The super politics of comic book fandom

Symposium Forrest Phillips, Captain America and fans' political activity Babak Zarin, The advocacy of Steve Rogers (aka Captain America), as seen in hetrez's "Average Avengers Local Chapter 7 of New York" Amanda Odom, Professionalism: Hyperrealism and play Rebecca Lucy Busker, Fandom and male privilege: Seven years later Kayley Thomas, Revisioning the smiling villain: Imagetexts and intertextual expression in representations of the filmic Loki on Tumblr Ora C. McWilliams, Who is afraid of a black Spider(-Man)?


Comic book fandom evolves and transforms
Transformation is a political act. Whether it is slash fiction's challenge to heteronormativity, cosplay at political rallies, or editorials that question the white male privilege of fandom, whenever fans appropriate cultural artifacts they transform them for rhetorical purposes. Fandom thus becomes the battleground through which cultural meaning is constructed and as such is always contested terrain. [1.2] The political element to fannish transformation is particularly apparent in the world of comic book fandom. For 75 years comic books have been major art form in popular culture, and since 1938 the superhero has been the major genre of comic books. Superheroes have had such longevity and such mass appeal that they have appeared in nearly every medium of popular culture and become embedded in the cultural psyche. American superheroes have always had a distinctly political element to them-consider Captain America's famous first appearance punching Hitler, or the Adventures of Superman radio show, which transformed him into a defender of "truth, justice, and the American way." The late former Alaskan senator Ted Stevens would gear up for contentious battles on the Senate floor by donning an Incredible Hulk tie, a notsoveiled threat of the consequences of making him angry. "The Inquiry," a 2011 Superman story in the Action Comics 900th anniversary issue, in which the hero renounces his US citizenship in favor of serving all humanity rather than one nation, generated over 600 commentaries on the conservative message boards of The Blaze and over 3,000 at the site of the more centrist Huffington Post. For both dedicated fans and casual consumers, comic books and their characters provide one battlefield in the fight to define cultural meanings. [1.3] This issue of TWC explores 21stcentury comic book fandom and the way it is transforming not only the characters, but also the industry and the art form. The essays that comprise this issue reveal a moment of change, with new voices meeting carriers of tradition and advocates of democratization meeting industrial inertia. Fans still engage in traditional fan practices of indexing, collecting, and forming reading communities, but as they do so, they appropriate and transform the characters, the encounter between the comics art form and diverse genres, and the very comics industry itself. These transformations continue in the traditional form of fans becoming creators, but they take on a specifically political hue. Fans and professionals vie to define the meaning of characters by placing them in new situations; newly visible groups within fandom assert their presence and interests against an industry that continues to define its audience as exclusively white and male. Fans of comic art are also pushing the boundaries between comics and other narrative forms, transforming narrative itself. [2.1] Captain America is a symbol of nationalism, one that has been frequently deployed to construct a rhetoric of national power (Dittmer 2013). In the 1940s he defended America against Nazis, and in the 1950s was reformulated as a "commie smasher." Since the 1970s, though, the character has consciously been written to be less a symbol of specific policy or party than a bearer of more general putatively American ideals. This led the character of Steve Rogers to quit being Captain America on two occasions in the 1970s and 1980s. As Forrest Phillips notes in this issue, this characterization of Captain America has created an icon available for appropriation by both sides of the political spectrum. Examining the use of Captain America iconography particularly through cosplay by the Tea Party and Occupy movements, [4.1] New opportunities for fans to express and reveal themselves have also begun a major change in the industry, but one that has required a fight. Long considered an almost exclusively white male domain, superhero comics had developed in blissful oblivion concerning gender issues. Occasional attempts to address a female market by largely middleaged white male creators were generally condescending (the ladies only like the romance stuff) and often embarrassing (see, for instance, the Femme Force, created in Captain America and the Falcon 144-47, or the earliest incarnations of Valkyrie and the Savage She Hulk). Attempts to relate to an African American audience resulted in the creation of heroes of color, all of whom had to be identified by their color-Black Panther, Black Goliath, Black Lightning. [4.2] In the 1990s, some things began to change. Milestone Comics became the first African American-owned and operated comic book company, and it created several African American heroes that became solid commercial properties (Icon and Static Shock). Still, this was a shortlived success that collapsed along with the rest of the comic book market in the 1990s (for a history of Milestone, see Brown 2000). Heroes of color who do not have to identify themselves by skin color have gained some ground, but not much. DC Comics has a teenage Hispanic from El Paso wielding the scarab of the Blue Beetle, and Marvel has created a new multicultural SpiderMan. Ora C. McWilliams recounts the role of fandom in bringing about this change but also notes some disturbing elements of backlash within the fan community.

The politics of Captain America
[4.3] Women still had little representation, even though they were becoming increasingly visible as fans. Gail Simone's 1999 posting "Women in Refrigerators" raised awareness of the misogyny of superhero comics and the increasingly visible female fan base. This fan base has grown extensively as comics have migrated to film and television over the last 15 years. Whether this greater visibility has generated significant change remains a matter of debate. As Suzanne Scott argues, women are becoming more visible within comic book fandom, despite the major producers' attempts to ignore them. This visibility is an important step toward increasing gender equality, a condition where women will be equally visible to men, and thus gender will be invisible. Rebecca Lucy Busker seeks the same goal, where gender is not an issue, but she sees little change in the male privilege that dominates comic book fandom.
[4.4] The growing visibility of female fans seems generated in part by the migration of comics out of the specialty shop and into the theaters and mainstream bookstores.
At FanFiction.net (http://www.fanfiction.net), for instance, moviebased fiction outnumbers comicsbased fiction almost three to one, and while women are more likely to write fan fiction than men, they seem even more likely to do so for film. This does not mean that women are not fans of comics but that their presence in specifically comic book fandom has been largely invisible (as Scott argues), but it is increasingly less so. The greater visibility of women has generated several battle fronts, from Simone's posting to the Batgirl of San Francisco's protest against the decline of female creators in DC Comics' "New 52." My SoCalled Secret Identity, a project instigated by Will Brooker to create a better Batgirl, discussed in an interview in this issue with Kate Roddy, Carlen Lavigne, and Suzanne Scott, is another battleground for gender awareness in comics, as is the publication of the Kickstarter funded Womanthology. All of these battles not only transform characters, but push toward a transformation of the industry.
[4.5] Fourteen years after "Women in Refrigerators," these battles do seem to be having some effect on the industry. Gender parity is a long way away, but there have been new inroads for female creators at the mainstream houses (although DC Comics seems to be doing a bit better than Marvel in numbers and visibility). The number of female title characters has grown-although again, parity is far off. While I would like to think we have come farther than we have, the current issue of Supergirl comics (#20) features a cover that loosely echoes the Pieta, with Powergirl as the Madonna, her "boob window" centered on the page. In the latest issue of Batman: The Dark Knight (#20), the hero's current love interest finds herself tossed out of a helicopter, crashing (somehow) into the Batsignal atop police headquarters. And although more women are creating comics, frequently they are still, to use Scott's metaphor, getting "fridged." 5. Transformational opportunities of the comics art form [5.1] Melding image and text, comics engage readers on both a textual and visual level; the ways text and image interact open up new possibilities of meaning and create unique opportunities for fan engagement and transformations. The construction of the comics page, separated into panels that capture and freeze a discrete moment of time, fractures time and space. By the very act of engaging the comics page, the reader creates the action that occurs in the gutter-the space between the panels. The presentation of the medium-fracturing time and space and combining image and text -forces the reader to become a transformative participant through the very act of engaging with it at all. [5.2] Several of the essays in this issue explore the unique opportunities for fans to become transformative participants in creating meaning from (and transforming the meaning of) comics. Catherine Coker's essay on slash fiction treating Captain America and Iron Man sets this fan fiction community in a unique position because the source material are comics. She examines how fan fiction is an attempt to create continuity between comic panels "by piecing together those elements visually present in the text with those that are clearly not" ( ¶1.6). She goes further, exploring the manifold transformative opportunities generated by the multiple alternative universes that have arisen over decades of Avengers continuity and transitions across media. This opportunity to create meaning, rendered possible by the spaces between panels and the multiple contexts of the AUs, allows fan fiction writers to give new meaning to the Steve/Tony relationship and to subvert the heteronormative narrative world of superhero comics, rendering the fans "subaltern and subversive practitioners" ( ¶1.2). [5.3] Lyndsay Brown similarly identifies the fractioning of time and space through the comics panel as a central element creating unique opportunities for transformation, particularly as fans suture the panels together. She goes further, exploring how text and image can work together to develop new forms of narrative. Her examination of both professional and fan pornographic comics explores how those elements peculiar to the comics art from can be used not only to create new meanings, but also to create new functions for the narrative. [5.4] The interaction of image and text is also central to transformational reading communities. Kayley Thomas examines fan reactions to the filmic Loki, the villain of The Avengers movie. She explores how fans use GIFs from the film amended by images from comic books, bringing two different fandoms together, to develop a sophisticated encounter with a character who is clearly a villain in the film-charming and attractive, certainly, but a villain nonetheless-and a character cast as part villain and part victim in the comics. Bringing together these two media enables an intertextual and transformative encounter with Loki. Such intertextuality, Thomas argues, can create new meanings and "can break down...hierarchies [in the fan community] by exhibiting engagement with multiple sources and providing coherent meaning for other viewers" ( ¶2.3). [5.5] Democratization of fandom is also a central element of Tim Bavlnka's analysis of the Hypercrisis thread on 4chan (http://4chan.org). This thread, essentially a reading community for the works of comics writer Grant Morrison, attempts to place all of Morrison's writings into a coherent single narrative, deploying images drawn from a 1. Introduction: Fangirls in refrigerators [1.1] In 1999, Gail Simone created a list of the disproportionate number of "superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator" (1999a). As for the wives and girlfriends of superheroes who suffered similar tortures in their decades as damsels in distress, Simone dismissed that as "a whole 'nother problem" (1999b). The title of the list, and the Web site it inspired, refer to Green Lantern #54 (1994) (figure 1), in which the hero's girlfriend, Alex DeWitt, is left dismembered in his refrigerator by villain Major Force (note 1). While the implied violence of the image is unsettling enough, its domestic context and paternalistic tone ("Least she left a note") collectively send a clear message about both the role of women in comics and in comic book culture. The panel is wholly focused on Kyle Rayner's reaction to the discovery of his girlfriend's body, visually composed to emphasize his trauma while obscuring hers. One could argue that this panel is simply a textbook example of comics' expressionistic effects and subjective use of color to convey Rayner's horror, but it also aesthetically symbolizes the concerns that underpin Simone's list (McCloud, 1993). Female comic book readers, like Alex Dewitt or many of the other heroines they identify with, often fade into the background or are obscured from view. Simone's "Women in Refrigerators" list, Green Lantern #54 (1994). [View larger image.] [1.2] In the years since the Women in Refrigerators list was published, Simone has become one of the most visible female creators of mainstream superhero comic books, perhaps best known for her work on superheroinecentric DC Comics titles Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman. Since coming to comic book fandom's attention with the Women in Refrigerators list, Simone has also been a vocal advocate for women in comics, reiterating the list's initial goal: "My simple point has always been: if you demolish most of the characters girls like, then girls won't read comics. That's it!" (1999c). The primary issue for Simone, one that is echoed by many female comic fans, is not just that there are fewer female superheroes (and thus, when they are brutally dispatched or disregarded, their absence leaves a greater demographic hole in the roster of mainstream superhero comics), or that they are often treated as spinoff franchise "baggage" (Batgirl, Supergirl), but what their treatment implicitly suggests about the comic industry's valuation of female readers. Simone ruminates on the impact of comics' implied or intended audience in the site's "Possible Motives" section, acknowledging that statistically, women are understandably "of marginal import" in a medium dominated by male creators and consumers. Simone concludes that, beyond the potential hostility these representations might breed for women venturing into their LCS (local comic shop or store), what is more disheartening is that "there's a feeling of inconsequence, of afterthought, to these stories " (1999b). This essay examines this nagging feeling of inconsequence, and how female comic book creators and fans have visibly and vocally begun to challenge the representations and industrial inequities that perpetuate these feelings. [1.3] The years 2011 and 2012 were marked by increased attention to the place and perception of women within comic book culture, from the pointed questions of the "Batgirl of San Diego" at ComicCon in July 2011 to the publication of Womanthology in March 2012. The increased visibility of these issues can be credited in part to social media platforms like Twitter, a growing network of feminist blogs devoted to geek culture, and the emergence of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. However, this groundswell of criticism must also be viewed as a part of broader contemporary debates around misogyny within maledominated media subcultures. Running parallel to this interrogation of gender and comic book culture, female gamers have begun to document the exclusionary practices and harassment they face within video game subcultures (see the blogs Not in the Kitchen Anymore; Fat, Ugly, or Slutty; Go Make Me A Sandwich). In particular, the vitriolic response to feminist blogger Anita Sarkeesian's Kickstarter campaign to produce a series of critical videos documenting representational tropes of women in video games made national news. Responding only to the project's Kickstarter description, male gamers launched a comprehensive campaign of harassment, including the creation of a Flashbased "game" in which players could physically abuse Sarkeesian (Sarkeesian 2012). This is an extreme case, but it speaks to longpercolating tensions within these communities and increased efforts to maintain "authenticity" and to socially police subcultural boundaries, frequently along gender lines. Comic books and video games, arguably the two media forms most associated with an overwhelmingly male consumer base, also appear be to most concerned about retaining their subcultural capital as geek culture moves from the margins to the mainstream. As the analysis below suggests, events like DC's massive "New 52" rebranding and reboot have provoked criticism from female fans precisely because they presented an explicit (and ultimately missed) opportunity to acknowledge minority readerships and expand comics' fan base. [1.4] I don't mean to suggest that the comic book industry treats female fans as brutally as it occasionally treats its female heroes, but rather that female fans of comic books have long felt "fridged," an audience segment kept on ice and out of view.

Figure 1. The inspiration for
Through a brief survey of existing scholarship on comics' readership, a closer examination of several of the controversies that have reignited debates around the latent sexism of comics, and examples of transformative and critical interventions currently being made by female comic book fans, this essay aims to interrogate the politics of (in)visibility for women within comic book culture.
2. Gendering comic book fandom: A survey of scholarship [2.1] In many cases, we need look no further than the titles of scholarly work on US comic book culture to see how this body of literature reinforces the cultural presumption that comic book fans are overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, male (see

