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fpbIN one form or another, fandom has dominated my life. I started out in comics when I was sixteen, and since then I only left comics fandom to plunge right back into JKR fandom in the internet age - which, to us old-time dead tree users, is fandom on steroids.
One of the hardest things to endure when I came back has been the obsession with sex. It really struck me at the time of the 2006 World Cup, when I became aware that Livejournal hosted - or at least partly hosted - a kind of fandom who used real people - in particular, sportspeople - to project on them all kinds of graphic sexual fantasies. Let anyone take it ill if they want, but this strikes me as a revolting intrusion, appropriating the real lives of real people for no better reason than mental or physical masturbation. It is the coward's version of rape, snatching someone you only know by sight in order to force your ugly sexual obsessions on him or her. You might as well write slash about your own family, and it makes such things as Mark Chapman much more easy to understand.
Certainly, writers have always used real people. I do. But I never involved a real person in my stories - with the exception of Debbie Wallace, to whom I wanted to pay explicit homage - without moving them away from background and altering character and name. In most cases, I wanted to pay homage to people I regarded as heroic or otherwise great (one fic features my mother, Jack Kirby, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others); certainly not to indulge in sexual fantasies about them. And even so, I took measures to distance the imaginative figures from their real-life originals. I think that is what all sane writers do. When I wanted to use the sinewy but pretty face and figure of a (then) young female athlete, since retired, I sent her 600 years into the future, gave her super-powers, and made her the time-displaced daughter of Lord Camelot and the Silver Angel, trying to rescue a self-degraded mankind.
I can understand the desire to build fantasies on a particularly memorable face or presence; that is, after all, why playwrights and opera composers write parts for definite people. Several of Mozart and Verdi's best known parts were written for women they loved, and I strongly suspect that Joss Whedon has tweaked the character of Buffy to fit it to Sarah Michelle Gellar, and that is why her performance as Buffy is better than anything she has done before or since. The difference, however, is between writing a memorable part for a woman you know and perhaps love, and prostituting her image. It is not even really a matter of sex as such: I find the whole idea of putting words in real people's mouths embarrassing and dubious. It is as much as to ascribe views - something I hate when it is done to me, and that I would not do to anyone. Besides, as a historian, I have all too clear a notion of how hard it is to be sure of the motives even of people you know well. And of course, to burden them with your own fantasies is to that as murder after rape is to jaywalking.
But real-people fandom is only a feature of something I regard as a much bigger problem. In my first period as a fan, I used as much energy and resources as I could mobilize into an effort to become a professional cartoonist and promote my own comics characters - the Silver Angel, Lord Camelot, the Liberators, Minerva, and so on. I have since then come to be sincerely and bitterly grateful that I never succeeded and that the children of my imagination are still so obscure that nobody has even bothered to swipe them; because it has become clear that, whatever I did and whatever I said, if I had ever had even a moderate amount of success, nothing could have prevented some self-satisfied pervert somewhere from slashing the Silver Angel and her daughter, and then taking offence if I complained. The Silver Angel has been a part of my life since my teens. I cannot and will not let the bloody public run amok with her. Rather than do that, I will live and die unknown.
(I do, of course, value the opposite, and I have actually asked the great![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kennahijja to write stories about my characters. The touch of a genius in action on figures one loves is both beautiful and desirable. But that does not mean that I would allow figures that are part of my life to be raped for someone's foul fun.)
The absurd possessive sense of fans towards characters is a notorious enough issue; bad enough if the criticism of incompetent authors such as George Lucas is deserved, but grotesque beyond description when we are talking of first-rate writers such as JK Rowling. But at least the debates of Harmonians and others are carried out at a high level of intelligence and over serious issues. Where masturbatory fantasies become an issue, then I simply do not want to have any part in it.
