they had been groped, assaulted, or raped at a comic convention.” From research like this, groups like Geeks for

CONsent began to petition cons of all sizes with their #CosplayIsNotConsent campaign, demanding an explicitly articulated policy against harassment, including consequences.

Most cons have accepted and promoted these types of policies, but enforcement is another controversy—one that will likely continue as the con space continues to become more diverse. Yet one thing is clear: the landscape is changing, with diversity as a new focus for many cons (MacDonald & Reid, 2014), prompting scholars like Carrico (2014) to suggest that the mainstreaming of nerd culture may, in fact, contribute to the diversification of US culture in general.

Experiential Consumption: The Disruption of Business as Usual

As cons grow in size and new cons pop up on the scene each year, the numbers of cosplayers and the concerns about how they are affecting the atmosphere of the con also increase. Asher-Perrin (2014) has concerns of her own about the notion that a particular group of fans is the reason some retailers and artists are losing money at comic cons:

Which is really just another way of making a ‘fake geek’ argument, isn’t

it?... It could be these [pop cons] are becoming a new sort of beast, but

pointing the finger at the newest generation of enthusiasts is turning a

blind eye to the sweeping ways that genre is changing, as the interests of

‘geeks’ become more and more mainstream.

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Asher-Perrin (2014) is expressing concern about horizontal hostilities in the fandom, but her comments hit on a larger point here as well. She is unsure about the changing nature of “genre,” but there is an understandable lack of clarity as to what she means when she uses the word. Does she mean comics in general, the comic con space, or cosplay as an expression or art form? The answer is no doubt “yes” to all of these, as the interconnection of all of these elements points to the waves of change throughout the fandom as a result of geek chic.

While the argument has been made in this manuscript that geek chic is light on knowledge gathering and production, geek chic is doubtlessly part of a participatory consumer class that expects not only to buy and use products, but also to experience them. Salkowitz (2012) explains that this issue of consumption is at the heart of contemporary and future creative markets:

The tribulations of this one sliver of the pop culture world also exemplify

the biggest challenge facing all creative enterprises in the twenty-first

century: how to balance the trend toward consolidation and centralization

in the business with the radical democratization of access toward creative

tools, media and audience engagement. (p. 1)

The proliferation of cosplay is symptomatic of a larger change in the comic con business model, which has traditionally favored fans as consumers only, not as participants. Hanna

(2015) asserts that “status of fan productivity and labor under convergence culture infuses audiences with an aura of power and control…. This allows [fans] to become scapegoats for sea changes in the culture that are, first-and-foremost, industrially and economically motivated.” While Hanna (2015) is correct in her assertion, the overall impact is that the

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con is not a physical manifestation of a mental preoccupation; it is a carnival—an orgy— of media consumption. It is a playground of seeing and being seen. In this atmosphere of the carnivalesque, the topsy-turvy becomes the rule, and power relations are inverted

(Bakhtin, 1984/2009). In this way, the presence of the cosplayer within the con space undermines the proposed “purpose” of the con as a space to commune about comics.

Instead, it becomes an experiential revelry. Alongside this inversion is the ability of traditionally underrepresented fans to gain entrance to the scene and, importantly, to thrive in new ways that disturb the authority and hierarchy of traditional nerd knowledge.

The Future of Fannish Industry Insiderism: A Few Possibilities

Industry insiderism is likely the future of nerd-focused popular culture, offering nerd culture and geek chic varying levels of involvement and rhizomorphic, participatory consumerist identities. The formation of insiderism is hardly new or revolutionary, as the concept of racial, ethnic, gender-based insiderism has long established homogeneity, yet within the notion of insiderist identities is the concept of socio-communalism in which disparate and chaotic formations of fandom may prevail, even as disjunctive as they are or seem to be. By reveling in the unadulterated media consumption offered by spaces like the con, fans (of all kinds) may be able to undermine the doctrine of cultural insiderism through the seeking and sharing of both cutting-edge and cultish information, spreading a considerably liberating message of fan-embodied power and influence.