Gerard Jones's Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book;
Matthew J. Pustz's Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers). There are two primary issues with the current body of literature on comic book culture. First, historical data on comic book audiences are both limited and inconsistent, often relying on "imperfect indicators" such as market studies and reader surveys (Gabilliet 2010, 191). If, as Gabilliet suggests, a fuller understanding of the volume and composition of comic book readership is essential, in part because a medium's "visibility is closely correlated with legitimation" (191), then female comic book fans' recent efforts to make themselves visible as a market segment suggests a similar desire to legitimate their identities as comic book fans. Second, comics scholarship often essentializes women's taste in comics along gendered genre lines, at the expense of engaging with the (admittedly small, but robust) female audience for mainstream superhero comics.
The brief survey of scholarship on comic book fandom and readership below suggests a desperate need for more extensive ethnographic and demographic work that addresses how gendered presumptions impact our cultural conception of the audience for comic books. [2.2] In his history of the creators and publishers of early superhero comics, Jones succinctly characterizes comic book fans as "overwhelmingly male, mostly middle class, mostly Anglo or Germanic or Jewish, and mostly isolated" until they discovered comic book fan clubs (2004,33). More specifically, Jones pejoratively depicts comic book fanboys as a collective of Jerry Siegels: small, anxious, withdrawn, and terrified of the opposite sex (26)(27)(28). Jones also notes that, like Siegel's writing, the stories that comic fanboys "loved and wrote were locked in boyish latency, often lacking females entirely; even the occasional damsel in distress tended to be...fairly sexless and unthreatening" (34). Keeping these descriptions of comic book readers' "boyish latency" in mind, comics scholars typically frame age, rather than gender (or race, or sexuality, or class) as the structuring demographic rift within comic book fandom (Pustz 1999, 164-65). As a result, gender is often invoked and quickly dismissed as an analytical axis, citing surveys that estimate that men constitute 90 to 95 percent of the fan base for comic books (Brown 1997; Parsons 1991; Lopes 2009. Invoking these data without any further interrogation allows these studies to focus on society's historically "paternalistic attitude" (Brown 1997, 18) toward comic book fanboys while neatly sidestepping conversations about the patriarchal attitude of comic book culture. [2.3] For example, Jonathan David Tankel and Keith Murphy's ethnographic study of comic book collectors states that "the most striking and expected demographic characteristic of the comic book collectors surveyed is that 100 percent are male" (1998,60). Modeled on the questionnaire used in Janice A. Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Tankel and Murphy's survey group was small (only 38 out of 50 questionnaires were returned, some of them incomplete), making their certainty regarding these extrapolated, "expected demographic" results especially problematic. Tankel and Murphy reinforce their own expectations with industrial and anecdotal evidence to argue that the "overwhelming male dominance" of comic book fandom "remains true despite the efforts that all the major publishers put into winning the readership of females" (1998,(60)(61). In this and many other studies, comic book fandom and culture is coded as always completely male, and the comic book industry's failure to acknowledge the female audience is justified through economic rationalization. In comic books' Golden Age, at the height of its popularity as a mass media form in the 1940s, comics were equally popular with adolescent and preadolescent boys and girls . Though we must also be skeptical of data estimating that 80 to 90 percent of girls ages 6-17 were reading comics around 1944 (Parsons 1991, 69-70), the current discursive construction of women as a surplus audience obscures the fact that they were a preexisting segment of comic books' audience at a time when comics consumption wasn't as stringently gendered. Scholarly accounts of comic book publishers' attempts to reach out to female readers and expand their current fan base tend to stress that these attempts invariably fail (Pustz 1999), with minimal examination of why. [2.4] The issue is not simply that popular and academic literature generally renders female comic book readers invisible; it is also that the moments in which they are visible, they are too frequently compartmentalized and contained. Whether addressing the boom of romance comic books in the postwar period (Lopes 2009), or contemporary transmedia extensions designed to expand a comic book's preexisting male fan base (Jenkins 2007), the gendered genre discourses used to frame past and present industrial efforts to reach out to female readers are problematic on two fronts. First, postwar romance comics, written predominantly by men, featured female protagonists but continued to frame them exclusively through their relationships to men, championing domestic servitude and illustrating the "perils of female independence" (Wright 2001, 128). Likewise, transmedia comics like SpiderMan Loves Mary Jane may have the capacity to nuance female characters that have previously functioned as love interests and/or plot devices and to tell stories from their point of view, but the series' essentialist emphasis on romance (reflected in both form and content) keeps it firmly located in the "pink ghetto" (Radway 1984, 18). Second, and even more troublesome, is the fact that SpiderMan Loves Mary Jane is clearly marked as existing outside of Marvel continuity. Thus, while it might offer new readers a low stakes access point into the SpiderMan canon, it also cordons off these new presumed female readers from the broader continuity traditions, serial pleasures, and community of comic book readership. [2.5] When not addressed through "feminine" genres, female comics audiences are most frequently aligned with independent comics (Pustz 1999). As Trina Robbins (2002) and others have noted, female readers frequently gravitate toward indie titles in part because this is where the vast majority of female comic book writers and artists are working. Courtney Lee Weida notes that the tendency to feminize indie comics, "if feminizing means the inclusion of women's agency as producers of cultural narratives in male dominated narrative artforms" (2011,103), aligns indie comics with zine culture and other spaces in which activist selfpublishing is valued. Many scholars have acknowledged that underground comix culture, despite its typically progressive political leanings, was equally laced with misogyny (Lopes 2009; Pustz 1999. Still, we can see the traces of the DIY ethos behind the underground comix movement and its mobilization as a feminist strategy in publications like Wimmin's Comix in the 1970s (Noomin 2004), within the contemporary transformative projects discussed below. [2.6] Research on female audiences for mainstream superhero comics is limited, in part because of a lack of transparency from publishers who, when they do conduct surveys, do so to "maximize profits within the existing system, rather than seeking to extend the readership of comics across barriers of sex, age, and race" (Gabilliet 2010, 207). Most recently, DC hired the Nielsen Company to gauge the demographic response to the New 52, finding that the relaunch ultimately "galvanized the traditional fan base for superhero comic books: male readers, who were already-or have at one time been-comic book fans" (DCE Editorial 2012). The data culled from over 6,000 surveys conducted in comic stores, via email and online, between September 26 and October 7, 2011, found that 70 percent of the respondents were already avid comic book fans, and 93 percent were male. The fact that only 5 percent of those surveyed indicated that they were new to comics should have been a point of concern for DC; instead, it was widely read as an affirmation "that [DC's] best bet for solvency in the market is to focus exclusively on keeping the 18-34 year old male reader to the exclusion of other demographics, over the protests of many female fans and readers" (Polo 2011). Comic blogger Jill Pantozzi echoed Gabilliet in her response to DC's explicit efforts to target men of ages 18-34 with the relaunch, noting with some frustration that the "survey wasn't meant to tell DC what they were doing wrong or what they could do to get more women to read their books (even though many respondents absolutely told them in the space provided). All the survey proves is that [DC's] lack of trying to do anything to gain a female audience did exactly what was expected-nothing" (2012b). [2.7] Contrary to the results of the Nielsen DC survey, anecdotal evidence suggests that the female readership for comics has been growing over the past decade, in part because of comics' integration into transmedia storytelling models. Reflecting on the noticeable shift in comic book convention attendance over the past several years, Gail Simone recounted an exchange between her husband and a male attendee at a recent convention. While signing books for female fans, noticing female attendees lined up to meet male creators and flocking to booths featuring creators like Amanda Connor, Simone marveled that despite being in "the very epicenter of that, the young man turned to my husband and said, 'I don't care what anyone says, women are never going to read comics'" (2012,17). What female comic book readers must fight for now, Simone suggests, is acknowledgment, in large part because those in power "don't see what's directly in front of them" (2012,17). The next section frames this visibility problem through the allegorical capacity of "Invisible Girl" Sue Storm and the gendered politics of studying subcultures.
3. The politics of invisibility (from Sue Storm to subcultural theory) [3.1] Marvel's The Fantastic Four debuted in 1961 as a superhero narrative focused on the often dysfunctional familial bond among its characters. Given this historical context and the comic's emphasis on how the "problems of human existence interfered with their crimefighting abilities" (Genter 2007, 954), it is difficult to read symbolic matriarch Susan "Sue" Storm (Invisible Girl, later Invisible Woman) outside of the context of secondwave feminism. Wife to Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic), sister to Johnny Storm (the Human Torch), and colleague/caretaker to Ben Grimm (the Thing), Sue's power, her ability to turn herself invisible, could be read as a commentary on the shifting cultural visibility of women's rights in the 1960s. Laura Mattoon D'Amore (2008) has suggested that Sue Storm symbolically represented the 1950s suburban housewife, "undercompensated and unrecognized for her successes," invisible and "unappreciated in a world of and for men." Tracing these tropes within The Fantastic Four comics through the 1960s, D'Amore argues that Sue's invisibility is both literal and figurative, initially mirroring and ultimately deflecting the period's gender norms. [3.2] D'Amore locates this shift from reflection to deflection in 1964's The Fantastic Four #22, in which Sue learns to craft powerful force fields, remaining visible as she projects invisibility onto others. As D'Amore (2008) notes, this "appears to be a limitation-yet another weakness-but in actuality it is critical to her newer, stronger identity. This power privileges her visibility, rendering others (men included) invisible." Thus, though not intentionally constructed as a feminist character, Sue Storm's visibility might be read as a "classic feminist victory," finally positioning her as an equal member of the team. Just as fans advocated for a more empowered Sue Storm in the letter columns of The Fantastic Four in the early 1960s, contemporary comic book fans are becoming increasingly unwilling to accept comic book culture as a world of and for men. We cannot neatly equate visibility with equality; nor should we fail to interrogate the problems and paradoxes surrounding notions of "visibility politics." It is important to acknowledge the enduring centrality of the concept not just to feminist media criticism but to a range of scholarly work on marginalized communities. [3.3] In their seminal 1977 essay "Girls and Subcultures," Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber interrogated the absence of female subjects from the literature emerging from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. McRobbie and Garber's ultimate concern, that "girls subcultures may have become invisible because the very term 'subculture' has acquired such strong masculine overtones" (1993,211), could easily be applied to contemporary concerns about the masculine overtones of "comic book culture." This gendered invisibility is cultivated and sustained through a variety of journalistic, industrial, and academic discourses.
Though media fandom in general has moved out of the subcultural shadows within convergence culture, McRobbie and Garber's claim that the "popular image of a subculture as encoded and defined by the media is likely to be one which emphasizes the male membership, male 'focal concerns, ' and masculine values" (1993, 212) remains firmly entrenched within comic book fandom. [3.4] In an effort to explain why girls were rarely the subject of subcultural studies, McRobbie and Garber observed that girls are likely to retreat or, alternately, become collectively aggressive in situations that are "maledefined" (1993,210). Many female comic book fans have adopted a similar response to the maledefined realm of comic book culture, in which "both the defensive and aggressive responses are structured in reaction against a situation where masculine definitions (and thus sexual labeling, etc.) are in dominance" (210). Joanne Hollows has made a similar argument about cult movie fandom, a subculture that is not only "based on a refusal of competencies and dispositions that are culturally coded as feminine; it may also work structurally to exclude women from participation" (2003,(37)(38). Comic book fandom, like cult movie fandom or other maledominated subcultures, may welcome women if they "opt to be 'one of the boys,'" but this fails to "challenge the power relations which sustain a position in which there are few opportunities to capitalize on femininity" (40) as either a producer or consumer. Thus, it is not enough to be visible; it is the terms and conditions of that visibility that are central. [3.5] My own concerns regarding comic book fangirls' relative invisibility, as a demographic and as a subject of study, echo McRobbie and Garber's anxieties that this might create a "selffulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle" (1993,212) in which women view comic book culture as inaccessible or inhospitable. For example, scholars tend to characterize the LCS, the primary site in which comic book fandom is made visible, as a space reminiscent of a secret clubhouse with policed social barriers of entry for new readers, and in particular female readers. Benjamin Woo's recent work productively describes the social setting of the LCS, and the tensions they exhibit "as both 'sanctuaries' from mainstream hierarchies of taste and status, and arenas of competition for social and subcultural capital" (2011,125). Building on Erving Goffman's distinction between "front" and "back" regions of theatrical performance, Woo allegorically links the inside of an LCS to a backstage area of a theater, a safe and supportive space free of the cultural scrutiny of an audience. Though he characterizes the LCS as a backstage area in which comic book readers aren't forced to manage impressions or perform mainstream taste hierarchies or social norms (131-32), Woo acknowledges that "a region's 'frontness' or 'backness' is relative to the performers and audiences in question" (2011,132). [3.6] When women are mentioned as inhabitants of the subcultural space of the LCS (either in scholarly or conversational accounts), they tend to be framed as highly visible precisely because of their pervasive framing as subcultural interlopers. In this panoptic model, visibility is not desirable but rather a trap that induces a "state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (Foucault 1995, 201). This has not been my personal experience as a patron of comic book shops, and gender rarely enters Woo's ethnographic account of the two social regions that LCS patrons occupy. Still, the notion that women might be simultaneously subjected to the front region's pressure to performatively manage impressions and be scrutinized by the audience (in this case, male patrons, as well as, frequently, shop owners and staff), and denied the invisibility afforded by the back region as a space for performers/fans to let down their guard and collectively engage in conversation and social rituals, is often reinforced in the characterization of comic book shops (Pustz 1999). Female comic book fans, like Sue Storm, must consider the different and often paradoxical, forms of power that visibility and invisibility afford. If the goal is for female comic creators and fans to become more than an industrial niche or surplus audience, to become invisible (read: accepted) members of that culture, increased visibility will be necessary to encourage that shift. [3.7] Because comic book culture is male defined, and because this perception has permeated both the collective consumer consciousness and the spaces in which those exchanges take place, it is understandable that many female comic book fans have taken it upon themselves to construct alternative, fangirlfriendly spaces. Henry Jenkins has argued that a "politics of participation starts from the assumption that we may have greater collective bargaining power if we form consumption communities" (2006,249). The fact that Jenkins's example of such a community is Sequential Tart, a Web zine and community that was formed in 1997 as "as an advocacy group for female consumers frustrated by their historic neglect or patronizing treatment by the comics industry" (249), is evidence that the medium of comics is perhaps most in need of such a politics of participation. In addition to other organizations with similar advocacy goals, such as Friends of Lulu, the boom in recent years of blogs that resonate with Sequential Tart's mission, such as DC Women Kicking Ass, The Mary Sue, Girls Read Comics Too, and Has Boobs, Reads Comics, among many others, is heartening. Even more encouraging is the politics of visibility that has recently emerged around and through these consumption communities, which have been wielded as weapons of intervention in the gender and comics debate.
4. Form and feminism (or, why we care how Mary Jane drinks her coffee) [4.1] The increased visibility of female comic book fans in 2011 and 2012 was due in large part to a string of compounding controversies that prompted an outpouring of criticism and commentary online. As Simone's initial Women in Refrigerators list makes clear, debates surrounding the links between comics' representation and readership are not new but have been revived with renewed interest amid broader conversations about women in comic book culture and comics' industrial survival. This section briefly discusses three notable firestorms of 2011: the Batgirl of San Diego, the response to hypersexualized female characters in the New 52, and the Mary Jane Drinks Coffee meme. Importantly, these three controversies suggest that comic book fans are increasingly producing transformative commentary, turning the male gaze of comic book culture back on itself, and holding the industry accountable for the paltry number of women being hired to work on mainstream superhero titles.
[4.2] At San Diego ComicCon 2011, a woman dressed as the Stephanie Brown iteration of Batgirl attended a range of DC Comics panels and waited patiently in line to ask a question of the overwhelmingly male panelists. Considering that the majority of these panels were expressly designed to promote the launch of the New 52, the questions themselves were not particularly controversial. They were questions about creators, which heroes would be featured, and comments on leaked covers and promotional images online. What was controversial was that each of these questions cordially, but pointedly, asked DC creators and publishers to explain the lack of female characters and creators being featured in DC's reboot. It is important to acknowledge that this fangirl, quickly dubbed the "Batgirl of San Diego" and now known by her handle, Kyrax2, wasn't the only attendee to interrogate the noticeable shift in the demographics of DC's creative teams surrounding the new line, with female creators dropping from approximately 12 percent to making up only 1 percent of DC's talent roster. One sound bite that circulated widely featured a male fan posing a similar question, only to be testily challenged and ultimately silenced by DC copublisher Dan DiDio.
[4.3] Ironically, the originator of the Women in Refrigerators list now frequently serves as a tokenist example of publishers' efforts to support female creators. As arguably the most prominent female writer for DC Comics, publishers and fans' frequent reliance on the "Gail Simone defense" when confronted with the aforementioned statistics makes tactical sense (in other words, if Simone, a vocal critic of gender and comics, chooses to align herself with DC and is known to craft narratives centered around compelling female characters, then the industry clearly doesn't have a gender bias) but ultimately only highlights industrial inequities. In particular, Simone's attachment to the New 52's Batgirl reboot suggests that her visibility as a female comic creator and critic is a doubleedged sword. Though female fans were certainly pleased that Batgirl was getting her own title, many were disappointed to learn that Simone would be relaunching the character of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl, effectively erasing Gordon's tenure as Oracle after being paralyzed by the Joker in Alan Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke (1988). In the New 52's Batgirl, Barbara regains the use of her legs three years after being shot by the Joker, and quickly slips back into the cape and cowl. While rebooting characters has been a common strategy of the New 52, many fans felt that the decision smacked of ableism and were especially critical of Simone, who as a feminist creator was expected to be more sensitive to these representational shifts and their impact on minority readerships.
[4.4] If Simone's industrial presence has become somewhat symbolic, invoked to quickly dispel criticism of industrial inequities (note 2), what made the Batgirl of San Diego such a powerful symbol was her consistent, visible presence at DC's panels, the persistence of her questions, and other fans' response. In response to the Batgirl of San Diego, Laura Sneddon (2011) of comicbookgrrrl.com observed: [4.5] Typically, questions about women in comics from women in the audience were prefaced with the usual disclaimers-"I mean absolutely no malice," "I don't want this question to come across as confrontational"-in full knowledge of the likely reaction. That the rest of the audience booed and heckled these women is, sadly, no big surprise. You only need turn to any large online comics forum to see a slew of (mostly male but not all) comic fans condescendingly dismissing women's concerns about female diversity in comics. In a society where pop culture is very much dominated still by men, and the male gaze, it is very easy for our concerns to be brushed aside.
[4.6] Unquestionably, the Batgirl of San Diego's unwillingness to be treated as a surplus reader challenged widespread presumptions about superhero comic book readership, but she also exposed the gendered nature of ComicCon as a space.
Doreen Massey has argued that spaces and places are not only gendered but also "reflect and affect the ways in which gender is constructed and understood," noting that attempts at spatial control can extend to a social control of identity (1994,179). Fan conventions have historically been characterized as safe, even utopian spaces in which differences are embraced. My work on the Twilight protests at San Diego Comic Con 2009 (Scott 2011), the recent sexual harassment debacle at Readercon 23 (Colby et al. 2012), and comic book artist Tony Harris's November 2012 Facebook screed against "COSPLAYChiks [sic]" who "DONT [sic] KNOW SHIT ABOUT COMICS" (Dickens 2012), all indicate that these utopian characterizations of comic book conventions belie how gendered subcultural tensions manifest in these spaces. Specifically, the hostility directed at the Batgirl of San Diego from fans and publishers alike suggests a sort of panopti(comic)con, in which fan expression is increasingly policed. Like the aforementioned panoptic qualities of the LCS, conventions transpose the implied male gaze of comics into physical spaces, realizing John Berger's claim that "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at" (1973,47). If female comic fans are simultaneously prisoner and guard, it is in large part because comic book form itself encourages women to "consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman" (Berger 1973, 46).
[4.7] The New 52, which presented a prime opportunity to attract new readers and reboot both comic book franchises and the comic book industry at large, instead kept its focus firmly on 18to34yearold men and accordingly kept its superheroines in "outfits that catch the eye and erect the crotch" (Sneddon 2011). Many female comic bloggers argued that it was not simply an issue of costuming, though a wave of cross dressing and genderswap memes accompanying the New 52's release made these disparities abundantly, and comically, clear (note 3). To the male comic book fans who frequently rationalized or openly dismissed complaints about the representation of women in comics by noting that the male superhero body is hypermasculinized, these female bloggers argued that "the 'ideal' nature of male superhero bodies will always focus on strength and fitness while the 'ideal' nature of female superhero bodies will always focus on sexiness and vulnerability" (Sneddon 2011). In particular, Guillem March's cover image for Catwoman #0, one of the only femalecentric titles in the relaunch, was criticized and endlessly parodied (RoboPanda 2012) for exhibiting the "broken back" syndrome that many superheroines aesthetically suffer from (figure 2).  what precisely Catwoman and Starfire were asking female readers to aspire to, Laura Hudson (2011) asked a common question and arrived at a common answer: "Why is she contorting her body in that weird way? Who is she posing for, because it doesn't even seem to be Roy Harper? The answer, dear reader, is that she is posing for you.
News flash: Starfire isn't being promiscuous because this comic wants to support progressive notions of gender roles. Starfire is being promiscuous so that you can look at [her]." It is difficult not to hear John Berger in Hudson's remarks, particularly the notion that, under these conditions, a woman's "own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another" (1973,46).  Watson fretting about Spidey's safety over her morning coffee, provoked a string of parodic images in which fans attempted to contort themselves into Mary Jane's pose (Sicha 2011). The backlash also prompted artists to rework the image, sometimes in radically different styles, but more often than not hewing closely to the original cover, arguing that minor alterations were enough to make the image more relatable without sacrificing Mary Jane's sex appeal (figure 4). One commenter summarized these frustrations: "Look, I get it. Mary Jane is hot, but for Christ's sake, this is why girls feel alienated from comics. This is not how a human lounges. [...] This is what we're talking about when we say 'male gaze'" (werockthisshit in kitfoxhawaii 2011). Because Mary Jane is presumably alone in her apartment, the performative pose assumes "the determining male gaze" of a heterosexual comic book reader projecting his fantasies on the female form. Mary Jane, like the Hollywood actresses in Mulvey's initial study, is thus "styled accordingly...simultaneously looked at and displayed, with [her] appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that [she] can be said to connote tobelookedatness" (Mulvey 1999, 837). [ View larger image.] [4.10] Though it is clearly popular to channel Laura Mulvey in these critiques of the male gaze of mainstream comic book art (and perhaps comic book culture by extension), a 1979 interview with science fiction author Samuel R. Delany in Comics Journal is quick to differentiate between the respective gazes of film, television, and comics. Privileging the gaze of comics over other media forms, Delany cited the unprecedented control the medium offers: "Viewers can control the speed their gazes travel through the medium, they can control how far away or close they hold the page, whether they go backwards and regaze-and going back in a comic book is a very different process from going back in a novel to reread a previous paragraph or chapter " (1979, 40). Arguing that the nature of the medium renders the reader a "coproducer" of the text, Delany's notion of the "regaze," while compelling, doesn't address the issue that women are rarely considered in these terms. Thus, despite comics' great potential, they still fall prey to many of the same issues Mulvey identified with respect to film, and perhaps exacerbate the male gaze via this gendered control of the regazing and the bodies of female superheroes. This unprecedented control of the gaze also evokes the panoptic power of the prison guard, with superheroines arranged in their panels/cells, performing this state of constant visibility for an invisible male spectator. [4.11] In the letters column of Saga #4, writer Brian K. Vaughn shared the results of a tongueincheek reader survey he had placed in the prior issue. Having requested readers to list their age, Vaughn noted that 35 percent of the respondents made a point of identifying themselves as women, despite the fact that he hadn't directly solicited gender demographics. While this is not entirely surprising, given Vaughn's reputation for producing work with compelling female characters and feminist undertones (Y: The Last Man, Runaways, Ex Machina) and the large female fan base that artist Fiona Staples brings to the project, the fact that these respondents felt compelled to specify their gender is telling. The growing desire for women to be counted, or rendered a visible part of the comics fan base, and the industry's reticence to listen have resulted in crowdfunded endeavors. These projects strive to rectify some of the aforementioned representational inequities and prove there is a paying audience for more progressive female superheroes; but centrally, they are concerned with making female comics creators and fans visible on their own terms.