I imagine that in some ways I have always been naive. I wonder how many fans will believe that I read Vampirella because I liked Archie Goodwin's stories. (And Tom Sutton's art, and Jose Gonzalez's, and all the excellent and exceptional artists that Jim Warren managed to get to work for him.) But it is the truth, and, in fact, going back to the early Vampis after decades, I found that not only was Goodwin the charming person I knew from convention meetings, but also the most literate and stylish writer before Steve Gerber and Alan Moore. His use of language was haunting, always amazingly apt and inventive, with every word invested with its full impact and value. It is hard to believe that he was writing comic books at the same time as Stan Lee and Roy Thomas.
I will not say that I did not read porn - apart from anything else, that would have been impossible in any comics market. But in my mind, there was - and still is, I guess - a very sharp dividing line between porn, hard or softcore, and ordinary comics (or cinema, TV, you name it). I simply did not conceive of that area of shadow in between, where porn penetrates and (to my mind) pollutes ordinary endeavour, which I now call sleaze. I could understand, for instance, Vampirella's ridiculous costume being an aid to sales; but then, until Warren's little empire was well on its way to collapsing, there was not actually a whole lot of sex or suggestion in the Vampirella stories themselves. (That was, I suppose, mainly thanks to the influence of Goodwin, who created a viable and interesting character, strong and sensitive, whose tradition lasted well beyond the couple of dozen stories he wrote. Goodwin essentially disregarded the sex element, writing a mix of romance, horror and superhero comic with his trademark excellent scripting, and I have never found any reason to be embarrassed at his work. And we might reflect on the fact that his Vampirella lasted for over a hundred issues, while none of the brutish, bloodied, perversely sexual reworkings of the character by Harris have managed more than twenty-two.)
Looking back, I simply reacted with hostility and denial to any manifestation of what I now see as a lasting and fairly pervasive presence of sleaze in comics fandom. Thus I hated and go on hating the character and world of Wonder Woman, and would not touch her with a barge pole. (A thermonuclear bomb, perhaps; a barge-pole would not be enough - not even if swung hard at her head.) I despised the bikini costumes that Dave Cockrum created for the girls of the Legion of Super-Heroes in the early seventies. And even as I was at the height of my admiration for the great Claremont-Byrne-Austin run of Uncanny X-Men, John Byrne's frequent bursts of outright lechery struck me as both irresponsible and damaging to the story. When you are reading a truly great saga of heroism, personal morality, terror, and the tragic temptation of immense power, you positively do not want to see an erect nipple on a picture of the main heroine in action, or see her draped in a costume drawn from the Histoire d'O movie. It was my very strong feeling that this kind of stuff actually damaged the story, drawing attention away from its real and driving content, and so was even commercially, let alone artistically, bloody stupid.
What I have now realized, and why I am writing, is that this sort of thing has been part of fandom from before I was involved, constantly affecting its social mores, and feeding into the talent pool. If John Byrne, among others, thought it entirely right and proper to deface the greatest work he will ever do with infantile sexual graffiti, it is because, long before he became professional (and John Byrne had a long background in early seventies fandom), he had been a part of a social milieu where sleaze was normal. Colleen Doran has chapter and verse on it (http://adistantsoil.com/2009/12/01/my-god-its-full-of-wank/), and her irate account of fannish ways is rather depressing. But what struck me was the interview she linked to, for the story of Heidi Saha; for the interview's subject was a woman costume maker (http://www.enjolrasworld.com/Richard%20Arndt/Angelique%20The%20Unconventional%20ComiCon%20Costumer.htm) who seems to have happily lent herself to the whole sleazy culture of convention costume shows, merrily going for every underdressed "heroine" part she could. (Who even remembers Marvel's character Satana?) And yet even she was struck and disgusted by the fandom exploitation of a then fourteen-year-old contemporary, Heidi Saha (http://mluebker.tripod.com/73_NYC.html for some photos), saying just enough of her story to make sure that it is understood to be horrible. Child abuse in public, with the partly witting cooperation of her own mother. Of course, in the early seventies child sexual abuse was not yet the issue it has become since, and indeed it was just stories such as poor Heidi's that were beginning to wake people to the evil of it; but the fact is that the whole Heidi Saha episode, short though it was, was a part of mainstream fandom, and people remember it to this day - and, says Doran, not always with disgust.
