Hi Pm. I hope my question isn’t too strange. You often talk about the fact you’ve been a fan all your life (of aha, of anime, of tv shows). Are you nostalgic of the “good old days”? Being a fan before the internet I mean? I’m curious. Thanks for your reply!!
First, sorry about the
late reply, I’ve been working on my answer for a while and you’ll
understand that when you see the rambling I wrote below. I’m even
gonna use a “read more” cut at some point, my answer being quite long
(it’s such and interesting topic) but if you want a summary of what is
written below, basically it’s “Fuck the good old days and viva el
Internet”. I have zero nostalgia regarding what being a fan meant for me
in my youth in the 80’s-90’s. It was more complicated to communicate
between fans, share info, have photos, order stuff but we’ll see that below.
However, keep in mind that I’m talking from an ARTIST point of view and
that I live in FRANCE.
Ok, let’s go. I prefer being a fan nowadays because….
1) You don’t need to lick anybody’s ass to be “out there”
In
my days (I sound like a 70 year old, but who cares), you needed to be part
of a fanzine in order to promote your fandom art. Some fanzines where more
beautiful than others and even printed semi-professionally with a color
cover and all, and they were sold during conventions or by mail order.
Being published as a fan artist was a bit complicated because you had to contact the
fanzine team, accept their conditions, lick their boots, and a lot of
them didn’t want to hear about “shipping stuff”. It was more accepted
when it came to anime fanzines but just forget about it if you wanted to
be featured in a comics, TV show or movie fanzine. You still had the
solution to print your own fanzine at home but it was expensive in the
end and rather difficult to promote the finish product, unless you were
rich enough to rent a table at a con. Not to mention you could be confronted to rather aggressive fans too: try to sale as a woman in a con devoted to US comics, in France, in the 1990′s, a Steve/Tony mini-zine for instance…You could be sure you were gonna have a “What the hell is this bullshit?!!” thrown at your face about 3 minutes after installing your table.
Now, it’s different: it’s
easier as an artist to promote your art. You don’t need fanzines, you
don’t need to know the right people who own the right fanzines, to hang out with “the cool kids”, you stay
out of the little “fandom wars” at cons between fanzine “big names”,
writers and cosplayers (it was like that in France). In short: you don’t need to
lick anybody’s ass. Don’t get me wrong: fanzines were great, we were
happy to have them back in the days and god bless the fans who were courageous and
enthusiastic enough to write them, print them, produce them but in terms of production,
printing, distribution, and cost, they were a nightmare. They were not
adapted to ambitious art projects and you had zero control either because you were part of a team (unless YOU were the boss). You have more freedom
when it comes to your personal production now. If tomorrow, you want to
start completely on your own a blog devoted to fan art of Inspector Barnaby wearing green ties,
and green ties only, you can do it and you won’t need anybody’s
help: less conflict, less headaches, less fights, less friendships lost
over bullshits. OF COURSE, you still have on the Internet fandom crap,
ship wars, fights over tiny bullshit but all this won’t prevent you to
have your blog or your DA page and to post your art: even if the whole
fucking fandom hates you, you can still post your art (and making a post
that states you don’t care that everybody hates you because you hate
everybody too!)
2) Far less crap in your room
When I was a teen, being a fan meant, for me, amongst other things, collecting magazines and newspapers like The NME, The Melody Maker or
Japanese movie mags. TONS. Even when you cut the interesting pages and
articles and gather them religiously into scrapbooks, they took tons of
space on your shelves and…everywhere! Came a moment where you had to
make a choice because you couldn’t keep everything. Now thanks to the
Internet, you can have tons of pics, even the most useless ones in a
minimum of space: your computer. Of course, it doesn’t prevent you from
buying mags and all kind of memorabilia if you want to but comparatively,
you have less mess around you now as a good part of your fandom
archives are digitalized. Same goes for video or cassette tapes. If you
love PVC figures, of course, you’re in trouble: no way to gain space, and
Internet won’t help you shrink your Captain America Hot Toys figure.
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