A transformative intervention:
The case of Womanthology [5.1] In May 2011, in the wake of controversies surrounding DC's New 52 and various other calls from female comic fans to be acknowledged as both producers and consumers, artist Renae De Liz tweeted and pitched the notion of a charitable comic anthology created entirely by women. A little over one month and one hundred contributors later, a Kickstarter page was created to raise $25,000 for printing costs, with IDW Publishing supporting the release. After surpassing the initial fundraising goal in less than 24 hours, Womanthology: Heroic went on to raise over $109,000, becoming one of the most successful crowdfunding endeavors in the history of Kickstarter. Though there has been some debate surrounding the project's charitable giving and distribution of funds (Khouri 2011), the anthology was successful enough to prompt IDW to commit to a fiveissue Womanthology: Space miniseries, which launched in September 2012. This miniseries furthers the project's initial goal of carving out a space for female comic book creators to share their work, but it also demonstrates the potential of projects like Womanthology as a transformative industrial intervention. [5.2] I don't use the word transformative here as we might when discussing fan works (that is, fan fiction or other texts created by fans and inspired by a media property), in part because Womanthology features wholly original works. So rather than framing Womanthology as a textually transformative work that, in the Supreme Court's terms, "adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning or message" (Campbell v. AcuffRose Music Inc. 1994), I would categorize it as an industrially transformative work, one that strives to effect the same change on the comic book industry that a fan might on a media property, bending it to align with textually unacknowledged identities and desires and wielding it as a mode of critical commentary. Womanthology: Heroic is thus pointedly the antithesis of a monthly comic book, weighty in both size and mission, distancing itself from the pejorative implications of the "floppy" and its historic treatment, often mistreatment, of female creators, character, and consumers.
Though diverse in genre, style, and tone, the comics thematically coalesce around and interrogate our culture's narrow, often rigidly gendered, definitions of heroism. As the cover image indicates (figure 5), many of the comics feature preadolescent and adolescent girls as protagonists, visualizing an untapped market key to the industry's future survival and articulating textual and aesthetic frustrations with mainstream comics. Heart a Masterwork," exemplifies these tropes and celebrates the transformative drive of female fans. Focused on a precocious young girl who pilfers and "fixes" her big brother's violent, hypersexualized comic books, "In Every Heart a Masterwork" models how fannish frustration can prompt creative intervention. Following a triptych in which the young female protagonist rifles through her brother's comics (notably, the center panel pictures the girl holding up a comic book featuring a busty dragon slayer, "Beastia," as one might a Playboy centerfold), she sets to work with her art kit. The comic closes with the girl's mother offering to buy her daughter "some comics a girl might like," to which the girl replies, "It's okay Momma-I made my own" (figure 6). The image of the transformed comics that concludes the story highlights a range of fannish (and potentially feminist) rewriting strategies, from the reconfiguration of Beastia as a fully clothed cowgirl, to the generic subversion of the zombie comic, to the Mary Sue-ish selfinsertion, to the potential slash relationship connoted by the heart placed between two male characters. The celebration of transformative textual play in this particular comic is reinforced by the "Pro Tips" peppered throughout the anthology, expressly designed to encourage readers to create their own comics. These Pro Tips range from practical advice to general words of encouragement, supplemented with indepth walkthroughs on how to write, draw, ink, color, and letter comics, and interviews with notable female creators on their creative process. Simone and Jean Kang's contribution to Womanthology, "In Every Heart a Masterwork" (2011). [View larger

Figure 6. Transformative intervention is foregrounded in Gail
image.] [5.4] Other comics in the collection, such as this singlepage untitled comic by Miss LaskoGross (figure 7), openly play on gendered notions of visibility, suggesting that even heroics of the highest order might become a form of women's work within our current cultural frame. Across seven dialoguefree panels, Miss LaskoGross's heroine slays ghouls, gladiators, dragons, and killer robots, only to return home to a hungry male partner lazing in bed requesting a sandwich. The physicality of the female protagonist clearly plays off of longstanding debates within comic book culture regarding representation. The punch line of the sandwich, and the heroine's response, speaks directly to the weariness of female fans of purportedly masculine properties and media forms being consistently told to "get back in the kitchen." This Internet forum refrain has grown alongside female fans' (particular female gamers and comic book readers) increased efforts to expose and denounce sexism in their respective communities over the past several years (note 4). What Miss LaskoGross's comic does so effectively, and so economically, is capture the moment of grudging disappointment that accompanies these regressive dismissals. Many of the comics in Womanthology similarly grapple with gender norms and their social enforcement.

Figure 7. This untitled comic by Miss LaskoGross in Womanthology (2011) reframes
and reflects on the notion of "women's work" and the common digital dismissal, "Go make me a sandwich." [View larger image.] [5.5] In some senses, a project like Womanthology can be viewed as an attempt to work through the tensions that invariably accompany discussions of gender, visibility, and fan culture. First, though it primarily focuses on the inequitable gender politics of mainstream comics, it points toward other marginalized or minority voices in comics, including works that consider heroism through the lenses of race, age, and mental and physical ability. As fan culture and fan studies broadly begin to look beyond gender as its primary critical axis to consider other marginalized audiences, the collection's attention to diversity, not just in content and style but in contributor demographics, suggests an attempt to raise the visibility of more than just female comic creators and readers. Second, while the collection shares many of the qualities and core traits of feminine fannish gift economies, Womanthology explicitly pitched itself as a professional launching pad for its contributors. The majority of fan creators show limited interest in industrial exposure, choosing instead to circulate their works for free as a mode of building and maintaining communal bonds. If this mode of feminine textual production remains relatively invisible to those outside these communities of practice, Womanthology's overt effort to exchange free labor for industrial visibility suggests a tentative step toward a reconciliation between commercial and gift economies that retains the appeal of both. Debates around the commercialization of fan labor are ongoing, and the collection's capacity to inject the comic industry with emerging female creators remains to be seen, but Womanthology makes a compelling case for how gendered means of amateur production as an entrée to professionalization (modding, fan filmmaking), might be used to feminist ends. Bukatman, and Thomas LaMarre. The aim of this dialogue was to survey the state of the field and contemplate its future as a burgeoning object of study. Discussing the lack of "exemplary" comics scholarship and how the difficulties of navigating a hybrid scholarly identity might contribute to such a lack, Bukatman noted:

Conclusion: Why the "what" matters
[6.2] Younger scholars, many of whom are comic fans, feel that they have to overburden their objects of study with a lot of ideological analysis. So there is a wave of "representations of" studies-African Americans in comics, queer characters in comics, and so on. It becomes a very predictable parade of concerns that played through in other fields decades ago. It also, often, serves to rob these objects of whatever pleasures they may have contained for the very scholars producing the work. But it serves the purpose of separating the scholar from the fan and demonstrating to the home department that the scholar is, indeed, doing "serious" work. (Smith et al. 2011, 138) [6.3] LaMarre concurred that "rather than grapple with the 'how' of comics, scholars tend to dwell on the 'what' of comics" (Smith et al. 2011, 138), a concern that reflects broader anxieties surrounding the "comics and..." logic that has dominated much of comics scholarship in the age of transmedia storytelling and superhero movie franchises. I am in no way advocating that comic book studies rehash (or worse, be subsumed by) media studies methods and discourses designed to address wholly different media forms. Nonetheless, this essay suggests that comic book culture is currently witnessing a potentially transformative feminist intervention in which the "how" and the "what" of comics are being placed in meaningful conversation. Like Simone's Women in Refrigerators list, which situated a discussion of superhero comics' narrative tropes and representations within broader concerns about the comic book industry and its conception of the audience, what I am calling for is an integrated approach to comic book studies in which discussions of the distinct pleasures of comic form and ideological analyses are not mutually exclusive. At the risk of overburdening LaMarre's comment, I am interested in a future for comic book studies that creates critical intersections between the "how" and the "what" of comics, in addition to considering the "who" (audience) and the "why" (economics/industry demographics).
[6.4] Fan scholars, whether they embrace the acafan portmanteau or not, have been grappling with questions around affect and academia for decades. If, as Bukatman argues, affect is not the enemy of objective, robust scholarship, and that "the fan's stance is the perfect starting point for beginning an analysis: 'This fascinates mewhy?'" (Smith et al. 2011, 139), than the expressions of frustration currently emerging from comic book fandom provide an ideal starting point to consider the transformative potential of these conversations and a productive direction (among many) for the growing field of comics studies. Andrae and Bukatman both acknowledge that fans were the first to seriously study comics and that some of the best contemporary comics scholarship is being produced outside of the academy by fan bloggers . While the analysis above reflects on only a small portion of feminist criticisms currently being levied at the comic book industry by fans, it collectively exposes a need for more scholarship on comic book audiences.
[6.5] Meanwhile, projects are emerging that suggest compelling, transformative possibilities for comic book creators, fans, and scholars to collaboratively speak back to comic book culture. A project like My SoCalled Secret Identity, initiated by media scholar Will Brooker out of a desire to "build a better Batgirl," models a collaborative approach to transformative criticism that foregrounds the work of female artists and collaborators to comment on, and creatively correct, some of the more problematic tropes that tend to weigh down superheroine comics. Brooker's 2001 book Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon, opened with an admission and embrace of his longstanding affective ties to the property and reflected on his own fannish textual production. Likewise, the article that inspired My SoCalled Secret Identity, a history of the Barbara Gordon iteration of Batgirl, models precisely the sort of scholarly impulse Bukatman suggests might be most fruitful for emerging comics studies. As Brooker's project and the growing array of femaledriven comics criticism makes clear, fannish frustration can be also be a perfect starting point to begin an analysis. Fascination will unquestionably drive the future waves of comics scholarship, but frustration might facilitate more praxisoriented, transformative approaches to this work.
[6.6] The stakes are ultimately higher than building a better Batgirl; they're about building a better comic book culture, one that acknowledges and holds itself accountable to its diverse and passionate readership. Fittingly, the cover image that accompanied Cinema Journal's first major foray into comic studies was taken from R.
Sikoryak's "Masterpiece Comics" series, which fannishly mashes up iconic comic characters with canonical literary works and authors (figure 8). Sikoryak's "Action Camus" offers an absurdist spin on Action Comics' Superman, but it also neatly (and perhaps unwittingly) encapsulates the gendered tensions currently underpinning comic book culture. One of the dangers of visibility politics, a byproduct of its either/or logic, is that it has the potential to reproduce the very structures of dominance and exclusion that it seeks to dismantle. I am not advocating for comic book scholars or the comics industry to exclusively focus their energies on female readers at the expense of misrepresenting or alienating comics' core demographic. Reading "Action Camus" as a satire of the comic book industry's historically genreessentialist efforts to appeal to female readers and a commentary on superhero comics' estranged relationship with female fans, 2011 and 2012 have witnessed female comic fans grappling with their containment as Miss Maries within comic book fandom. We don't need to be told that we're loved, but we would like to be assured that we aren't meaningless.  1. Problematizing comics fandom: A multitude of textual universes [1.1] The relationship between slash fan fiction and comics fandom is problematic not only because of the shift of medium from source text to fan text but also because of the shift of fan community. Comics fandom is often viewed as consisting of heterosexual white men and comics are often explicitly marketed to them, excluding and othering the rest of the audience. Comics fandom online subverts this expectation of audience because the majority of fan authors and creators are women. While canon plots privilege action and conflict, and the problematic depiction of women characters in them is so obvious it hardly need be discussed, comics fan fiction reverses these trends: stories privilege emotional arcs, and female characters are depicted as more recognizably human even when they are secondary to the male characters. [1.2] Comics fan works thus become completely transformative because of the shift in both fan space and fan audience: texts that are homophobic become homophiliac, authors and readers who are male become female, and that which had previously been other becomes the new norm. For these reasons, the fans are not just aware but indeed hyperaware of their own identity as subaltern and subversive practitioners. [1.3] When the overwhelming presentations appear homophobic, where are the positive queer identities to be found in these works? That homophobia is used throughout these texts (and others within the comics genre) by the authors to establish queer identities has been made readily apparent. All too often these identities are crafted as a reaction to the homosexual's interruption of society's heteronormative homosocial. As a result, these homophobic identities regularly appear as threats to heterosexual society: gays as murderers, villains, rapists, and pedophiles.
And yet we have also seen where the positive identities can exist. It is due to the very nature of comics' physical attributes (their visual aspects, panel structures, and blank gutters) that we are allowed an alternative space where queer identities that are not saddled with homophobia can be formed. (Buso 2010, 79-80) [1.4] Through this lens, all of comics slash fandom becomes a resistant and even a queer reading, an insistence on enacting and creating a virtual safe space for fans.
Further, this selfawareness of identity (as feminine, as queer) becomes explicitly politicized through its declaration of being, which is then often rewritten from within the fan texts themselves. Comics fandom and fan fiction in particular face an especially unusual challenge because of the difference of medium. While many comics fan works are themselves comics-some of which are of professional quality in both artwork and writing-many more are in the traditional fan fiction format of short stories or novels. In some ways, this format is at odds with the original medium, in which the interplay of illustration, textual narrative, and dialogue is as crucial to the form as the story itself. For instance, Scott McCloud explains what he calls closure by describing how the comics format invites the reader to acknowledge that comics (and thus, all texts) are artificial creations that our brains then rationalize to fill in the blanks: [1.5] See that space between the panels? That's what comics aficionados have named "the gutter." And despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics. Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea. Nothing is seen between the two panels, but experience tells you something must be there.
Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality. (1993, 67) [1.6] Fan fiction and other fan works are efforts to join these disconnected moments and make sense of them in another fashion, by piecing together those elements visually present in the text with those that are clearly not. Reconstructing these pieces to create new works is not only a part of reading comics textually but also a part of reading fan works.
[ drunken binge, and in general is treated as more of a problem celeb than an icon.
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) wears all the tropes of a conventional war story on its sleeve far more than it does those of the superhero genre. [1.9] In the slash genre, however, this playing on expectations can present new problems for the reader. Traditional slash narratives have often posed an issue for readers in that they essentially reproduce aspects of the traditional romance with the notable difference that the protagonists are, of course, two men. It has only been in the last decade that fan writers have become more willing to label the characters of these stories gay, or at least bisexual; especially in the 1970s and 1980s, fans wanted to distance beloved characters from the stereotypes and even the identity of gayness (note 1). Instead, they depicted the men as sharing a great, transcendent love that eliminated the boundaries of gender. Indeed, it was an article of faith that neither man would have had samesex sex prior to their romantic involvement with each otherunless, of course, one of them had previously been prostituted or raped, in which case the sexual consummation became a sexual healing. This specific genre of hurt/comfort fiction earned the notable appellation "magic cock stories," of which much more could be said, perhaps, but not in this essay.
[1.10] Many scholars have attempted to explain why women read and write slash stories. For the purposes of this study, I'm not interested in recapitulating this research, since it has been so heavily documented elsewhere, but I would like to note the work of Joanna Russ on the topic. "If you ask 'Why two males?'" she said, "I think the answer is that of eighteenthcentury grammarians to questions about the masculinepreferred pronoun: 'Because it is more noble.'…No one [can] imagine a man and woman having the same multiplex, worthy, androgynous relationship, or the same completely intimate commitment" (1985,84). [1.11] As frustrating as it seems some 30 years later, this attitude definitely persists.
Further, the most specific element-(gender) equality-actually grounds the Captain America/Iron Man or the Steve/Tony ship. As written by fans of that ship, their relationship is the only possible true partnership (figure 1). [1.12] Steve is an idealist with a practical streak, while Tony is an "ends justify the means" pragmatist with an idealistic streak. This leads to frequent clashes between the two of them over methods and tactics, but at [sic] also means that the two of them balance one another remarkably well.  [1.13] The selfawareness of fandom transforms within the Steve/Tony ship into fiction that verges on nonfictional commentary, or meta, rather than story. The romance as realized by the fans translates into Steve and Tony becoming aware of and analyzing their own feelings at length. A popular trope within the fandom is that of identification and explication; the goal of the story is for the characters to come to terms not only with being in a samesex relationship but also with why the specific relationship works for them. [1.14] Rogers didn't look surprised or curious at all. Just frustrated. "Let me guess," he said sharply. "What on Earth could a nice guy like me see in-Tony." Lindsay could actually hear the adjectives Rogers had cut out of the sentence. "Do you know how many people just walk up to me on the street every day and ask me that?" Rogers demanded. "And now it's apparently such a tantalizing mystery," he said the word like an insult, "that you're willing to risk your life over it? What is wrong with you?" "Steve-" Tony began, his tone apologetic.
Rogers spun to face Stark instead of Lindsay. "No!" he snapped. "This is not your fault. And it's not a 'reasonable level of media interest' either." The quote in the words was clear. "When did reporters lose all respect for privacy and decorum? And why is it so unbelievable that I'd fall in love with a dedicated and brilliant man with whom I've shared some of the most significant moments of my life?" (Nix 2012; emphasis added) [1.15] This trope not only allows for character studies but also offers fans a route to conversion to the ship. A reader who is curious about the pairing may be more convinced by, and become more invested in, the ship by a fictionalized account of how the romance works than by a detailed nonfiction analysis like the Ship Manifesto.
[1.16] Anne Kustritz reiterates this idea in her essay "Slashing the Romance Narrative," in which she says, [1.17] Slashers often exaggerate the extent to which slash characters seem drawn to talk about the power dynamics within their relationship, demonstrated in a series of stories that parodied the characters' tendency to begin philosophical discussions about their relationship during sex…Authors meticulously create an equality relationship dynamic in which characters are completely equal in everything from decision making to love making, and from patterns of dress to household chores to levels of attractiveness and financial security. (2003,377) [1.18] However, this dynamic is rewritten by Steve/Tony fandom in that, in Steve's and Tony's private lives at least, there is a fundamental difference in wealth. Steve came of age in the New York of the 1930s, with its soup kitchens and breadlines. In some comic and film time lines, he has also spent time in an orphanage or boys' home after his mother died of TB, and has been an art student struggling with tuition bills. He has always had to work to make ends meet, and often meager ends at that. In contrast, Tony Stark has always been a wealthy, privileged profligate. Essentially, despite their equality as male superheroes, their material disparity returns their relationship to something closer to the traditional romance, with Tony as the wealthy, experienced suitor and Steve the innocent ingenue. [1.19] In some ways, fandom anticipated this element of class and economic tension prior to the 2012 film. In that film, Steve and Tony have multiple verbal confrontations stemming from their different backgrounds: [1.20] Tony Stark: Following is not really my style.