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APPENDICIES

Appendix A

The Association of Comic Magazine Publishers (ACMP) Code (1948)

1. Sexy, wanton comics should not be published. No drawing should show a female indecently or unduly exposed, and in no event more nude than in a bathing suit commonly worn in the United States of America. 2. Crime should not be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy against the law and justice or to inspire others with the desire for imitation. No comics shall show the details and methods of a crime committed by a youth. Policemen, judges, Government officials, and respected institutions should not be portrayed as stupid, ineffective, or represented in such a way to weaken respect for established authority. 3. No scenes of sadistic torture should be shown. 4. Vulgar and obscene language should never be used. Slang should be kept to a minimum and used only when essential to the story. 5. Divorce should not be treated humorously or represented as glamorous or alluring. 6. Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible.

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Appendix B

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Appendix C

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Appendix D

CODE OF THE COMICS MAGAZINE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA, INC. The Comics Code of 1954 Adopted October 26, 1954

PREAMBLE The comic-book medium, having come of age on the American cultural scene, must measure up to its responsibilities. Constantly improving techniques and higher standards go hand in hand with these responsibilities. To make a positive contribution to contemporary life, the industry must seek new areas for developing sound, wholesome entertainment. The people responsible for writing, drawing, printing, publishing, and selling comic books have done a commendable job in the past, and have been striving toward this goal. Their record of progress and continuing improvement compares favorably with other media in the communications industry. An outstanding example is the development of comic books as a unique and effective tool for instruction and education. Comic books have also made their contribution in the field of letters and criticism of contemporary life. In keeping with the American tradition, the members of this industry will and must continue to work together in the future. In the same tradition, members of the industry must see to it that gains made in this medium are not lost and that violations of standards of good taste, which might tend toward corruption of the comic book as an instructive and wholesome form of entertainment, will be eliminated. Therefore, the Comics Magazine Association of America, Inc. has adopted this code, and placed strong powers of enforcement in the hands of an independent code authority. Further, members of the association have endorsed the purpose and spirit of this code as a vital instrument to the growth of the industry. To this end, they have pledged themselves to conscientiously adhere to its principles and to abide by all decisions based on the code made by the administrator. They are confident that this positive and forthright statement will provide an effective bulwark for the protection and enhancement of the American reading public, and that it will become a landmark in the history of self-regulation for the entire communications industry.

CODE FOR EDITORIAL MATTER General standards—Part A 1. Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals. 2. No comics shall explicitly present the unique details and methods of a crime. 3. Policemen, judges, Government officials and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority. 4. If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity. 5. Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates a desire for emulation. 6. In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.

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7. Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited. Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gunplay, physical agony, gory and gruesome crime shall be eliminated. 8. No unique or unusual methods of concealing weapons shall be shown. 9. Instances of law-enforcement officers dying as a result of a criminal’s activities should be discouraged. 10. The crime of kidnapping shall never be portrayed in any detail, nor shall any profit accrue to the abductor or kidnaper. The criminal or the kidnaper must be punished in every case. 11. The letters of the word “crime” on a comics-magazine cover shall never be appreciably greater in dimension than the other words contained in the title. The word “crime” shall never appear alone on a cover. 12. Restraint in the use of the word “crime” in titles or subtitles shall be exercised.

General standards—Part B 1. No comic magazine shall use the word horror or terror in its title. 2. All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted. 3. All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated. 4. Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly, nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader. 5. Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

General standards—Part C All elements or techniques not specifically mentioned herein, but which are contrary to the spirit and intent of the code, and are considered violations of good taste or decency, shall be prohibited. Dialogue 1. Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden. 2. Special precautions to avoid references to physical afflictions or deformities shall be taken. 3. Although slang and colloquialisms are acceptable, excessive use should be discouraged and, wherever possible, good grammar shall be employed. Religion 1. Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible. Costume 1. Nudity in any form is prohibited, as is indecent or undue exposure. 2. Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable. 3. All characters shall be depicted in dress reasonably acceptable to society. 4. Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities. NOTE.—It should be recognized that all prohibitions dealing with costume, dialog, or artwork applies as specifically to the cover of a comic magazine as they do to the contents.

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Marriage and sex 1. Divorce shall not be treated humorously nor represented as desirable. 2. Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable. 3. Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior shall be fostered. A sympathetic understanding of the problems of love is not a license for morbid distortion. 4. The treatment of live-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage. 5. Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions. 6. Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested. 7. Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden.

