Know thyself, or something like that

Sean Kleefeld helped me out a bit with my Superman book, and I've kept up with his writing since then. He writes a fanthropology column over at Freaksugar, and his latest is a good one for contemplation. He advocates interrogating your tastes, finding out exactly what it is about them that you like.

The lesson here seems to be that, if you’re a fan of something, be honest with yourself about what you’re a fan about.

And:

We’re seeing that more and more frequently with people who voted for Trump. People who voted for him, for whatever reasons, and are now seeing him implement policies they didn’t realize would hurt them.

 So what are you a fan of?

Man of Steel Trailer

Here's a link to an interesting piece on Robot 6. What's even more interesting is the discussion that follows it. It all kicks off with a quote from J. Michael Straczynski, followed by some commentary from the columnist Michael May, the trailer for Man of Steel. It's all about the idea of what sort of character Superman should be. The comments below it feature some interesting remarks by Straczynski and by Mark Waid. It's also got a link to another article that I'll probably bring up again some day.

The discussion goes in some interesting directions, particularly its focus on the comment in the trailer that Jonathan Kent makes about how 'maybe' Clark shouldn't have saved a bunch of kids from drowning, so he could protect his secret. It's interesting, but I think I'll wait until the movie comes out and I can see the whole scene before I comment on that.

What was especially interesting was the occasional criticism of Straczynski's Earth One stories. The specifics aren't important here. The important part is that Straczynski himself felt it necessary to chime in with a lengthy defense of his stories. My feelings about Earth One aside (it's utter tripe), I think the fact that the writer had to explain what he was trying to do says loads about how well he did it. Meaning he didn't get his point across very well in the story he told.

The discussion made me think of the types of stories being told today, in movies, television, and comic books. We live in an era where fandoms are becoming the dominant audiences courted by media storytellers and executives, in part because fans spend lots of money on things. So there needs to be lots of things for them to spend their money on. The result of this is that stories are told at great length, with the details fleshed out in sometimes excruciating detail. Star Wars is the perfect example of this. What was essentially one paragraph's worth of information in the original movie became more than six hours of film time (not to mention the animated series, novels, comic books, etc). Some people wanted that story told. Not me. Though I was excited to see them, I liked the spark in my imagination, lit by the hints in that one paragraph of information. The Clone Wars in my head are so much more interesting than what the movies revealed them to be.

Anyway, I think that Superman is most compelling as a fully formed hero, not as a hero-in-the-making. Siegel and Shuster got it right in the first place: limit the back story, get right to the adventures in Metropolis. I don't need to see how he came to the decision to be a hero. In fact, I'd say it diminishes him. It makes it contingent on events, tells us that if something had gone just a little bit different when he was 15, or 16, or 18, or 20, he would be a villain, or a different kind of hero. There are plenty of characters whose stories already do that. For Superman, I'd rather have a lot left to my imagination. But that's just me.

The thing is, I know that telling the story of how Superman made the choice to be a hero can be a valuable story. I have interviewed people for whom that story has made a difference in life, has led them to make their own choices, has given them inspiration: an "If Superman could make the right choice, could figure out the best way to live his life, then so can I" sort of thing. I just hope they don't look to Earth One for this inspiration.

I'm not the greatest photographer. I've come to learn that my greatest fault in that area is that I just don't take enough pictures. Either that's all I'm doing, or I completely forget about it. Nonetheless, I did get some photographic evidence of the Superman Celebration. Let's start with Thursday afternoon, June 10. This was pretty early, so there weren't many people out yet. Other than Captain Canadian, that is.




Let's jump ahead to Sunday, with the group picture of the Superfriends of Metropolis.

Among the Superfriends, you'll find Brian Morris, who was instrumental in my work this year. I met him last year, and we talked for a while. He agreed to let me follow him around a bit this year, and he introduced me to a bunch of people. He is heavily involved in the Celebration, and he writes or helps to write the dramatic components of the opening ceremonies. He's a bit fan, and my interview with him, his wife Cookie, and writer Sean Dulaney at the close of the ceremony was one of the most rewarding parts. Here he is, showing his shield tattoo on his wrist.

Another tattoo, this time on the wrist of Kristina Johnson. It's the kryptonian symbol for hope.

People come from far away for this thing. This year, Angie Shelton of the Metropolis Chamber of Commers had the idea of having people put pins in a map to show everybody just how far. Yep, people come from Europe.

Was that a pin in Iraq?

They also come from Asia.

And just about every state.

The Superman Celebration was very, very warm this year. But I attended most of the events and managed to conduct the sort of fieldwork that will, I hope, make the book worth reading. I cannot express enough thanks to everyone who worked with me.