Steve Rogers:
And you're all about style, aren't you?
Tony Stark: Of the people in this room, which one is (a) wearing a spangly outfit, and (b) not of use? … Steve Rogers: Yeah, big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?
Steve Rogers: I know guys with none of that worth ten of you. I've seen the footage. The only thing you really fight for is yourself. You're not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you.
Tony Stark: I think I would just cut the wire.
Steve Rogers: Always a way out. You know, you may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero.
Tony Stark: A hero, like you? You're a laboratory experiment, Rogers. Everything special about you came out of a bottle. (Whedon 2012) [1.21] These scenes echo many that had already appeared in fan stories, in which Steve and Tony are unable to get along because of their clashing personalities. In "Ready, Fire, Aim" by gyzym, they aren't even able to apologize to one another without getting into another fight: [1.22] "You came all the way out here to apologize?" Tony says. "Have they not taught you to use the phone, like normal people?" "I'm not apologizing!" Steve snaps, and then visibly reigns [sic] himself in. "No, you know what, I am apologizing. I'm sorry. I'm just…not adjusting all that well, I guess, and then there's you, and you look a lot like-" "Get out of my house," Tony says, instinctive, automatic, before he can finish that comparison.
Steve jerks back, stunned, and then narrows his eyes. "Excuse me?" "You heard me," Tony says. "Look, Rogers, you want teammates or whatever, fine, great, you've got a whole gaggle of S.H.I.E.L.D. cronies waiting to bust out their guitars and sing Kumbaya with you, have fun, but I told you, I don't play well with others, okay? So you and your…apology or whatever, you can just go, I don't need you to do me any fucking favors." Steve stares at him with his mouth open for a long minute. Then he says, "What're you-no, you know what, I don't care. Fine. If that's the way you want this to be, that's just fine with me. Have a lovely evening, Mr. Stark." "Fine!" says Tony. "Good! Great! I will!" (gyzym 2011) [1.23] In fan fiction, their tension is interpreted as having undercurrents of sexual attraction, of which the characters may or may not be aware. Onscreen in the 2012 movie, Steve and Tony's interactions were read by many as having this same motivation, especially in the climax of the film, in which Tony is feared dead.
Surrounded by his teammates, he jerks back to consciousness after the Hulk roars loudly. He gives a short cry and looks around in panic, saying, "Please tell me no one kissed me?" Steve looks away, relieved and blushing. It is up to the invested viewer to guess at the source of Steve's embarrassment. [1.24] As can be seen, elements in both fiction and film are open to multiple readings. Steve/Tony fandom is remarkably aware of the many ways in which texts can be read and interpreted, and it actively documents its history through numerous archives. In larger, more wellknown fandoms, it is not unusual for Web resources to be abandoned or orphaned (or even deleted altogether) once the fan who maintains them has left the fandom. In Steve/Tony fandom, these resources are often adopted by other fans so that they are continually maintained for new fans or those who want access to older materials. Many of the fandom's works have been duplicated on LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, and the Archive of Our Own to prevent textual loss through technical failures, people dropping out of fandoms, or other means. Resources such as the Captain America/Iron Man Slashy Moments List have had a series of moderators or curators who have kept the page up to date over a period of years. [1.25] Further, the variety of fandoms within both the ship and the official franchise is astonishing. As mentioned above, Marvel has a multitude of iterations of the Avengers, Captain America, and Iron Man available, including not just the comics (which themselves have a dizzying array of versions) but also the cartoons and films.
Fan authors and communities normally specify the universe referenced in a fan work, both to alert readers to versiondependent elements of characterization and history and to allow them to avoid spoilers. For instance, comics fans will recognize the significance of Agent 13 and the Winter Soldier, while movie fans may not. With the announcement that the forthcoming film Captain America 2 would be subtitled The Winter Soldier, several debates were struck up online. What, if anything, do comics fans owe to movie fans to ensure that the latter remain unspoiled if they so desire? Do plot points that are years-and sometimes decades-old really count as spoilers? It remains to be seen how these questions may be resolved. As the following discussion will show, characterization and plot can diverge significantly enough that their interpretation by and through fan works should prove problematic-and yet it doesn't, because of fans' commitment to unifying universes.
2. The use of the alternate universe [2.1] Marvel Comics canon is essentially already a shared universe, particularly when it comes to massive story lines that cross over multiple comics titles and have far reaching consequences, such as House of M and Marvel: Civil War. (This latter story, which involved more than a hundred issues of fifteen monthly titles, pitted Captain America and Iron Man against each other in a conflict over a law requiring superheroes to register with, and essentially become weapons of, the US government. In an epilogue titled Civil War: The Confession, a distraught Iron Man admitted that nothing he did during the conflict was worth the loss of everything that mattered to him, namely Steve.) Characters stepping in and out of each others' monthly titles or sharing adventures in special miniseries are all but de rigueur. Moreover, stories are told in a multitude of time lines or universes (a multiverse), in which events are freely rewritten or replayed. Marvel maintains an online list of these universes (http://marvel.wikia.com/Multiverse), and tsukinofaerii (2012) has compiled a useful fannish aidemémoire as well. Four are of particular interest to Steve/Tony fandom.
[2.2] The 616 universe is the standard, mainline continuity, beginning with the 1941 Captain America comics and continuing through subsequent titles from the 1960s through to the present. Because of its longevity, the time line of events has been blurred, so that while nearly five decades' worth of stories have occurred since the 1960s iteration, they are compressed into the lifetimes of characters who remain in their physical prime and virtually ageless.
[2.3] The 1610 or Ultimates universe reboots the events of 616 while simultaneously displaying darker themes in story and representation. For several reasons, it's widely suspected among fans that Marvel created this universe to enable the production of feature films; among other things, the character of Nick Fury was redesigned as a near double of Samuel L. Jackson. [2.4] The movieverse or MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), also called 199999, encompasses all the major film interpretations from 2008 onward, including projected sequels to Thor and Captain America and rumored standalone films for other characters.
[2.5] The 80920 universe, depicted in the animated series The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes (2010, shares details with both 616 and the movieverse that other universes do not, such as physical appearance (Tony's brown eyes, always depicted as blue before Robert Downey Jr.'s appearance in the films) and JARVIS the AI rather than Jarvis the butler.
[2.6] Some details of canon are shared from universe to universe. Tsukinofaerii notes that The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes combines the basic plotlines of 616 with elements of 199999, such as JARVIS being an artificial intelligence and Tony having brown eyes (like actor Robert Downey Jr.), rather than blue as in the original comics. The 1610 Ultimates line, initially published in 2002, also set the stage for the series of films by retconning many events and characterizations, emphasizing streamlined story arcs that require no knowledge of previous history and focus on an ensemble rather than a single point of view. [2.7] In addition to these universes, many more appear as oneshots or are referenced only briefly. For example, universe 3490 is seen only in a single panel in an issue of Fantastic Four: Dark Reign #2 (figure 2). In this universe, Iron Man is Iron Woman while Captain America remains male; the single image we have of them together is their wedding kiss. The narrative tells us that their romance acts as a "deterrent to each other's more aggressive behavior" and thus circumvents the Marvel Civil War (http://marvel.wikia.com/Natasha_Stark_(Earth3490)). The whole tragedy of the Marvel Civil War is that, although Steve and Tony talk to each another, they are unable to come to a compromise and instead continually rage at each another as the country falls to pieces around them. Their relationships are virtual analogs of the bodies politic: one couple can function peacefully by (presumably) discussing their feelings, thus leading to peaceful unification, while the other cannot.