CODE FOR ADVERTISING MATTER These regulations are applicable to all magazines published by members of the Comics Magazine Association of America, Inc. Good taste shall be the guiding principle in the acceptance of advertising. 1. Liquor and tobacco advertising is not acceptable. 2. Advertisement of sex or sex instruction books are unacceptable. 3. The sale of picture postcards, “pinups,” “art studies,” or any other reproduction of nude or seminude figures is prohibited. 4. Advertising for the sale of knives or realistic gun facsimiles is prohibited. 5. Advertising for the sale of fireworks is prohibited. 6. Advertising dealing with the sale of gambling equipment or printed matter dealing with gambling shall not be accepted. 7. Nudity with meretricious purpose and salacious postures shall not be permitted in the advertising of any product; clothed figures shall never be presented in such a way as to be offensive or contrary to good taste or morals. 8. To the best of his ability, each publisher shall ascertain that all statements made in advertisements conform to fact and avoid misrepresentation. 9. Advertisement of medical, health, or toiletry products of questionable nature are to be rejected. Advertisements for medical, health, or toiletry products endorsed by the American Medical Association, or the American Dental Association, shall be deemed acceptable if they conform with all other conditions of the Advertising Code.

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Appendix E

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase 1 Iron Man (2008) The Incredible Hulk (2008) Iron Man 2 (2010) Thor (2011) Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) The Avengers (2012)

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase 2 Iron Man 3 (2013) Thor: The Dark World (2013) Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) Ant-Man (2015) The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase 3 Captain America: Civil War (2016) Doctor Strange (2016) Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017) Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) Thor: Ragnarok (2017) The Inhumans (2017) Black Panther (2018) The Avengers: Infinity War, Part I (2018) Ant-Man and The Wasp (2018) Captain Marvel (2018) The Avengers 4 (2019) “Untitled” Spider-Man: Homecoming 2 (2019) Three undisclosed titles (2020)

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Appendix F

From Comics Alliance (2014), a composite of all superhero, comics-related movies scheduled until 2020.

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Appendix G

175

Appendix H

Expansion of ReedPOP’s Pop Culture Empire

2006, ReedPOP holds the inaugural New York Comic Con Feb

2007, ReedPOP holds the inaugural of the New York Anime Festival Dec

2009, ReedPOP and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) collaborate to hold March the UFC Fan Expo at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the largest “celebration of combat sports” in the US (“UFC Fan Expo,” 2017)

2009, ReedPOP officially becomes a brand June

2010, ReedPOP and LucasFilm partner for the first time to host Star Wars Aug Celebration V in Orlando, FL

2013, ReedPOP announces exclusive streaming for its three largest fan events with June Twitch, a live streaming video platform and subsidiary of Amazon.com, to live stream panels at cons. These events include NYCC, Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2), and PAX, a gaming con hosted in the West, East, and South in the US; in Australia; and in a select city each year for the annual gaming development con known as PAX DEV, which takes place two days before the international PAX Prime.

2014, ReedPOP acquires an exclusive partnership with Austria’s OZ Comic Con, a Feb traveling con event hosting cons in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney

2014, ReedPOP launches BookCon, an event “where storytelling and pop culture May collide” (“About the Show,” 2017)

2014, ReedPOP holds the inaugural Special Edition: NYC, an event celebrating June comics, art, and culture

2014, ReedPOP partners with Comic Con India to run event Sept

2014, ReedPOP announces the first Comic Con Paris for 2015 Oct

2014, ReedPOP supported New York Super Week takes over NYC for the first time Oct

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2015, ReedPOP acquires the Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, WA Jan

2015, ReedPOP and Twitch announce the TwitchCon, an interactive celebration for Feb broadcasters and viewers to meet, play, learn about using Twitch to improve gaming and broadcasting. The first con was held in the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco, CA.

2015, ReedPOP announces the launch of the Shanghai Comic Convention March

2015, ReedPOP announces the launch of Vienna Comic Con May

2015, ReedPOP announces the launch of Beijing Comic Convention Sept

2016, ReedPOP announces the launch of Star Trek: Mission New York in partnership Jan with CBS Consumer Products

2016, ReedPOP announces the launch of ComplexCon in Long Beach, CA, with May Complex, a digital discovery platform. The con was billed as the millennials’ World Fair, hosting names like Takashi Murakami, Skrillex, and Pharrell Williams.

2016, ReedPOP announces the launch of Comic Con Seoul Dec

All dates above courtesy of “Our Story” (2017) on ReedPOP’s official website.

177

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