One of the most common activities at the Celebration is taking pictures. This revolves around the costumers.

The costumers value the pictures more than those who aren't in costume. This is a picture of the process from backstage, so to speak. Batman on left. Wolverine on right. Note Poison Ivy taking pictures in the middle. They're all friends who costume together and attend events like this. They're also members of The Society of Secret Identities.

This is another example of that sort of thing. On the left are a man dressed as Clark Kent and a man dressed as Superman. They're posed to resemble the fight between the divided Kent and Sueprman in Superman III. On the right are a bunch of people. Sorry it's so dark. It was late at night, in a darkened room.

Below is a reading of an old episode of the Adventures of Superman radio show, by a bunch of fans. What I love about the Superman Celebration is the fan involvement. There's a Celebration Committee of local people who organize everything, but over the years the fans who come from miles and miles away have become part of the process. They work with the committee to organize events such as this reading, the costume dance, the opening (and, starting this year, closing) skits that are part of the ceremonies, and other events.

Speaking of the opening skit, this year featured the prisoners of the phantom zone released to once again confront Superman. This is a photo taken after the ceremony ended. I have video of the whole thing, but no photographs. Superman is the official Superman of the celebration, but the other Kryptonians are fans.

Here's the official Superman again.

That'll do for now.

Christopher Reeve

In his autobiography, Still Me, Christopher Reeve doesn't talk about Superman much. It's clear that Reeve liked the role, but didn't like what it did to his career. Following the success of the first movie, he deliberately sought roles that were in no way like Superman. As a result, he selected Somewhere in Time--a movie that evidently flopped on release but now has a very dedicated cult following. I remember seeing all sorts of memorabilia when I visited Mackinac Island, where it was shot.

On top of trying to distance himself from the role, Reeve seems genuinely unaware of how much those movies meant to people. He writes nothing about fans, about people accosting him on the street, etc. You'd think this would have been a major part of his life, but he spends more time describing the comedic stylings of Robin Williams than he spends discussing what Superman meant to people. He gives it one paragraph:

During my stay in Hollywood [for an appearance at the Academy awards; this is after his injury] I entered hotels and buildings through garages, kitchens, and service elevators, and met cooks, waiters, chambermaids, and maintenance crews. Many of them said they were praying for me. Others looked me right in the eye and said, "We love you, Superman. You're our hero." At first I couldn't believe they meant it. Then I realized that they were looking past the chair and honoring me for a role that obviously had real meaning for them. I didn't feel patronized in any way. Clearly a part I had played twenty years before was still valued. The fact that I was in a wheelchair, unable to move below my shoulders, and dependent on the support of others for almost every aspect of my daily life had not diminished the fact that I was--and always would be--their Superman.

Reeve writes about basing Clark Kent on Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, which is awfully obvious once you give it a second's thought. He writes about being the custodian for the character, and that he did his best with it. I wonder what he would think of current comics artist Gary Frank using his face for the comics version of the character in several of the titles now being published.

In all, he devotes about ten pages of 300 to Superman, which shows what his mindset was. For a man who endured a spinal injury that left him quadripeligic, one might think that he would use Superman as an image for the freedom of movement he longed for and could only experience in his dreams. Nope. He mentions his heroes: Charles Lindburg and Harry Houdini, who embodied this longing for freedom for him. The true recurring image is not flying but sailing. He finds it in his dreams every night, and it orders his existence to some extent.

That said, he does report some funny things about Superman:

In the first draft of Superman was a scene in which Superman sees a bald man walking down the street. Thinking it's Lex Luthor, he swoops down to collar him and take him away. But it's Telly Savalas, who says, "Who loves ya, baby?" to the startled Superman and offers him a lollipop.

Reeve is glad they got rid of that scene. And:

The less said about Superman IV the better.

Links

This is but one fan of Reeve Superman, discussing a movie book she found.

Then there's My Enduring Relationship with the Man of Steel, which is about a woman's fascination with Reeve's character. At first, her fantasy is to interview Reeve, as Lois Lane does on her balcony in the movie. After learning that Reeve wasn't really much of a Superman fan, but is everything she hoped he would be as a person, she reconsiders her fantasy:

...while there was always a part of me that wanted to be with a Superman, what became more prevalent was the part of me that wanted to be like him. After all, Superman has given us a role model with qualities that we mortals can emulate without having to bend steel with our bare hands – fortitude, integrity, honesty, humanity.