Figure 2. The marriage of Captain America and Iron Woman. From Fantastic Four:
Dark Reign #2.
[2.8] Sheenagh Pugh notes that "the one aspect of canon that is not usually up for alteration is the nature of the characters" (2005,65). Both tsukinofaerii and elspethdixon demonstrate through their extensive notes and analyses that the combination of character traits and histories that make up Tony Stark/Iron Man and Steve Rogers/Captain America are often those same elements that promote the pairing, such as their repeated statements that each means the world to the other and their flowery interior monologues ("Captain America, Steve, I look at your handsome face…into your clear azure eyes…") (note 2). Within the 1610 universe, however, the darker themes and character traits emphasize their heterosexuality. These comics emphasize the sexuality and violence of superheroics, including scenes of Tony in bed with Natasha (typically his sexual encounters are alluded to but never seen) before she murders Jarvis, and Steve viciously beating Hank Pym after Janet is hospitalized.
Hence canonical 1610 Steve/Tony fan stories are rather short on the ground, though there are some 1610 AUs of note. [2.9] As is often the case in new and quickly growing fandoms, the AU modernday trope (in which science fiction characters are rewritten as normal, workaday people) has seen burgeoning use. This trope is popular because it is accessible to new fans.
Most AUs presuppose new backgrounds for the characters that may be based on decades of preexisting history or commentary. A specifically modernday AU, on the other hand, has no presuppositions to build upon: instead, the featured characters exist in a world of the fan author's own creation, generally with the same emotional relationships as their originals (friends, lovers, colleagues) but in a different environment. Steve/Tony modernday AUs frequently keep elements such as Stark's wealth and Rogers's transformation but reconfigure them to be more realistic: Tony is a programming genius who makes software and apps rather than AIs or flying armor; Steve's evolution from skinny asthmatic to buff Adonis is due to an intense health and workout regimen.
[2.10] Modernday AUs give the characters a tremendous variety of new professions, but certain tropes recur over and over again across multiple fandoms. In almost every fandom, for instance, there is the coffee shop AU, in which one character is a barista and the love interest is a repeat patron. Fan author solnox puts this genre to use for Steve/Tony in a story called "Caffeine, Otherwise Known as the Key to Tony Stark's Heart": [2.11] Tony returns the following morning and Steve looks astonished.
Tony can't imagine why. He'd said he was going to come back, hadn't he?
When Tony first heard that a coffee shop was going to be opening across the street from Stark Tower he had been interested in a detached sort of way. A potential supplier for his caffeinefueled nights in the workshop? Sure, he was all over that. And then Tony had caught a glimpse of its owner.
Tony can't pinpoint the exact reason why he's taken an interest in the young artstudentgonebarista. Actually, no, that's a lie. He can. Steve is fucking hot. Tall, built like a comic book superhero. He had those amazing blue eyes and that pouty mouth. Plus he had an air of sweetness and innocence that Tony, being Tony, had a base urge to corrupt.
Tony steps up to the counter and presents his best smile. Steve's eyes dance shyly away. That was much cuter than it had a right to be. (solnox 2012) [2.12] Businessman Tony as a patron ordering coffee from barista Steve is the story's "meet cute." Other characters from the comics and movies appear in small roles: Nick Fury is Steve's assistant, and Bucky is mentioned as Steve's childhood friend recently fallen in Afghanistan. The story largely plays out as a series of encounters in the coffee shop, detailing the making and serving of beverages as a kind of language of romance.
[2.13] Readers and writers like coffee shop AUs partly because coffee shops are a comforting environment (and also, probably, where many authors actually write their fics). As in fairy tales, the elements common to such stories-the flirty barista who offers special concoctions, the recurrent visits to a place that offers something like sanctuary, the happy ending-instill expectations that are then pleasantly met.
Indeed, the popularity of this trope has prompted some complaint. [2.14] Another nearuniversal trope is the high school AU, in which the main characters are all high school students. (There are also college AUs, though high school AUs are more numerous.) Part of the reason for this is likely that high school stories are themselves a recurring trope within popular mass culture, and since many fan writers are in their 20s or 30s, high school is a recent experience for them, one that can be referred to knowledgably and without research. In high school AUs, the focus becomes the traditional dialectic of the nerd and the jock-and in Steve/Tony fics, either may play either role. Tony is often portrayed as being superficially popular but still socially ostracized for his youthful genius; Steve can be portrayed as a skinny art nerd or as a bulky football player. Fan author settiai chose to interweave these possibilities in "High School Is Not a Musical." In her story, Tony is a young inventor with a propensity for pyrotechnics and Steve straddles expectations as both a would be illustrator and an athlete. As in many other stories, the boys awkwardly miscommunicate: [2.15] Steve folded his arms over his chest uncomfortably. "Uh, don't take this the wrong way, but why are you even talking to me?" Tony blinked, apparently in surprise. A slightly hurt look appeared on his face, and he opened his mouth. Whatever he was going to say, however, was cut short by a firm hand coming down to rest on his shoulder. (settiai 2010) [2.16] As in other stories, their developing friendship eventually leads to deeper feelings. College AUs are often longer, with slowly building, betterdeveloped narratives. In these, the characters are most often college students, though sometimes they are professors instead. This genre is less common, most likely because college studies are more specialized; it's harder for characters to be rewritten within a specific discipline than it is for them to represent wellknown high school archetypes. For instance, in Steve/Tony college AUs, Steve is usually an art student while Tony is usually in computer science or engineering. Like high school AUs, they reiterate certain stereotypical elements of American school experience, such as the partying student (Tony) and the conscientious student (Steve): [2.17] "So, how did I end up with you?" Tony asks, because he honestly has no idea. He remembers vaguely meeting his antiPepper and then there was more drinking and a sudden urge to go to the library. He's not really sure what was so pressing.
Steve was looking amused but his face freezes, goes carefully blank and he says, "You were drunk I guess." Tony wants to ask Steve if he did anything. He feels like he should apologize but then again, with Pepper around, he constantly feels that way. "Sorry if I said anything…weird?" "S'fine," Steve dismisses, not elaborating. "You want me to walk you back to your room so it doesn't look like you're doing a walk of shame?" Steve asks, back to amused and Tony just grins at him, enjoying this soft, morning version of Steve more than he'd like to admit. (kellifer_fic 2011) [2.18] This story, "If at First" by kellifer_fic, goes on to describe the characters spending late nights in diners drinking cheap coffee, falling asleep in the library, and struggling to get to class on time after oversleeping. In short, these interpretations of AUs privilege a form of normalcy over the superheroics displayed elsewhere. Other stories, however, return to the heroic form for a different purpose: social justice.
3. "Some time-displaced war heroes marry genius billionaire playboy philanthropists, get over it" [3.1] An AU, whether in canon or fanon, can acknowledge the nonstereotypical comics audience-that is, women and LGBT readers. Fandom traditionally creates a safe space for many people who, for whatever reasons, lack it in their nonfannish lives. In comics canon proper, the multiplicity of AUs allows the characters to step outside their own safe spaces, offering stories in which Tony Stark hasn't always been a wealthy multimillionaire or Steve Rogers hasn't always been a hero. These "what ifs" open a world of possibilities for character exploration that nonetheless return them both to the people we know, as well as carving out a new space they can inhabit. [3.2] The lengthy history of the Avengers, and particularly of Captain America, allows both the corporate authors and the fan authors to infuse political meaning into the characters, as is demonstrated through the entirety of Marvel: Civil War. All the narrative tension and meaning of this story comes from the struggle and failure of Iron Man and Captain America to find a common ground. Steve/Tony fandom largely developed after the publication of Marvel: Civil War in 2006-7, at the same time that samesex relationships were being more often discussed in popular culture. Safe spaces for LGBT people are increasingly seen as desirable both within and outside fandom. The It Gets Better movement, for instance, is aimed at preventing LGBT teen suicide. Steve/Tony stories, by necessity, involve Steve coming to grips with his sexual identity as he comes to terms with 21stcentury morals and mores. Numerous stories do this by showing Steve trying to balance his duty as Captain America and advocating for the civil rights of others. In hetrez's story "Average Avengers Local Chapter 7 of New York City," all of the Avengers, and especially Captain America, inspire a grassroots campaign of public service and social change that reaches its emotional climax and plot apotheosis when Steve comes out during an interview on The Colbert Report: [3.3] "Yesterday, a boy killed himself. He loved other boys, and he was bullied for it, and he took his own life. When I learned about him, I thought, this is something I can do. I can tell people who I am, that I'm a hero and I love men and it's not wrong. I can make them listen, and maybe I can make it easier for somebody else. So Mr. Colbert, I want you to do something for me. If you know somebody who's gay, you tell them about me, and maybe it will make their lives easier. You'll be helping me a lot." He puts his hands in his lap, and looks straight at the camera. "That's really all I wanted to say.
Thank you for having me on your show." (hetrez 2012) [3.4] Similarly, autoschediastic's story "For America" (2010) combines social justice and romance plots when Steve proposes to Tony because he wants not only to marry the man he loves but also to make a public stand for what he believes in. Many other stories play out similar plots by describing political protests and, often, political fallout as Steve or Tony receives negative press because of their relationship. These plots not only depict current social reality but provide a series of "what ifs" for the reader-a different sort of AU or continuity that can be conjoined with our own as a new aspect of shared reality. [3.5] Some fans add text to clips from the films or interviews with the actors to reinforce this shared reality. If the viewer doesn't know the original context of the visuals, it is astonishingly easy to believe that the combination of image and text is a real quotation rather than a constructed fan work. One fan, for instance, added a subtitle to footage of Chris Evans appearing on an episode of The Late Show with David Letterman. Evans actually said, "Aquaman and I are moving to New York to get married," but the subtitle changed "Aquaman" to "Iron Man" (figure 3). In the new context, the actor Chris Evans can be viewed as his character Steve Rogers; as in the fictional exchange on The Colbert Report in hetrez's story, the mix of fictional characters with real people creates an element of cognitive control-or closure-for the viewer or reader, allowing her within the newly shared universe of fandom. The characters have stepped out of the comic book panels into a blank space that can be filled by the fans. Similarly, canonical texts in the comics, such as the picture of Iron Woman's marriage to Captain America, demonstrate what happens outside the characters' own books: this scene appeared in a Fantastic Four comic rather than in Captain America, Iron Man, or The Avengers, allowing readers to view the story from outside the characters' own space-much as fan fiction does.   LGBT issues, much as the original comics provided a haven for war protestors during a period when popular culture was silent on the topic or forthrightly hawkish. They demonstrate how slash fans present and articulate their political concerns through the mode of fandom itself, and examining them gives us a more comprehensive view of how we can read past the constraints of both text and panel.
[3.8] The emblem of Steve/Tony fandom is a split circle, with one half formed by Cap's shield and the other half by Iron Man's arc reactor. It is perhaps notable that the shield prototype seen in Iron Man 2 has a more than passing resemblance to this emblem (figure 4). Readings of the prop as a deliberate shoutout by the film's creators to Steve/Tony fandom demonstrate an awareness of creators' own cooption of fans/fan service that appears to a growing element in popular culture as a whole. [3.9] The rapid growth and transition of the fandom-from comics to movies, from hidden to open through the use of new social media-provides a fascinating record for media scholars. The exact nature of the fandom's impact, if any, has yet to be demonstrated, but for this brief moment at least, a traditionally obscure part of fandom, slash, is mainstream. Fans avoid Scott McCloud's "limbo of the gutter" to allow the various forms and aspects of the Avengers to transform into a more meaningful narrative-one that encompasses both the real world we experience and the dozens of other universes possible in comics, film, and fandom.

Notes
1. In Henry Jenkins's words, "A focus on how slash constructs a continuum between homosocial and homosexual desire may explain why the protagonists of slash stories are male lovers and yet often have had no previous history of gay relationships: the barriers between men must be intensified to increase the drama of their shattering; the introduction of sexual taboos requires greater trust and intimacy between the men before they can be overcome" (1992, 205).

Praxis
Pornographic space-time and the potential of fantasy in comics and fan art

Lyndsay Brown
University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States [0.1] Abstract-By putting pornographic comics and fan art into conversation, this article contends that works intended to depict and fuel sexual fantasy structure time and space differently with the goal of directly engaging the reader and extending the duration of her pleasure. Further, the comics and pieces of fan art examined herein are produced by, for, and about women and suggest an alternative vision of female desire that challenges contemporary understandings of pornography's utility and functioning as it intersects with fantasy in the private sexual economy.  [1.1] Recent work in the field of porn studies has examined the ways in which film, video, and online technologies have reshaped our engagement with erotic and pornographic content, but less attention has been paid to still mimetic visual art, that is to say, comics. Comics by, for, and about women, whether published by the comics industry or produced by fans online, have received even less consideration. While lesbian erotic comics offer a variety of scenarios using a nonnarrative sequential structure, pornographic fan art explores the erotic potential of a single panel that relies on a common canonical source as well as a collective archive of other works. Pornographic comics and fan art can be drawn into conversation to determine how graphic media depict and fuel fantasy, as well as whether texts that evoke female desire more fully figure an alternative reading of not just pornography's nature and effects on the consumer, but of desire itself. Additionally, the works considered herein challenge fundamental beliefs about the nature and utility of fantasy, particularly in its relationship to masturbation and the private sexual economy. [1.2] When drawing a rough distinction between categories of sequential and/or multipanel fan art and nonsequential/singleimage works, an interesting division appears: the vast majority of the former is nonpornographic, while the opposite is true of the latter. Sequential fan art may depict commentary on a source or offer its own narrative, but explicit sex, unlike romance, is rarely a central theme. Likewise, single image works are most commonly devoted either to a sexual scene or to a figure or figures in the style of pinup art, as in the case of wallpapers or title images for fan fiction, making single image fan art a more productive form of fan work to consider alongside pornographic comics. As a result of generic influences and constraints provided by the content, pornographic comics and fan art express a context and contentspecific understanding of space and time, embracing scenario over narrative and surface experience over deep identification without necessarily requiring narrative resolution in a climactic end (pun intended). Further, pornographic comics and fan art produce a more involved and complex relationship between consumer and text by directly addressing and engaging the consumer; the result is a multivalent and polymorphous experience of identification, objectification, and destabilization of subjectivity. The visual pleasures offered by pornographic comics and fan art are inextricable from their formal and material conditions, and an encounter with those pleasures signals not an isolated or solipsistic descent into escapism, but a window into a different manner of perceiving the self in the world. Similarly, for McCloud (1993), "comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments" (67). Both Eisner and McCloud assert that the reader is an active contributor to an experience of the medium, unlike that of film or literature, as she participates in the creation of time and motion via-as

Space and time in comics
McCloud notes-the experience of closure, which "allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality" (67). By suturing separate panels together, the reader perceives a fluid and consistent progression made necessary because time and space are the same thing in comics: the lack of sound and motion within drawn panels extends their duration and blurs the perception of time, and McCloud (1993) observes that no clear "conversion chart," such as one panel equaling one minute of time, exists as a metric (100). The solution is closure, the method by which the reader "assemble[s] a single moment using scattered fragments" and thereby perceives the panel as a single action or event and the text itself as a narrative whole (79). [2.2] Yet, as McCloud (1993) observes, time works in much more complicated ways in comics, and although closure is essential in the depiction of certain types of action or narrative, single panels can extend the reader's experience of time within them.
While Eisner (1985) and McCloud (1993) use primarily mainstream American action and/or superhero comics as their examples of the form-Eisner his own work, which is based in a tradition of newspaper comics devoted to actionbased narratives, and McCloud panels from a variety of sources, but overwhelmingly samples of 1950s and 1960s superhero comics from such artists as Jack Kirby-and thereby depict a period and type of American comics that emphasizes action/reaction panel transitions, along with specific moments of action that propel the reader onward, neither author supports a singular form of narrative progression. Instead, McCloud articulates how panel and page layouts in comics serve as temporal cheats, imperfect analogues of the real world in which "a silent panel…could indeed be said to depict a single moment" (98). That same single moment "can actually be held" through a caption or an alteration of the panel's size and shape, or it can "produce a sense of timelessness" and invite the reader to linger rather than moving on to the next image (102). Both context and content influence the reader's perception of time and space: a fight scene has distinct beats that lend themselves well to what McCloud identifies as "momenttomoment" and "actiontoaction" transitions, yet a sex scene, while similarly intimate and narrowly focused, is less linear and less narrative (74). As the works examined in this essay demonstrate, comics with pornographic content involve a contemplative and elaborative presentation of the image and a lack of direct, narratively propulsive transitions. (2004) cites Natsume Fusanosuke's (1996) analysis of narrative in Japanese comics to demonstrate that both shojo manga (comics targeted at girls 10-18) and their successor, josei or ladies' comics (targeted at adult women), are concerned less with depicting action than with "illustrat[ing] the emotions of the characters; for this reason," according to Fusanosuke, "montage is preferable to an orderly progression of panels" (quoted in Shamoon 2004, 83). McCloud observes that the generalized and iconic qualities of the face draw the reader in, and Shamoon surveys various design innovations found in both shojo and ladies' comics that "draw the reader's attention to the image of the female protagonist for the purpose of sympathizing and identifying with her," producing numerous panels of her face and body so as to allow the reader to vicariously experience her emotions as opposed to her actions (84). While action does occur in ladies' comics, the genre is more concerned with exploring the character's subjectivity than with her struggles against a supervillain, for example. [2.4] Narrative comics (or more precisely, superhero comics) are understood to progress to a point of closure from panel to panel and from left to right, developing identification through a deep engagement with characters and a satisfaction through linear progression via a traditional novelistic structure. This understanding of comics demonstrates a privileging of teleological concerns: fundamentally, so the argument goes, the form works as it does to produce a satisfactory end for the reader as she progresses from panel to panel to reach a conclusion. Yet this element of comics is not constant or even wholly consistent across genres, cultural traditions, or international forms. While an extended formal survey is beyond the scope of this article, the work of Chris Ware demonstrates the type of formal, structural, and narrative experimentation present in American indie comics, and McCloud (1993) discusses Osamu Tezuka as an example of Japanese mainstream comics. Additionally, given the influence of content on form, the purpose of pornographic comics-to arouse the reader-suggests that such works must mobilize numerous formal elements to heighten and sustain pleasure for as long as possible, and engage the reader in a manner distinct from, though informed by, filmed pornography.