That is the point. I well remember the Heidi posters and artbook being advertised in the backs of dozens of Warren mags at the time. I vaguely wondered who she was supposed to be and why her posters were being hawked, since so far as I could see she was neither an actress nor any other kind of personality; and I also remember wondering about her age from the childlike features of her face. I was never motivated enough to find out. But what I have now found out, what struck me across the face like a wet fish, is that she was part of the same fandom where all my favourite comics were being promoted and indeed justly glorified. The costume show in which she came third featured two people dressed as Darkseid and Desaad - from Jack Kirby's unsurpassed masterpiece, New Gods - as winners. At the same time as the art of comics was reaching, through the thunder of the King's fierce genius, its towering peak, storming the heights of art with one of the greatest masterpieces of the century, at the same time and in the same space, it was producing bad imitations of strip tease joints. The sleaze, the ugly and complacent vulgarity at women's expense, the grotesque obsession with the underdressed - not even naked, underdressed - female body, the tendential rapist attitude held back only by cowardice, were an integral part, an ineliminable part, of the same social phenomenon whose growth was leading people to recognize comics as an artform. And they have not changed since; indeed, they are more rooted than ever.
A closing note: I mentioned the great Swabian writer who signs herselfkennahijja, of all the great fanfic writers I could have, not only because I regard her as the greatest, but also to show that I have no objection to the use of sex, even of perverted sex, as such, in stories. I should be a damned hypocrite otherwise, since I have done it myself. Genius can do that and make it worthwhile, and besides kennahijja is, to anyone who knows her, a remarkably civilized, gentle, mature person, with a great deal of self-knowledge and some humour to go with her genius. The point is that if there is a possible polar opposite to the sleazy kind of fan, she is it. And sleaze is what I object to.
One of the hardest things to endure when I came back has been the obsession with sex. It really struck me at the time of the 2006 World Cup, when I became aware that Livejournal hosted - or at least partly hosted - a kind of fandom who used real people - in particular, sportspeople - to project on them all kinds of graphic sexual fantasies. Let anyone take it ill if they want, but this strikes me as a revolting intrusion, appropriating the real lives of real people for no better reason than mental or physical masturbation. It is the coward's version of rape, snatching someone you only know by sight in order to force your ugly sexual obsessions on him or her. You might as well write slash about your own family, and it makes such things as Mark Chapman much more easy to understand.
Certainly, writers have always used real people. I do. But I never involved a real person in my stories - with the exception of Debbie Wallace, to whom I wanted to pay explicit homage - without moving them away from background and altering character and name. In most cases, I wanted to pay homage to people I regarded as heroic or otherwise great (one fic features my mother, Jack Kirby, and Hayao Miyazaki, among others); certainly not to indulge in sexual fantasies about them. And even so, I took measures to distance the imaginative figures from their real-life originals. I think that is what all sane writers do. When I wanted to use the sinewy but pretty face and figure of a (then) young female athlete, since retired, I sent her 600 years into the future, gave her super-powers, and made her the time-displaced daughter of Lord Camelot and the Silver Angel, trying to rescue a self-degraded mankind.
I can understand the desire to build fantasies on a particularly memorable face or presence; that is, after all, why playwrights and opera composers write parts for definite people. Several of Mozart and Verdi's best known parts were written for women they loved, and I strongly suspect that Joss Whedon has tweaked the character of Buffy to fit it to Sarah Michelle Gellar, and that is why her performance as Buffy is better than anything she has done before or since. The difference, however, is between writing a memorable part for a woman you know and perhaps love, and prostituting her image. It is not even really a matter of sex as such: I find the whole idea of putting words in real people's mouths embarrassing and dubious. It is as much as to ascribe views - something I hate when it is done to me, and that I would not do to anyone. Besides, as a historian, I have all too clear a notion of how hard it is to be sure of the motives even of people you know well. And of course, to burden them with your own fantasies is to that as murder after rape is to jaywalking.