Comic Book Fanthropology

Sean Kleefeld recently published a book about comic book fans, and I thought it might be a good one for me to read for this project. It's a pretty good book, overall. He calls it Comic Book Fanthropology. He's serializing it over at the website, or you can plunk down a few bucks for a hardcover, paperback, or pdf over at Lulu.com. Kleefeld also keeps a pretty interesting blog.

The book's title throws me off a bit. Kleefeld isn't an anthropologist, nor does he reference anthropologists in his book. Theoretically speaking, his sources come from media studies (McLuhan and Jenkins) as well as social psychology (Tajfel and Turner) more than anything else. I suppose the title might just refer to anthropology as the study of people more than any particular methodology or theoretical stance. And people like puns in titles.

Kleefeld lays out what he's not doing early on: He's not writing a history of fandom, and he's not writing an academic book on fandom. His theory is used sparingly but well applied. Drawing on social psychology (Tajfel and Turner) he elucidates the fact that fandom exists as a social enterprise in part because people like to share their passions and in part because sharing those passions provides an environment where individuals can affirm their identities and boost their sense of self-esteem and -worth. This is all in the early chapters, which also include a brief history. Despite Kleefeld's wish not to write a history, what he does provide works well for him. It shows the origins of fandom as it arises from people getting together to share their passion. First through correspondence and then in person.

In my opinion, the book breaks down in the last few chapters. The chapter I most looked forward to was on participatory culture. Throughout this book, Kleefeld makes the point that fans engage with comics in more ways than merely reading--more than discussing them with friends as well. While Kleefeld lists these ways (including fan music, fiction, costuming, etc) he provides virtually no examples. There's a photo of a man in a Flash suit, but that's about it. Considering that Kleefeld has apparently read Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers (he cites and quotes Jenkins), this oversight is perplexing.

Perhaps my own perspective will tell you a bit more about why I find this chapter disappointing. I'm a folklorist by training. More than any other discipline, folklore brings to the foreground the texts that are relevant to the discussion. It's not unusual for folklorists to tell whole stories during academic talk, presentations, and lectures. Folklore books include multiple versions of any text being studied. If you want to see an examploe, check out one of the more widely known folklore books, Jan Brunvand's The Vanishing Hitchhiker. This is a classic example of how folklorists work. There are probably ten versions of each urban legend studied in that book. Some people think it's repetitive, and it is, but it's supposed to be. The versions aren't all the same, so you get to see how different people tell the same story. Sometimes, those differences are revealing, sometimes they're curious, and sometimes merely amusing.

Back to participatory culture. Let's look at two examples: fiction and costuming. It's not merely that fans write their own stories about characters they love; it's what's in the stories that's important. Jenkins devotes two chapters to fan fiction, and retells a great many of the stories (and story types) that show up. He's dealing with Star Trek, mostly (which would be important to comics fans). He concludes, in the chapter "Welcome to Bisexuality, Captain Kirk," that the women who write these slash stories are doing so because it enables them to imagine the sorts of relationships they would like to see portrayed on screen. These are women writing about characters in shows produced with a male audience in mind. Often these women don't have much choice in what's on the television, so they make the shows into something that suits them. These factors are important, and I would have liked to see Kleefeld at least explore the fiction surrounding one character.

As for costuming, again, Kleefeld leaves a lot unsaid. I have conducted two short interviews with costumers, and it doesn't seem to me to be all that hard to get information with which to analyze the phenomenon. People want to talk about this stuff. One woman I interviewed talked about the clash between fans who make their own costumes and those who buy them at the store. She said she doesn't enter costume contests because the emphasis is often on who is the most attractive woman rather than on who has the best costume. She talked about the process of making a costume, substituting one piece for another in the same costume as she makes it, always approaching the "perfect" costume but never quite reaching it. All this and much more from 45 minutes. Sometimes just pointing out the controversies is enough.

This is the fieldwork process, which anthropologists as well as folklorists and other employ to get the data for their analysis. It's what I expected. It is not, however, what Kleefeld promised at any time, except perhaps in his title.

I may be being a bit harsh here. The early chapters of the book are quite good. The discussion of cultural capital is rewarding and thorough. He gives a description of the ritual of buying comic books that I find absolutely wonderful and will quote in my book about Superman. His reading is that this process, engaged in repeatedly and recurrently, provides the comfort and stability that we can also find in rituals. It's more than just habit. I also appreciate his qualification on the definition of being a fan. It's not merely something you identify yourself as; another fan must also identify you as one. This fits both Kleefeld's themes of self-esteem and sociality. Is sociality a word?

Other strong points include Kleefeld's acknowledgment of the diversity of fandom, and his bibliography. This last one may not sound like much, but to me it is. He's found some sources I'll be checking out soon, and for me this is a very good thing indeed. I know it may seem strange, but I also appreciate the index.