[2.3] Deborah Shamoon
3. The problem with pornographic fantasy [3.1] Modernday comics and fan art rely on some filmic conventions, such as presenting the body in ways that are more pleasing to the viewer than pleasurable or even possible for the characters involved, as well as overdetermining signifiers of pleasure (the sounds of orgasm, the money shot) to amplify their affective power over the consumer. Both McCloud (1993) andEisner (1985) describe comics' use of space and time through reference to the moving image and its realistic representation of moving bodies, suggesting first that film serves as a useful model for audiences more familiar with film than comics, and second, that both forms aspire to an ideal of visual authenticity. In the comics and fan art discussed below, however, the ideal instead appears to be one of authenticity of feeling, conveying characters' emotions and experiences in an authentic manner without relying on a simulation of realistic time and space. Linda Williams (1999) defines pornography as "the visual (and sometimes aural) representation of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit, usually unfaked, sexual acts with a primary intent of arousing viewers," which privileges an objective ideal of physical "truth" (30). Thus, unlike fiction, still photography, or comics, film has a privileged position to offer truth claims about bodies and their responses, as male arousal and ejaculation in filmed pornography are clearly real. [3.2] Yet if, as Williams (1999) contends, the goal of hard core pornography is "making visible the involuntary confession of bodily pleasure," a quest similar enough to the documentary genre that narrative or characterization are set aside in favor of discrete scenarios, a problem arises when it comes to representing the female body's confession (50). Williams argues that the invisibility of the female orgasm, given its location inside the body, means that any actress may be giving a voluntary performance or otherwise faking it. Thus, these films continually attempt and fail to depict the "visible 'truth' of sexual pleasure itself" via the female body and instead must turn to the male body's obvious signs (50). Williams acknowledges that her study only examines heterosexual films made by and presumably largely for men, and that this issue may be absent or differently figured in lesbian pornography, for example, but concludes that the malecentered economy of hard core's "obsessive focus on the female body proves to be a narcissistic evasion of the feminine 'other' deflected back to the masculine self" (267). The result is a failure to figure female desire from a female perspective. [3.3] One other significant element of Williams's (1999) definition is that pornography is produced with the intent of arousing its consumers, which guides how bodies and actions are depicted, but which also raises various issues of exploitation of and violence towards women. As Williams observes, antipornography feminists criticize the genre primarily with the claim that its consumption, presumably meant to satisfy male sexual fantasies, inevitably leads to various harmful effects on real women (note 1). This underlying belief, that consuming fiction perceived to be harmful leads to enacting in the real world the ideas and fantasies inspired by the fiction, has spurred widespread controversy, censorship, and social policy in a repetitive cycle with each new form of that fiction, from novels and film to television, comics, and video games (note 2). There is something suspect and dangerous about fantasy, and about art that allows us to access and express what Williams (1999) calls a "desire for selfabandon" in an unreal world filled with unreal objects (273). Since pornography exists to facilitate masturbation, examining arguments against it and the fictional vehicles that fuel it will shed light on what is so dangerous about desire and its spur to fantasy.  (2003) charts how a constellation of anxieties, both medical and moral, came to center on masturbation as a discreet kind of sexual act in the early 18th century. Writers such as Wittgenstein, Kant, and Rousseau were not concerned with Catholic ideas about the sinfulness of the flesh but still remained convinced that masturbation was an act that should-and did-cause shame, guilt, and a host of other physical, psychological, and ethical issues. Masturbation was found to be essentially unnatural for three reasons: first, it is "motivated…by a phantasm" rather than by the real world; second, it is an act of private rather than social sexuality; and third, "it could be neither sated nor moderated" because it is inspired by "the mind's creations" alone (210). While desire for a person or act is checked and ended either by satiation or rejection, desire created by the mind for no real object was potentially without end, without limit, and without a way for the masturbator to reenter the sexual economy of the world. While Laqueur frames his inquiry within the context of the Enlightenment-in which industry, a public/private divide, the advent of rational rather than religious ideology, and print culture combined to generate precisely the autonomous, imaginative, and self controlled subjects that were so easily seduced by the excesses produced by the rise of modernity-many of these ideas remain in contemporary fears about the fundamental excessiveness of desire. [3.5] What appears to be at stake in the threecentury outcry over masturbation is not just the danger of forsaking the real for the illusory, but that the self requires protection from imagined threats even more than from real ones. As Laqueur observes, medical scholars in the Enlightenment considered "nerves and nervous fluids" at the center of human development-consider the empiricist vision of the child's mind as a blank slate-and believed that experiences penetrated through the senses to affect the body directly via those elements (2003,204). Traces of this idea that "we are creatures open to endless stimulation, material and psychological" are apparent in Williams and other scholars of film and video pornography, along with the belief that "wrong or inappropriately modulated…stimuli" can lead to mental and physical deformation, in the view of 18thcentury doctors, or to rape and sexual violence, in the view of antipornography advocates (Laqueur 2003, 204-5). [3.6] Masturbation with the aid of a text was not considered any less harmful; like Williams (1999), Laqueur observes that pornography-written or filmed-has the most concentrated power to affect the body of the consumer, and both authors document a fear of "hordes of autonomous but somehow complicit individuals who do not cooperate because they know they do not need each other" for sexual or any other satisfaction (2003,357). What, then, makes fantasy, specifically sexual fantasy, so threatening? Claims that fantasies are produced by the mind alone ignore the influence of culture, particularly how desires are shaped by experiences with other people as well as with fiction. And when the self does turn inward to contemplate idiosyncratic scenarios for the purpose of achieving orgasm, what is to prevent it from returning to the external world? Desire writ large may be inexhaustible, but the body and mind certainly are not. If the belief articulated in the Enlightenment that fantasy is inherently solipsistic, inferior to reality, and generates nothing is set aside, the discourse of pornography gives way to alternatives, including a renewed interest in what happens when the consumer engages with her dirty book, film, or comic. For Laqueur's selfobsessed and isolated reader, solitary sex not only offered a safer and perhaps easier option, but also a different type of pleasure: [3.7] the pleasures of the novel-"nobody's story"-were the pleasures of fictionality itself: the frisson of absorption in a reality that was known to be artifice…If "fictionalizing" in general is a way of being present to ourselves, a way of selfgrasping and a way of escaping, of overstepping and of creating boundaries, then the stakes in reading a particular form of fictionalizing-the novel-are great: reading novels could create new ways of being morally present to oneself for good or ill. (Laqueur 2003, 320) [3.8] Laqueur's (2003) observations about the potential value of artifice are suggestive, as they reveal a fluid and unstable subjectivity constantly negotiating the utility of what is taken in along with the possibilities for being present to oneself in the world. While it is beyond the scope of this article to examine the coincidence or noncoincidence of fantasy and action, much less the exact influence of the former on the latter, Laqueur's description of fantasy as both useful and generative may be specifically relevant to pornographic comics and fan art by, for, and about women, particularly given the role women usually play in mainstream pornography. [3.9] As Williams (1999) observes, the answer that hard core provides to the question of what women want is the penis, preferably that of the watching male. Yet Shamoon (2004) suggests that pornographic comics by and for women express a desire to abandon the self to pleasure. In comparing the female audience for pornographic comics and for comics as a whole in Japan and the United States, Shamoon identifies access as a primary issue. In the United States, the comics audience as a whole is small, with few comics targeting women, much less produced by them; technical, financial, and time constraints inhibit the potential for audience growth (77-79). Japan's tradition of producing specific genres for women and girls stretches back to the mid1960s, and Shamoon surveys the genre of ladies' comics, which are drawn by women and take a relatively realistic view of contemporary women and their desires, to determine what vision of "female spectatorship and visual pleasure" they offer (80). [3.10] Similar to traditional pornography, ladies' comics rely on displaying the nude and aroused female body more often and more consistently than the male body but for a very different reason. According to Shamoon (2004), this display serves not only to affect identification, as noted in section 2, but also to "arouse[] the sexual desire of the female reader through the endless play of difference and similarity between her and the characters" (83). Pleasure arises not from possessing the image but from engaging with the text's protagonist as both self and other, as ladies' comics display female pleasure in order to arouse it via "an exploration, not of the other…but of the self, or what may potentially become the self" (95). Male bodies are barely present during sex acts in Shamoon's examples, cut entirely or represented via action lines so that the panel can better frame the woman experiencing a transformative pleasure that can temporarily dissolve the character's subjectivity, and through identification generate a similar dissolution in the reader. The ultimate fantasy that Shamoon documents in ladies' comics is not to understand the desire of the other, to be wanted by the other, or even to experience a real moment of intimacy that removes the separation between self and other, but rather to achieve a satisfaction that is nearly sublime in its resulting loss of coherence and awareness of the self as self. While this radical dissolution is less on display in the comics discussed below, similar breakdowns in narrative, formal conventions, and structured experience offer another potential window into the intersection of female fantasy and desire.

Erotic structures of space-time in comics
[4.1] The protagonists of Molly Kiely's graphic novels That Kind of Girl (1999) and Tecopa Jane (2000), and Colleen Coover's twovolume Small Favors , seem to exist in a sexual space detached from the outside world, unaware of political, social, or even ethical concerns. Similarly, while fan art can offer critique or commentary on canon and/or a variety of sociopolitical topics, pornographic fan art is largely unconcerned with such topics at the level of content (note 3). In terms of production, reception, and circulation, of course, a variety of political, social, and ethical issues arise, including kink (that is, raising awareness of correct practices and promoting interest in them), consent, and representation. Media fandom and female underground/alternative comics artists also share a history of negotiating issues of identity, including resisting the male gaze and articulating women's right to their own pleasure and to control how that pleasure is depicted. Kiely's and Coover's texts, however, imagine a world without such narrative struggles; instead they are formed according to a structure of desire, with its concomitant peaks and valleys. Linearity of paneltopanel reading aside, a narrative drive is largely absent in these texts in favor of a determinedly unrealistic spacetime of imaginative play. Some panels and pages unfold like snapshots, gesturing at a larger whole that is unrepresented and perhaps unrepresentable. Others call attention to the constructed nature of the form through reader addresses or playing with the image's simultaneous representative and physical presence.

Figure 1. Speech balloons containing sex noises come alive and transform into tentacles/restraints in Small Favors (2002-3). [View larger image.]
[4.2] Rather than producing a linear movement as in narrative comics or filmed pornography, pornographic comics, as a result of the nature of the form, allow the eye to linger and the reader to remain in an extended state of pleasure far longer than realistically possible-bodies tire, orgasms end. Instead, the representation of action in comics panels or fan art's single images produces a simultaneous distillation and elaboration of time and space within a sexual encounter, both in the work and the audience.
[4.3] What occurs in Kiely's (1999) That Kind of Girl is primarily sex, but that description trivializes how intertwined intimacy, art, travel, fantasy, and experience are in this loosely structured work. That Kind of Girl follows frustrated writer Dez Diva as she travels across the desert for a yearly meeting with a longdistance boyfriendwhose existence doesn't at all inhibit taking pleasure in other "beautiful boys." A flat tire leads to a brief erotic encounter with a man in need of jumper cables, and then Diva meets a trick rider named Ruby Justice, whose erotic calls to action inspire Diva to begin writing again. Yet the two women part just as this comic begins to feel like a romance, and Diva is suddenly back home in New York, hooking up with another beautiful boy after a pretentious art party. Clearly, neither monogamy nor the threat of disease exist in Kiely's universe (note 4), and without the constraints of such interpersonal complications, Kiely is free to depict sex outside of a narrative context. Instead, sex is an occurrence, a momentary pleasure that affects an individual's life without either defining that life or being subsumed into a larger framework of romance.

Figure 2. One of numerous momentary sexual encounters with a "beautiful boy" in
Kiely's That Kind of Girl (1999). [View larger image.] [4.4] The motivating theme of travel in That Kind of Girl reflects the content, resulting in a nomadic movement from scene to scene rather than a forward progression, and Kiely (1999) resists even the regular structure of a pornographic narrative, moving fluidly from landscape shots to individual sex scenes along the crosscountry trip. Tecopa Jane (2000) has a similarly loose structure and contemplative pace, though the plot is a bit more complex: the protagonist, Jane, is heartbroken over her ex, Dixie, while Jane's roommate, Violet, Dixie's fraternal twin who transitioned to male beginning at age 9, longs for Jane from afar as she goes from one girl to another. Eventually Jane meets a girl named Jubilee, and the two begin a relationship, while Violet leaves town to join the rodeo. Not only does Tecopa Jane play with chronology, but it also breaks up narrative progression via flashbacks, voiceover, and breaking the fourth wall-one page features a future Jane narrating present events, who claims that "Other people may talk at you, too…But…I'm the real narrator. My name is the title." Unlike That Kind of Girl, Tecopa Jane presents a protagonist with multiple selves and perspectives, and grants significant time to Violet's longing, which culminates in a frustrated masturbation session interspersed with pieces of fantasy, making her a secondary protagonist. [4.5] Both texts reveal the influence of Kiely's work in photography and pinup art, as each grant as much focus to poses and brief but expansive images of silence as it does to moments of climax. Having eschewed a plotbased framework, Kiely's comics linger on oddly angled panels of bodies writhing together, accidental encounters, and other ephemeral moments chained together by an almost filmic focus on experiencing the image in depth, privileging visual over textual engagement. There's a remarkable lack of extraneous words in Kiely's work, which helps to shape her protagonists as icons or figures rather than characters with complex internal lives. Readers have some ideas as to what Diva wants, even her profession as an artist, but little idea of who she is-and other characters possess even more symbolic status. This emphasis on scenario over story, encounter rather than romance, and figure rather than character forms a kind of pornographic quest structure, and each part is given equal weight, whether a fuck or a dream. Diva's world is suggestive of what Williams (1999, 269) terms a pornotopia, "in which sexual utopia is divorced from the real world of its narrative," at least as relates to sex: Diva is never not in the mood, never experiences rejection, never regrets a sexual encounter, and ultimately seems to find sex, sexuality, and desire itself wholly unproblematic. This is even more the case for Colleen Coover, whose work depicts an ultimate sexual utopia without even the concerns of profession or nonsexual interests.   [4.7] Small Favors details the sexual adventures of Annie and Nibbil as they move from one scenario to another; rather than engaging issues of identity or politics, everyone in this universe is not just sexpositive, but wholly concerned with having as much sex as possible. The outside world of jobs, families, and obligations simply does not exist, and in that sense Coover's work is far more traditionally pornographic. The two girls exist to have sex, and sex that is pornographically perfect: without awkwardness, pain, or lack of desire. Shamoon (2004) observes that a common element of ladies' comics is the overdetermination of signifiers of female sexuality, and in that case wetness serves as both "proof of the woman's arousal and a demand for satisfaction" (91). Coover and Kiely both depict wetness as a similar proof, but less often and less overwhelmingly than a sheer desire for more, whether more numerous and varied partners in Kiely, or more sex in as many ways as possible in Coover. Each artist produces a pornotopia designed to engage readers' fantasies, in which anything unrelated to satisfying sex ceases to exist and female desire is voracious and always satisfied.
[4.8] Coover relies heavily on the discrete scenario, bracketing off and titling each segment according to its content, revealing the two volumes' origin as several single issues. As in the case of filmed porn, this allows the reader to select scenes for their erotic effectiveness, which grants the pornographic form, as Williams (1999)  Annie as Annie masturbates. The rule in Coover's work appears to be that of function: everything, even the conventions of the form itself, is sexual.

Figure 6. Spaghetti and a wooden spoon are only two objects Coover repurposes as sex toys in Small Favors (2002-3). [View larger image.]
[4.9] Small Favors may be said to outporn porn by the simple rule that if it exists in the world of the comic, it exists to be used as a means to achieve sexual satisfaction.
This highly creative use of the natural environment also provides Coover's work with a level of variation necessary to pornography, as satiation usually leads to boredom.
Given that Annie and Nibbil aren't real people, they can never get bored with sex. Each scene merely inspires further scenes, and the fluidity of their desire allows for endless new scenarios. If written porn offers fantasies from inside the protagonists but without visual stimulation, and if filmed porn offers verisimilitude with the caveat that the images may not accurately represent the reader's desires, then Coover's work demonstrates that comics can provide an excellent compromise. Kiely engages variation by extending the moment, eroticizing everything so as to sustain pleasure, while Coover eroticizes everything to literally fuck with it.
[4.10] Additionally, both artists' work directly engages the reader, in part to make the explicit content more accessible and acceptable, especially given the dearth of explicit lesbian American comics. Tecopa Jane acknowledges how readers are commonly engaged by pornography and by foregrounding its fictionality, grants the reader permission to appreciate what she might otherwise find demeaning or silly. In Small Favors, the playful and utopian mood of wholly uncomplicated pleasure is only enhanced by inviting the reader to play along with the genre's conventions, so that she may enjoy the series without selfconsciousness or discomfort.

Figure 7. Thoughts become sex aids in Small Favors (2002-3). [View larger image.]
[4.11] Coover often uses the rule of function to break the fourth wall, as Nibbil turns the idea, in the traditional shorthand of a light bulb, into a dildo: here, thoughts literally get you off. As porn necessarily addresses the reader/viewer in order to implicate her in the fantasy, and that implication arises because of the genre's pragmatic goal of getting her off, these works' lack of narrative makes it easier for the reader to engage in and experience a surface intimacy, rather than one concerned with internal workings. Porn is utilitarian, which makes it, to a certain extent, disposable: without the complex though predictable structure of romance, the aim is to show us just enough (or perhaps just too much) to get us off. The vision of female desire and fantasy present in these works is one of limitless play, extended sensation, and shifting subjectivity. Readers are invited to identify with Diva's free spirit and greed for experience, Jane and Violet's struggles to find a deeper connection in the midst of enjoyable but insufficient sex, and Annie and Nibbil's boundless joy in a world full of sex, but none offers the kind of deep identification described by Shamoon (2004).
Instead, this is a fantasy of a world in which such easily and consistently pleased women (and such pleasures) are possible.