But real-people fandom is only a feature of something I regard as a much bigger problem. In my first period as a fan, I used as much energy and resources as I could mobilize into an effort to become a professional cartoonist and promote my own comics characters - the Silver Angel, Lord Camelot, the Liberators, Minerva, and so on. I have since then come to be sincerely and bitterly grateful that I never succeeded and that the children of my imagination are still so obscure that nobody has even bothered to swipe them; because it has become clear that, whatever I did and whatever I said, if I had ever had even a moderate amount of success, nothing could have prevented some self-satisfied pervert somewhere from slashing the Silver Angel and her daughter, and then taking offence if I complained. The Silver Angel has been a part of my life since my teens. I cannot and will not let the bloody public run amok with her. Rather than do that, I will live and die unknown.
(I do, of course, value the opposite, and I have actually asked the great
kennahijja to write stories about my characters. The touch of a genius in action on figures one loves is both beautiful and desirable. But that does not mean that I would allow figures that are part of my life to be raped for someone's foul fun.)The absurd possessive sense of fans towards characters is a notorious enough issue; bad enough if the criticism of incompetent authors such as George Lucas is deserved, but grotesque beyond description when we are talking of first-rate writers such as JK Rowling. But at least the debates of Harmonians and others are carried out at a high level of intelligence and over serious issues. Where masturbatory fantasies become an issue, then I simply do not want to have any part in it.
I imagine that in some ways I have always been naive. I wonder how many fans will believe that I read Vampirella because I liked Archie Goodwin's stories. (And Tom Sutton's art, and Jose Gonzalez's, and all the excellent and exceptional artists that Jim Warren managed to get to work for him.) But it is the truth, and, in fact, going back to the early Vampis after decades, I found that not only was Goodwin the charming person I knew from convention meetings, but also the most literate and stylish writer before Steve Gerber and Alan Moore. His use of language was haunting, always amazingly apt and inventive, with every word invested with its full impact and value. It is hard to believe that he was writing comic books at the same time as Stan Lee and Roy Thomas.
I will not say that I did not read porn - apart from anything else, that would have been impossible in any comics market. But in my mind, there was - and still is, I guess - a very sharp dividing line between porn, hard or softcore, and ordinary comics (or cinema, TV, you name it). I simply did not conceive of that area of shadow in between, where porn penetrates and (to my mind) pollutes ordinary endeavour, which I now call sleaze. I could understand, for instance, Vampirella's ridiculous costume being an aid to sales; but then, until Warren's little empire was well on its way to collapsing, there was not actually a whole lot of sex or suggestion in the Vampirella stories themselves. (That was, I suppose, mainly thanks to the influence of Goodwin, who created a viable and interesting character, strong and sensitive, whose tradition lasted well beyond the couple of dozen stories he wrote. Goodwin essentially disregarded the sex element, writing a mix of romance, horror and superhero comic with his trademark excellent scripting, and I have never found any reason to be embarrassed at his work. And we might reflect on the fact that his Vampirella lasted for over a hundred issues, while none of the brutish, bloodied, perversely sexual reworkings of the character by Harris have managed more than twenty-two.)
Looking back, I simply reacted with hostility and denial to any manifestation of what I now see as a lasting and fairly pervasive presence of sleaze in comics fandom. Thus I hated and go on hating the character and world of Wonder Woman, and would not touch her with a barge pole. (A thermonuclear bomb, perhaps; a barge-pole would not be enough - not even if swung hard at her head.) I despised the bikini costumes that Dave Cockrum created for the girls of the Legion of Super-Heroes in the early seventies. And even as I was at the height of my admiration for the great Claremont-Byrne-Austin run of Uncanny X-Men, John Byrne's frequent bursts of outright lechery struck me as both irresponsible and damaging to the story. When you are reading a truly great saga of heroism, personal morality, terror, and the tragic temptation of immense power, you positively do not want to see an erect nipple on a picture of the main heroine in action, or see her draped in a costume drawn from the Histoire d'O movie. It was my very strong feeling that this kind of stuff actually damaged the story, drawing attention away from its real and driving content, and so was even commercially, let alone artistically, bloody stupid.