He gives a lot of time and space to what it means to be a fan. I just wish he's given more to showing what the fans mean when they express themselves. The book is, overall, a little too abstracted from actual fans--too many hypothetical examples, despite the fan profiles that punctuate each chapter.

I'm a fan of the case study. Kleefeld might have really driven home his points if he'd done one or two of these. Followed fans through the process of buying and reading comics to the participatory culture that follows. He gets closest when quoting and discussing fan "origin" stories. These are great. I wanted more. I wanted Kleefeld to point out how each fan describes entering the world of comics with someone. It's always a social process. This is his main point, I think.

Kleefeld cannot be faulted for not writing the book I wanted him to write. There are some omissions that could be rectified in a revised edition. The strucutre is there, and it's a good one.

Wow, that got really long.

Fan Culture

I've been struggling with what to do with "fan culture" since it's in some ways the foundation of my project. I'm in the thick of it now. But the problem is that I'm a folklorist who wants my book to be about folklore, not about pop culture. Superman is a strange topic for this, since the character arose in pop culture and has resided there for seventy years.

Well, it's not so much a problem in my mind. One of my goals is to demonstrate how little the boundaries of academic disciplines matter to people in their everyday lives. Medium matters to people, but not the way it does to university departments.

The primary thing that separates folklore from popular culture is standardized production--which is largely irrelevant to most people. Folklore is not mass produced. It doesn't come off the assembly line or the printing press. That's key to the definition of folkloristics as an academic discipline. It's what has historically separated it from others, such as English and film studies, etc. The lack of standardized production means that everytime folklore is performed, it will exhibit variation. Every time you tell a story, it will be different, for a possibly infinite number of reasons. And those differences might be meaningful. Then again, they might not. It's what I love about folklore. Endless possibility.

Fan culture does not so much exist for the performances of folklore. It exists for mediated entertainment, such as comic books. The creations of that fan culture, in the form of fan fiction, for example, would not qualify as folklore because the production, while creative, is standardized. Once you write your story and publish it to the internet, it's always the same. The text doesn't change. Every time someone clicks on it to read it, it's the same (other things may change, but that's a different story).

Yet fan culture does exhibit the variation and multiplicity that I love about folklore. It can come in the jokes told, the costumes made (and endlessly changed, as I'm learning through interviews with people who make and wear them--although there are costumes you can buy at the store, which are quite controversial in the world of fan costuming...), there are tattoos, and anecdotes, and all sorts of interesting bits of folklore. That's what I'm writing about in the first four chapters of my book. It's the stuff generally left out of fan culture studies, which focus on institutional, standardized responses to media.

Here's some stuff I've found about fan cultures:

There's a guy named Henry Jenkins who wrote about Fan Culture a while ago. He's got a blog with several entries about Superman. This one, written in response to the 2006 Superman Returns film, is particularly useful.

Then there's Matthew Pustz' book Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers.

Sort of about fan culture are the works of Lawrence and Jewett: The Myth of the American Hero and The American Monomyth.

Then there's Bill Schelly's The Golden Age of Comic Fandom.

A chapter of Martin Barker's Comics: Ideology, Power and the critics is called "Reading the Readers." I haven't gotten to this yet, but it might be relevant to fan culture.

Christopher Knowles' book Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes isn't of much use, but it does have a few passages about fans, especially about Alex Ross as a fan-turned-creator.

Speaking of fans as creators, Lauire Cowan's documentary Participate: The Revolution of Fan Culture is not too bad. Mostly interviews from a comic con in New York.

For me, the Holy Grail of Superman responses is the fan who posts to the internet something along the lines of "What Superman Means to Me." It's not as common as I'd like, and I get plenty of it from interviews. This essay by The Onion's Noel Murray is a good one, and it concludes thus:

The appeal of Superman–again, maybe just to me, though I think to others as well–is that because he can do everything, he doesn't have to do much at all. He can take care of business and then chill out, solitude-style, at his Arctic clubhouse, where he tinkers with robots and obsessively arranges his souvenirs into a massive monument to himself. Or he can spend a whole day thinking up the perfect birthday present for Batman. Or he can make publicity appearances, while dodging Lois' attempts to find out his secret identity. The stakes are pretty low in those forty-year-old Superman stories–even in the "imaginary tales" where some bored staffer figured out a way to end the endless Superman saga, at least for a week. And if somebody today wants to know how to write a Superman story, it shouldn't be that hard. Just ask a ten-year-old boy what he'd do if he were Superman, and take notes.

There's other good stuff in there, but this strikes me as something I might quote one day--especially that last line.