5.
Addressing the reader in comics and fan art [5.1] The reader is implicated in the surface intimacy of given representations whether she is directly addressed or not and thus also in how the form is constructed. The comic must be opened up, spread flat, and made accessible, so that the reader can see the events occur. But direct addresses, as in Nibbil's acknowledgment of herself as a character on a page, break a traditional structural element of fiction that is presumed to allow for the suspension of disbelief. Awareness of the audience is innate to pornography, however, even if only in paratextual or contextual ways. Fan art contains within its ethos a similar drive, for while it may seem obvious that both the artist and viewer desire the creation of such work, the lack of distance between producer and consumer in fandom's gift economy reveals a shared emotional identification that sharply diverges from that of comics. [5.2] Further, the audience for such fan art is likely to be largely female, given the demographics of American media fandom, and is thus free of the access problems that women commonly encounter with comics. The pieces considered in this article display the female body in order to heighten identification and engagement, but what they share with Kiely's and Coover's comics is a distinctly lesbian gaze, unlike Shamoon's (2004) ladies' comics; for this reason, the play of difference and similarity is more akin to desiring to have and to be both parties in a scenario, doubling the dual engagement that Shamoon describes. What is distinct about this femslash art is that its lesbian gaze may not be anchored to a discrete and lived sexuality on the part of the artist or the viewer, as fandom's "particular online spaces, cultures, and practices can queer women (and other gendered subjects) in ways not accounted for by most identity narratives," regardless of whether, as is the case in individual fantasies, those fantasies are directly related to one's lived experience (Lothian, Busse, and Reid 2007, 103). [5.3] Shamoon (2004) is oddly dismissive of other Japanese comics genres targeted at women, particularly yaoi or boys' love (which she conflates with shotacon), largely for its unrealistic elements. While she briefly acknowledges that identification with the male protagonists may offer a temporary experience of empowerment due to feeling free of gender constraints, Shamoon rejects the "escapist fantasy" of boys' love and slash fiction for its "self indulgence" when compared to ladies' comics' more realistic genre conventions, as the latter can increase the reader's sexual freedom and autonomy (86). More complicated structures of identification, such as with a male body, or engagement, such as with a comic that, like traditional (men's) pornography, lacks character development and a complex narrative in favor of endless sexual acts, are apparently innately inferior because they lack the clear tie between artifice and the real that Laqueur (2003) describes. In applying traditional feminist theory to ladies' comics, Shamoon favors fantasies whose consumption may improve female readers' lives and thereby outright dismisses the possibility that alternative understandings of pleasure, sex, sexuality, gender, and even identity may be generated by escapist fantasies. As Williams (1999) observes: [5.4] As long as sexual pleasure is viewed as having a proper function and an end…it tends to reside within the relatively parsimonious masculine economy of production. But when sexual pleasure begins to cultivate (already inherent) qualities of perversion; when it dispenses with strictly biological and social functions and becomes an end in itself;…when a desiring subject can take up one object and then another without investing absolute value in that object; and finally, when this subject sees its object more as an exchange value in an endless play of substitution than as use value for possession-then we are in the realm of what must now be described as a more feminine economy of consumption. (273) [5.5] Fan art serves as an excellent example of such a "feminine economy of consumption," as the viewer contemplates the image and lingers in pleasure for its own sake before moving on to the next one of many potential objects for satisfaction. desire to see what cannot commonly be seen, two components intensify this factor in fan art: first, the reliance on a preexisting canon that offers builtin emotional identification with the figures depicted; and second, the awareness that the fan will likely never see her beloved characters performing the desired acts. Depicting two characters overwhelmed with passion, frozen in time and thus unaware of the viewer's gaze, grants "Bit of Skirt" an illicit power, as the eye is drawn to subtle details rather than quickly progressing to the next image. [5.7] Pornographic fan art can also take as its subject other fan works, just as art can inspire fan fiction, be produced to accompany a story (often for a larger challenge or fandomwide event), or be commissioned as part of a festival. Twilightsorcery's  [5.9] While "Just Us" may provoke fantasies of the events that led to this moment or those following, the artist does not provide definite answers. Further, the lack of direct acknowledgment of the viewer-unlike pinup art and its contemporary equivalent, the desktop background or wallpaper-offers a touch of realism, as the fan can credibly imagine that the events depicted either really occurred or could occur, rather than merely existing for her pleasure. The narrow focus of nonsequential pornographic fan art invites the viewer to linger in an unending moment and therefore to achieve the satisfaction of seeing a fantasy realized. Thus do such works convey in a single panel the effect of entire pornographic comics, relying on preexisting narratives and emotional investment to heighten the viewer's pleasure further, such that a single moment can evoke an entire scenario. Additionally, just as Coover's works offer numerous scenarios so as to engage multiple desires, the larger community of fan art generates a similar proliferation of options: all potential scenarios are on offer via collective production and circulation, thereby producing a decentered, diverse, and everevolving erotic archive that caters to all. Just as these comics depict undeveloped figures to offer the reader easy access to pleasure, these pieces of fan art refuse to interrupt the viewer's gaze with any particular narrative or characterization that could rupture the surface flatness of the open image.
[5.10] Along with her own definition, Williams (1999) also cites Beverly Brown's definition of pornography, which emphasizes how fan art's depictions of individual fantasy are entangled with extant cultural discourses and, moreover, a community of likeminded subjects. If pornography can be understood as "a coincidence of sexual phantasy, genre, and culture in an erotic organization of visibility" (Brown 1981, quoted in Williams 1999, it is clear to see how fan art calls on the viewer's situation within a fandom full of other, similarly pornographic responses to canon, all connected in a web of networked desires. Fan art does not need to address the viewer in the same blatant manner as do comics because the form itself is an address more intimately and directly tied to the potential audience than commercial works. Just as a consumer may purchase pornography because it contains familiar and presumed elements, from an actress to a kink, the fan consumer engages a piece already primed not only by attachment to canon and fanon depictions of characters, but also by an expectation that some element will be left out. Unlike the visual and sequential fullness of Coover's or Kiely's work, fan art offers a blank or unoccupied space because of the lack of information that can be conveyed in a single panel for the viewer to fill in. While the masturbatory aid offers both a spark and potential limit by providing an encounter with an external object, fan art further engages the viewer as part of a collective, connecting her desires to a larger whole and figuring fantasy itself as inextricable from her chosen community and thus to a lesser degree from the world itself. Rather than springing fully formed from a solipsistic mind, fan art envisions fantasy and the desire that engenders it as simultaneously individual and shared, internal and external, artificial and real. [5.11] Because pornography is fundamentally invested in affecting its consumer's body, Franklin Melendez (2004) claims its address to viewers is necessarily an invitation to engage rather than passively look. As has been suggested earlier, the reader's interaction with pornography is "a negotiation between different pleasures and different modes of viewing not necessarily locked into a static subject/object

Conclusion
[6.1] Climax in these comics does not necessarily evoke closure, and the acts leading to climax form no consistent progression from beginning to end as the next scenario interrupts, or starts anew from the same setup of "before sex," applying a playful attitude to format and structure at the very basis of representation. Fan art most often offers a single moment, suggesting both the transience and fecundity of fantasy. Both forms represent time as a fragmented experience of lingering in a moment or moving between discrete though not necessarily chronological moments, with the reader encountering an instantaneous charge that can never be exactly repeated despite the ability to return to it again and again, thus making a suggestive claim about how desire itself works. If pleasure in filmed and written pornography derives from its movement from scenario to finish, the pleasure of these works lingers across bodies in various states of being, frozen in time, taking a hedonistic joy not just in depicting the intimate, but also in expanding that category past any limits imposed by the panel.
Such a situating of the readerly experience asserts a rethinking of how desire is structured, and these works' evocation of a specifically lesbian gaze offers an alternative vision of desire itself. Rather than moving through a linear trajectory toward a desired end, interrogating the other's pleasure in order to possess it, these works both depict and transmit a desire that circulates and oscillates between subject positions as well as between pleasure and pain, never entirely exhausted or satisfied, and thus continually a site of generative possibility.

Notes
1. The effects on men have been less of a concern; see Jensen (2007) for more on that issue. (2005) and Nyberg (1998) for depictions of the midcentury controversy over comics and comparisons to similar situations involving television and film.

See Beaty
3. For example, see vito_excalibur's "Alter's 6: Supernatural" for a Latino version of the Winchesters that challenges perceptions of the series.
4. Though the title does imply a woman who, as the back cover blurb makes clear, is "thoroughly a creature of her own desires," and thus Kiely's (1999) book offers the reader-whose world punishes that kind of girl-a fantasy of freedom to "tak [e] whatever and whomever she wants as it cums-to the speed limit and beyond!"  identities not granted to others. Inclusion is enforced through the subculturally defined parameters of those with greater authority within the fandom. As Brown points out, many of these subjugated fans do not consider themselves any less devoted to the medium, but they are perceived as less valuable within the fandom community by those who are perceived as more ardent.

Introduction
[ nearly a year after the members of /co/ began to notice this trend on their own.
[2.6] The /co/ group's creation of the Hypercrisis is not just a narrative analysis; it is also a participatory event-a groupbased dialogic relationship. Mikhail Bakhtin defines this relationship with texts as reading in which one "interrogates [the text], eavesdrops on it, but also ridicules it, parodically exaggerates it" (1981,46). The visual and textual narrative of comics means that this is happening with the printed words and the comic's art-the combined language of comics. Bakhtin describes the narrative of novels as being "inseparable from images of various world views and from the living beings who are their agents-people who think, talk and act in a setting that is social and historically concrete" (1981,49). Unlike novels, where the diegesis is represented only by the text and the heteroglossic dialogism among author, text, and reader, comics allow the reader to see the world of the text, and strengthen their participation with it. One can see the actions of a scene or emotions of a character rather than gleaning information from descriptive text. Comics provide another level of discourse open to interpretive actions. The reader is having a conversation not only with the language (the text), but also with the art, thus allowing for a stronger connection to the overall narrative. The users of /co/ are connecting vague passages, panels, quotations, and ideas across various texts, trying to discover a hidden meaning and to learn the possible future of the comics they love. By establishing an ingroup continuity and understanding of DC's comics, the Hypercrisis becomes not a simple act of media consumption but rather a mode of media participation.
[2.7] The /co/mrades are creating a theoretical mythology for the DC universe that is both unrelated to the actual narratives of DC and based entirely on its published history. This theoretical mythology is a way for fans to "raid mass culture, claiming its materials for their own use, reworking them as the basis for their own cultural creations and social interactions" (Jenkins 1992, 18). In terms of predictions, the Hypercrisis may or may not represent what will actually happen in the future of these comics. The participants do not care if they are right; rightness has no place in the discussion. They are having fun sharing ideas and developing their own concept of knowledge, with discussion constantly in flux and analysis presenting infinite possibilities. They are putting together a huge puzzle that may or may not have any specific solution. Whether or not this supposed grand idea is diegetically real in the comic world (that is, formally planned for publication by DC creators and editors) is irrelevant to the actual process of community participation.
[2.8] The range of ideas pondered within the early 4chan threads highlights the complexity of material that is being discussed: /co/mrades discuss characters as common as Batman and as obscure as Qwewq, a sentient universe. The texts they mine for meaning come from many different sources, including Final Crisis (2008) interacts with the larger continuity of the DC universe. Over the first several months of the creation of this community, the reading list increased in size and complexity.
However, the titles listed above have become the core reading for the Hypercrisis and serve as the base for the groupconstructed continuity of the DC Comics universe.

Figure 2. Fanmade reading list for the Hypercrisis. From 4chan (http://4chan.org).
[View larger image.] [2.9] The growing textual complexity demonstrates several things about the /co/ group. The first set of comics explored by fans was published from 2006 to 2009, emphasizing an importance of contemporary work. Second, as hinted at by post 13000226, "I…I think I need to reread Final Crisis," communal competency with the texts in question is implied. Users assume others will have more than just casually read a comic. The members encourage others to critically engage with the content and play with continuity ideas. Not living up to the standard of critical analysis on /co/ can be dangerous: "Good god. You guys have an amazing ability to invent stuff from nothing. To totally invent story lines that aren't there. To create connections in order to save Morrison's shit from being irrelevant trash" (post 13000844). This particular user may be a troll, but he or she is implying that some people read for simple enjoyment. This post is in response to post 13000862: "When this all turns out to be true, your face is going to be so red" (Hypercrisis 1). This user is stating that not only is he or she having fun with the texts, but he or she is also representing a collective belief that the group is onto something big, and participation is required.
[2.10] Whereas the first thread represents a deep textual analysis of contemporary comics, drawing basic connections between works and developing ideas, the second official thread starts something far more complex. The first post involves a compiled image of 10 panels from two different comic series and compares symbols and dialogue in Batman and Green Lantern comics to create connections between two seemingly unrelated characters and stories into one larger narrative. This use of user constructed images becomes a recurring trend throughout the Hypercrisis discussions.  Red Hood, has appeared in and the overall message of vengeance that is prevalent with so many DC characters. Other users expand on this, and connections to John Milton's Paradise Lost, the source of slogan, enter the discussion. These literary allusions lead to a greater understanding of the overall tone of specific characters. As one user remarks, connecting the tone and allegories in Milton's work not just to a single character, but to a greater sense of characterization throughout DC's comics: [2.12]   greater collective understanding of the structures of abstract power within the fictional universe based on three entirely unrelated comic histories while also creating original media to help explain events. The shift to the conceptual also includes more artistic elements within the comics. Users are analyzing symbols, icons, scars, cave paintings, tattoos, and other diegetic markers relevant to the characters and narratives, even going so far as to connect the importance of historical shamanistic imagery to the iconography of DC's superheroes.

Figure 5. Fanmade chart by user Madman connecting several superhero groups by their power levels (post 13064208, Hypercrisis 3). [View larger image.]
[2.15] Where participative thinking helps a reader engage a text in a more fulfilling way, as a group, the members are able to collect their engagements into a communal dialogic process. Users help others in order to gain increased participation. When a user states, "I just realized I understood 40 percent of [Final Crisis]" (post 13000371), another replies with, "It's amazing-Final Crisis was the most pickedapart thing EVER in the history of /co/ but we are still discovering new [stuff] that was set up in it" (post 13000472; Hypercrisis 1). Besides coming up with new theories, /co/mrades help each other with readings. Scans of comic pages are common and are often used to remind others of past events or allusions to other texts, or to illuminate missed details.
Bakhtin describes the dialogic process with texts as "a system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other. It is impossible to describe and analyze it as a single unitary language" (1981, 47). Narratives have multiple levels, given the realities of the characters and settings. The construction and interpretation of a text cannot be a singular process. The /co/ members help each other with this process. Users can bring in information from other canonical texts, but they also collect it for future discussions and to show to new users.
[2.16] The strength of this process is in part due to the group's ability to be wrong and to adapt discussions according to findings they decide are incorrect. The lack of importance of subcultural capital in the anonymous community allows for experimentation in thought and a lack of repercussions for incorrect ideas. While discussing the death of Bruce Wayne and the possibility of his being the mysterious Phantom Stranger, a user reminds everyone that "Phantom Stranger is an angel who refused to take sides during Satan's rebellion" (post 13029333, Hypercrisis 2). But in reply to the limitations of a character in DC's canon, a user states, "Like I said I don't like this theory but in one of Aesop's fables one animal didn't fight in the battle of Beasts and Birds. That animal was The Bat" (post 13029407, Hypercrisis 2). Nor does the group neglect possibly fruitless ideas. Rather, members search for better justifications for their theories. Although this theory was ultimately disregarded by /co/, it did help the community by developing analysis, strengthening the group's bond, and furthering the community's efforts. [2.17] In addition to discussing the theory and origins of plot points, the /co/mrades also focus on deconstructing the complex nature of power and identity in the DC Comics universe. The users analyze the nature of good and evil DC's fictional universe over more than 75 years' worth of published texts, discuss how it has developed through events created by Grant Morrison, and speculate on what it means to the future development of DC's comics. This has less to do with analyzing texts and more to do critically thinking about intertextual and universal realities and the belief systems of various characters. The usercreated ideas are growing collectively more abstract, yet the group manages to explain these concepts to each other succinctly and continues to connect them to the texts in discussion; the community encourages interaction. Users help explain and elaborate on concepts and point to particular texts and characters to help construct a particular idea. If somebody doesn't get it, it is up to the community to justify the idea or express it more clearly. 3. Note 1. Introduction [1.1] Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, serves as the embodiment of traditional American ideals such as liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness (Dittmer 2005; McDermott 2009; DuBose 2007. Considering this, it is hardly surprising that American fans often use the character to engage with political topics (Johnson 2010; Ostrander 2011. More specifically, Marvel Comics fans of varying political perspectives have used the StarSpangled Avenger to further their political arguments. This wide range of political engagement is possible in part because Steve Rogers's brand of Americanness is broad enough that it encompasses all but the fringes of the American political spectrum. This essay will look at the ways in which the Tea Party and the Occupy movement have used the Sentinel of Liberty to further their respective ideological goals, and will briefly touch on two groups that have not. writer Steve Englehart has argued that this transcendent quality is an essential part of the character (Walton 2009

Video 2. "#F29 Allen Mullins (Captain America) Addresses Occupy
Oakland" by addio33. [3.3] While most appropriations of the Captain's iconography are anchored in a broader political movement such as Occupy or the Tea Party, not all political uses of it occur on behalf of such groups. For example, in a riot following an Occupy Oakland march, Roy Sorvari, a "reallife superhero" called "The Ray," attacked riot police at an Occupy Oakland encampment with a borrowed orange aluminum reproduction of Captain America's mighty shield (Smiley 2011). An SF Weekly article made clear that Sorvari lacked a coherent political motivation and was motivated by a general fear of African Americans. Sorvari's use of a superhero identity to act on this fear is an inherently political statement, as it distorts his prejudice into fourcolor heroism. However, it is distinct from other fan appropriations of Captain America in two ways. First, Sorvari doesn't belong to a political movement.
Second, he made practical use of the shield as a defensive weapon rather than using it to connect his viewpoint to American tradition.
[3.4] Fans' politicized use of Captain America's iconography goes beyond wearing costumes and wielding props at rallies. A post on the Occupyaffiliated Web site Occupyr was titled "Captain America Stand with 99%" and included a panel from Amazing SpiderMan #537 (January 2007) in which Captain America declares, [3.5] This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world -"No, you move." (precipice 2011) [3.6] However, this passage was also quoted on a conservative Tumblr blog that has declared the 99% movement useless ("Doesn't Matter" 2012; "So Let's Have a Chat" 2012). At first glance, the fact that an Occupier and a Tea Partier both present this quotation as perfectly summarizing their viewpoint seems to support the popular notion that these movements are starting to converge. This is mistaken. Nothing that Captain America says in that passage is specific to Tea Party or Occupy ideology, and it would be wrong to conclude from their joint adoption of it that their ideologies are similar. All that this use of the quotation demonstrates is that members of both movements frame themselves as outsiders who adhere to their vision of true American values, and that Captain America is a broad enough figure to encompass such outsiders regardless of their differences. This shared outsider status is hardly evidence of a convergence. Instead, it is merely evidence of their shared origin as grassroots movements.
[3.7] Steve Rogers's brand of transcendent Americanism has even been embraced by the establishment the character is written as being separate from. This was demonstrated when the Obama reelection campaign's Tumblr reblogged a poster of the president dressed as the StarSpangled Avenger (Daily Mail 2012). The Obama campaign hasn't reblogged a picture of the president dressed as one of the Founding Fathers, and few if any Occupy protestors have styled themselves so as to evoke them. This difference suggests that Captain America is a more potent symbol of nearly universal, nonpartisan Americanness than any historical figure who has been elevated to the American pantheon.