What I have now realized, and why I am writing, is that this sort of thing has been part of fandom from before I was involved, constantly affecting its social mores, and feeding into the talent pool. If John Byrne, among others, thought it entirely right and proper to deface the greatest work he will ever do with infantile sexual graffiti, it is because, long before he became professional (and John Byrne had a long background in early seventies fandom), he had been a part of a social milieu where sleaze was normal. Colleen Doran has chapter and verse on it (http://adistantsoil.com/2009/12/01/my-god-its-full-of-wank/), and her irate account of fannish ways is rather depressing. But what struck me was the interview she linked to, for the story of Heidi Saha; for the interview's subject was a woman costume maker (http://www.enjolrasworld.com/Richard%20Arndt/Angelique%20The%20Unconventional%20ComiCon%20Costumer.htm) who seems to have happily lent herself to the whole sleazy culture of convention costume shows, merrily going for every underdressed "heroine" part she could. (Who even remembers Marvel's character Satana?) And yet even she was struck and disgusted by the fandom exploitation of a then fourteen-year-old contemporary, Heidi Saha (http://mluebker.tripod.com/73_NYC.html for some photos), saying just enough of her story to make sure that it is understood to be horrible. Child abuse in public, with the partly witting cooperation of her own mother. Of course, in the early seventies child sexual abuse was not yet the issue it has become since, and indeed it was just stories such as poor Heidi's that were beginning to wake people to the evil of it; but the fact is that the whole Heidi Saha episode, short though it was, was a part of mainstream fandom, and people remember it to this day - and, says Doran, not always with disgust.
That is the point. I well remember the Heidi posters and artbook being advertised in the backs of dozens of Warren mags at the time. I vaguely wondered who she was supposed to be and why her posters were being hawked, since so far as I could see she was neither an actress nor any other kind of personality; and I also remember wondering about her age from the childlike features of her face. I was never motivated enough to find out. But what I have now found out, what struck me across the face like a wet fish, is that she was part of the same fandom where all my favourite comics were being promoted and indeed justly glorified. The costume show in which she came third featured two people dressed as Darkseid and Desaad - from Jack Kirby's unsurpassed masterpiece, New Gods - as winners. At the same time as the art of comics was reaching, through the thunder of the King's fierce genius, its towering peak, storming the heights of art with one of the greatest masterpieces of the century, at the same time and in the same space, it was producing bad imitations of strip tease joints. The sleaze, the ugly and complacent vulgarity at women's expense, the grotesque obsession with the underdressed - not even naked, underdressed - female body, the tendential rapist attitude held back only by cowardice, were an integral part, an ineliminable part, of the same social phenomenon whose growth was leading people to recognize comics as an artform. And they have not changed since; indeed, they are more rooted than ever.
A closing note: I mentioned the great Swabian writer who signs herself
kennahijja, of all the great fanfic writers I could have, not only because I regard her as the greatest, but also to show that I have no objection to the use of sex, even of perverted sex, as such, in stories. I should be a damned hypocrite otherwise, since I have done it myself. Genius can do that and make it worthwhile, and besides kennahijja is, to anyone who knows her, a remarkably civilized, gentle, mature person, with a great deal of self-knowledge and some humour to go with her genius. The point is that if there is a possible polar opposite to the sleazy kind of fan, she is it. And sleaze is what I object to.
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no subject
Date: 2010-02-01 01:22 am (UTC)That being said, just when I had decided I LOATHED any idea of RPF for pretty much the reasons you said, someone wrote the most amazing Peter O'Toole/Leni Riefenstahl fic, Black and White, Still. Which basically proved again that you can write absolutely ANYTHING, as long as you have the talent to go with it.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-01 01:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 06:59 pm (UTC)Edited to add: I agree that RPS sucks, it's right up(down?) there with MPREG and other dregs of fanfic
no subject
Date: 2010-02-03 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 06:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-04 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-05 05:13 am (UTC)