…or Captain America?
[4.1] The use of the StarSpangled Avenger's image by the Obama campaign and by protest movements across the nation's political spectrum demonstrates Marvel's success in writing the character as a defender of broader American ideals rather than of the American government. That is to say, Captain America's owners have crafted an icon of Americanness whose bipartisan popularity rivals or surpasses that of our nation's founders. The good captain is even treated as though he were a historical figure.
Every other member of the American pantheon was a complicated human being who held a wide range of opinions, yet Americans across the political spectrum frequently claim that one or another of them would agree with their policy positions. The same claims are made about Captain America. He was rabidly prowar in the 1940s and yet has been heralded as an icon of everything that is great about the United States by the generally antiwar Occupy movement (Canfield 2012; Carapezza 2012. He exchanged blows with Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, and yet Captain America and the Gipper are both held to be paragons of American virtue by the Tea Party (Gonyea 2011; White 2011b). Marvel has created an icon of Americanness so potent that Americans can't help but turn to political poaching (à la Michel de Certeau), writing their own meaning onto him rather than passively accepting Marvel's assertions of his neutrality (Jenkins 1992; Rimjob 2008; DuBose 2007. Each poacher considers the elements of Cap's character that conform to his or her own perspective to be essential, while casting aside those that conflict.
[4.2] The reason Captain America is so easily poached is simple. Marvel's desire to ground the character in overarching American principles rather than policy or party means that Steve Rogers will never outline whether or not he supports Medicare.
He'll never issue an opinion on illegal immigration. Instead, all he will talk about are broad ideals like freedom and justice. When fans read Captain America saying that the United States is built on "the requirement that we stand up for what we believe," they assume those beliefs are their own. His vagueness combines with readers' confirmation biases (Eysenck 2004, 328) to make him a broadly admired American patriotic icon.
[4.3] Such broadly admired icons are rare. This means that fans' decision to use one as a mouthpiece for their political position is inherently divisive. It creates a dichotomy that turns Americans who disagree with them into an Other (Dittmer 2005). If Captain America is a conservative, then liberals oppose not only a specific set of policies, but the very core of America itself. The reverse is true when those on the left use Captain America to support their policies. When a character whose narrative is that he represents all Americans is used to criticize some of them, the deAmericanization of those being criticized is inevitable. This is the  (Docsamson 2010). A likely explanation is that these groups are not primarily focused on arguing that their views are part of the American tradition. As an example, the American Communist Party contextualizes itself as an international movement and prioritizes the hammer and sickle over the stars and stripes. Fittingly, Captain America is nowhere to be found on its Web site (http://cpusa.org). The same is true of fringe groups on the right, like Stormfront, that identify as part of a broader white supremacist movement and prioritize German-and Teutonicinspired iconography (Kampfgruppe88 2011; Lady Celtic 2007).
Given such groups' international selfimage, it isn't surprising that they would abstain from appropriating the StarSpangled Avenger. It's worth mentioning that while some groups that walk the line between the mainstream and the fringe, such as the John Birch Society, fully embrace American iconography, they find their membership conflicted about whether they can embrace Captain America (Eddlem 2011; Walker 2011. Only the mainstream, including the Occupy and Tea Party movements, has generally embraced Captain America. This is likely because the members of such movements have (at least largely) embraced their Americanness and thus want to draw on the tradition that Captain America so effectively represents. [5.1] While Captain America was first created as a fervent nationalist who wanted American children to "free our country of our traitors" (Yanes 2009, 58), he has developed into a very different character. Fans have embraced the modern incarnation of the StarSpangled Avenger because he is one of the few embodiments of an Americanness that encompasses a wide swath of the nation's political spectrum, from the most conservative Tea Party member to the most liberal Occupier (Johnson 2010; Mroczkowski 2011. This nearuniversal American appeal renders any political use of his image inherently divisive and

Conclusion
questionable, yet makes his political appropriation irresistible. demonstrates to Steve and to others that there is a role and a place for Steve in the present world), the aid they can offer is so great that refusing to give it would be unethical.
[4.4] Have readers taken this course? On this topic, the reception of this piece speaks volumes. Since its publication on January 4, 2012, "Average Avengers Local Chapter 7 of New York City" has received over 40,000 hits and 150 positive comments. The comments note a strong desire for such groups to exist, and many commenters describe feeling comforted and inspired to act by the piece while lamenting that such groups are not more common and that they can find few ways of taking action. In January 2012, an Average Avenger Tumblr was created (http://averageavenger.tumblr.com), with a Tshirt design and a call for ideas. In June, however, its owner admitted having difficulty maintaining it (there had been only two posts since the end of January) and asked to hear from anyone willing to help.
These suggest that most fans remain at the first stage and are having difficulty finding partners to join with. They also point to a limitation of "Average Avengers": while inspirational and suggestive, the story is unable to help readers along the course it proposes. Of course, developments may continue, and thus this lack of movement may turn out to have only been temporary. [1] Comic book stories exist and coexist as texts, constructs of texts, reconstructions and reimaginings and responses to themselves. They do not move in a linear path.

Notes
They are not plot consistent (at least, there are multiple universes in which simultaneous stories play out), and they reinvent, reuse, and add on as needed to communicate the social impetus of any current moment. To these ends, they have been explored across official and unofficial communities. Fan fiction communities, for example, have allowed a broader interpretation of characters, further humanizing these figures by giving them a satisfying mundanity that pulls them into the colloquial experience while skyrocketing them out of context by reexamining their prescribed roles via subtext or in alternate universe (AU) spaces to give them sexualities, problems, and so on that never explicitly existed or which were not exhibited in canon.
In addition, every writer who, as a child, read his or her favorite comic, then grew up to write for a major distributor, is also creating fan fiction, redefining beloved characters on a very personal level. When writers inhabit the dual spaces of professionals and fans, they become creators and critics, identifying the tropes that make readers feel the love and frustration of fandom and perpetuating those same tropes within canonbound stories.
[2] Marvel, one of the major distributors, has entertained the dichotomy between serving as creator of and commenter on the text quite explicitly; a recent Ms. Marvel collection entitled "Ascension" includes a heated diatribe on the part of Ms. Marvel and a snarky rejoinder by SpiderMan. He calls her and the Avengers crazy for seeking legitimacy for their work and says he wants to get away from her to "go back to my life of fighting maniacs dressed up in frog costumes" (Reed 2009 Concurrently, what does it mean when the writer inhabits the space of the fan? Via this text, Ennis is fan, writer, and commenter on the state of being both. [4] In a back cover endorsement for the graphic novel, Mark Waid (2002)  Speedo (Flash). Everything they say is the expected pabulum of the superhero (such as "Greetings, comrade. Welcome to the fight"). Each also shows a problematic stereotype inherent to the particular character: misplaced patriotism, repressed sexuality, lipservice feminism, and token racial diversity. Over the course of the text, the main character shows the characters, directly or indirectly, as the facilitators of the stereotypes, not the patrons of diversity and acceptance they promote themselves as being.
[5] Thus, the text is not providing a fairytale change for the main character. In an interview in the UK magazine Clint, Ennis (2012) notes many of his characters "have really just been dealt a shit hand, and are endeavouring to do the best with what they've got." Accordingly, this is no Pretty Woman or Cinderellameetssuperpowers tale. As a superhero, she is juxtaposed with her fellows not as a fallen woman, but as a sane, if bitter and jaded, human who recognizes that life is not a game or an adventure. She shows up her comrades as the hypocrites they are: token figures or stereotypes that promote rather than heal the tensions of divisions brought about by race, sexuality, and so on. She mocks their methods, their outfits, and their rationalizations. As she bluntly asserts: [6] I don't know why you retards think I'd want to come play in your rubber room with you, but you have got the wrong woman. I've got the kid, a ninehour shift at Denny's-which I have to be at in about twenty minutes -and a fun night of handjobs to look forward to. So fuck off and carry on smearing shit up the walls. And leave me the fuck alone.
[7] Upon learning that she will receive remuneration for her service in The League, she reluctantly tags along to battle a motley crew of thugs, including The Noun, The Verb, The Adverb, and The Adjective (all the good names having been taken).
Thereafter, she uses her powers to subdue a nasty individual who had been hurting prostitutes. She allows those he'd wronged to take vengeance. Both of these scenes show her to be a duck out of water. They are depicted as slapstick, until they go too far and become uncomfortable, which is the point. As she tells The League members when they accuse her of being too vulgar and brutal, "Please.  D.). In the light of 9/11, he lambasted Ennis, Amanda Conner, and Jimmy Palmiotti, the writers and artists of the comic, saying, "They obviously think of themselves as cultural terrorists and want the world to know they've allied themselves with evil" (2001). Steranko misses the point; Ennis's work is a reflection on the very concept of the superhero and his or her audience, creating a space for discussion that is neither easy nor comfortable because he does not believe it should be. We the fans grow up with superheroes, and their stereotypes and ideals are part of our cultural dynamic. We love them. We laugh at them. We want them to be better than they are. This high degree of acceptance necessitates a stark provocation to move us to treat both superheroes and our relation to them critically.
[10] In large part, these are the reasons we have fan fiction in the first place. These are certainly reasons why Ennis ends his story with an attack and hostage situation at the Empire State Building. The League of Honor is unequipped to deal with a bomber with no demands. The newest addition to the group is left holding a depressed nuke.
Recognizing that she is dead anyway, she flies into space to allow it to detonate. As she enters the inky blackness, her cigarette fizzles out; she huffs it as her life fizzles out as well.
[11] Throughout this graphic novel, Ennis as fan explores the tropes of the stories he grew up with, able to satirize them precisely because he loved them. Ennis as writer engages the tropes in his own space. Ennis as commenter shows the problems inherent in hero comic texts and offers a harsh criticism both of the material and those who subscribe to it. That he chose to do so in the light of 9/11 is no mistake. The last two sentences of the story are compelling. They are, as Waid noted, laughing with and at the reader: "Her kid grew up. Not a bad idea, when you think about it.". With this comic, with this comment, Ennis is simultaneously the professional writer telling the fans to grow up and the fanboy telling the professional comics industry to do the same. A harsh statement playfully delivered is, for all that, no less pointed in its analysis of the subject. 1. Introduction: It was 7 years ago today (more or less) [1.1] Like many fans, I have written long stories, carefully crafted drabbles, thoughtful journal posts, funny polls, and academic essays. It's both ironic yet somehow telling, though, that I seem to get the most attention when I lose my shit. [1.2] Arguably the most enduring of these moments has been an essay I wrote in November 2005 called "Fandom and Male Privilege." The essay was a quick, somewhat irritated look at what happens when male fans wander into spaces created by and predominantly inhabited by female fans, particularly those spaces centered on or at least friendly to slash activities. The essay argued that many times, these male fans not only expected the women who had built these spaces to invite them in and make them welcome, but to do so by suppressing the slash discussions they had built the spaces for, as those discussions made the men uncomfortable. [1.3] Posted on both the Fanfic Symposium and my LiveJournal, it garnered approximately 1,250 comments, and continues to get the odd comment even today, so to say that it struck a nerve is an understatement.

Works cited
[1.4] I sometimes joke that the essay was dashed off in the hour between two classes, but the truth is that parts of the essay had been brewing in my head for months. My primary fandom at the time was DC comics, specifically the Batfamily, and like any good comics fan at the time, I was following a LiveJournal community called scans_daily, a place for posting comics panels and pages fans found interesting. [1.5] In its LiveJournal incarnation, scans_daily had been founded by women fans to be friendly, but not exclusive, to slashy interpretations and discussions of these comics panels and pages. Many of the fans who initially came to post and discuss comics there approached comics as part of their larger media fandom, and also as a part of their larger slash fandom. However, for reasons that I suspect had something to do with the crosspollination I discussed in 2008 in "On Symposia: LiveJournal and the Shape of Fannish Discourse" (doi:10.3983/twc.2008.0049), the community began attracting more mainstream comics fans, whose background was in the broader realms of geekdom, and for whom slash was either unknown or at least a very strange thing (slash being at least slightly less mainstream at the time). Not surprisingly, most of these fans were men. Also perhaps not surprisingly, many of them missed the community information that said "slashfriendly" on the way in. This led to a number of clashes, which ultimately led to "Fandom and Male Privilege." [1.6] That was 7 years ago. In both comics and fandom, much has changed, and much has not. In comics, there are now openly gay characters making headlines. On the other hand, the tremendously popular character Oracle, an icon for disability rights and a character refreshingly valued for her smarts and computer skills, has been taken out of her wheelchair and squeezed back into her skintight Batgirl costume, and artists continue to thrill us with material like Catwoman's debut cover (figure 1).

Figure 1. Catwoman's debut cover. [View larger image.]
[1.7] What has changed in fandom since then? A great number of things, and not all of them expected. In particular, the notion of fannish spaces as predominantly women's spaces has become complicated. Women of color have spoken up and repeatedly said that fandom has ignored and undervalued their presence, thus prompting the question of which women we mean when we say "women's spaces." Likewise, challenges to gender binaries have necessarily challenged the very notion of predominantly women's spaces. At the same time, some communities have struggled with the question of male privilege and even sometimes misogyny versus exploitation and appropriation when it comes to gay male members.
[1.8] At the same time, judging by the occasional affirming comments the essay still receives, the issue of male privilege is obviously one that fandom still struggles with.
Of course, it seems almost painfully naive to say this in a year when, in the United States at least, the issue of male privilege is foremost in realworld politics. Certainly fandom continues to have its clashes. Women are still excluded from the definition of "geek" and "fan" in the mainstream press (http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/24/boothbabesneednotapply/), despite our contributions to the culture, once again leading to the very issue I discussed in "Fandom and Male Privilege": mainstream geekdom attempts to exclude us, and then when we make our own spaces, accuses us of being exclusionary.
[ His argument was that US medicine was not only not gender biased in favor of men, but it was gender biased in favor of women. His support for this was that as many men get prostate cancer as women get breast cancer, and yet breast cancer receives much more funding and research than prostate cancer.
[2.6] Without being able to verify either of these facts easily (this was before such information was available with a couple of mouse clicks), I responded thusly: the reason breast cancer has the research and funding it has is because women (and a few men, most of whom had lost women to breast cancer) had gotten off their asses and gotten it. They had raised money and lobbied and dragged what was once a vaguely shameful disease into the public eye.
[2.7] I don't actually remember how the debate ended, but the gist of it was this: the idea that men as a group might actually have to do something to get their interests represented was totally and completely foreign to him. The "fact" that they weren't represented already was just proof of bias and oppression. [2.9] After a while, we began organizing chick nights-gatherings of just the four of us, and maybe some other women we knew from outside the group. Some of the men in the group took exception to this. They never organized nights at which we were excluded. When we pointed out that by the law of averages, a good half of the various social outings ended up being guy only, they replied that it was not the same thing.
[2.10] "Look," I finally said to one of them, "when we get together Saturday night, we're going to paint our nails and put goop on our faces and play with each others' hair and watch movies with really hot guys and talk about how hot the guys are and probably talk about sex and periods and all that fun stuff. Do you really have any interest in that?" [2.11] "No," he replied, "but we could do other stuff instead." [2.12] At which point I walked away, because otherwise things would have ended either with a rant on how it was not only more socially accepted but socially expected for women to be interested in stereotypically guy things than for guys to get into stereotypically female things (which I didn't want to do, because really, we all did love gaming and horror movies and science fiction all that fun stuff), or else with me banging my head on the table.
[2.13] We live in a culture of male privilege.
[2.14] I mean, you all do know that, right? I'm not breaking anything to you? Cool. [2.15] Male privilege may be more obvious in other cultures, but in socalled Western culture, it's still ubiquitous. In fact, it's so ubiquitous that it's invisible. It is so pervasive as to be normalized, and so normalized as to be visible only in its absence.
As John Scalzi points out in his attempt to find a new terminology for the default status that is straight, white, ablebodied male (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straightwhitemalethelowestdifficulty settingthereis/), the vast, vast, vast majority of institutions, spaces, and subcultures privilege male interests, but because male is the default in this culture, such interests are often considered ungendered. As a result, we only really notice when something privileges female interests. [2.16] This results in, well, lots of things, but two that I want to talk about here. The first is that true gender equality is actually perceived as inequality. A group that is made up of 50% women is perceived as being mostly women. A situation that is perfectly equal between men and women is perceived as being biased in favor of women.
[2.17] If you don't believe me, then you've never been a married woman who kept her family name. I have had students hold that up as proof of my sexism. My own brother told me that he could never marry a woman who kept her name because then everyone would know who ruled that relationship. Perfect equality-my husband keeps his name and I keep mine-is held as a statement of superiority on my part. [2.18] Back to the first point there. Think for a minute about any show that isn't a sitcom (for some reason, they're the exception) or a Lifetime series. I'll bet you anything the opening credits have more male names than female. If there are more female names, odds are the series is about women, as opposed to being about lawyers or doctors or people living in another galaxy, like Stargate: Atlantis . And as much as I love the show, the main cast was a tad lopsided. For that matter, I remember noticing and being pleased by how many women there seemed to be on the Atlantis starship Daedelus. How many is how many? Two. If it's realistic that there would be fewer women on an air force ship, the more telling point is that the presence of two visible female background characters caused me to take notice. [2.19] The second result of the invisibility of male privilege is that a lack of male privilege is taken as active oppression, as male bashing or bias toward women. It is not enough that the mere presence of something that actively aims at women and women's interests is taken as oppressing men; simply not catering to men's interests is perceived as oppression-honestly perceived that way.
[2.20] Let's talk about Spike TV (http://www.spike.com/) for a moment-television for men. Leaving aside for the moment that their idea of what television for men is kind of interesting, there was no question that the network label was in part a response to Lifetime. Leaving aside what Lifetime thinks television for women is or should be (we live to rant another day), it sounds fair enough, right? One network that's television for women and one that's television for men. [2.21] Except is there anyone out there who doesn't know that pretty much every other network on television is courting the male viewer? The WfrickingB is trying to attract more male viewers. I'm not saying they're actively excluding female viewers, unless they're the sort of network that cancels their secondhighest rated show because the only people watching it are women, and no, I am never letting that one go, but is it any secret that male viewers are the holy grail of television? [2.22] This is, in essence, the television corollary of the men who point to women's studies programs/classes and ask where the men's studies are, at which point I flail in the direction of the history, literature, art, and social studies classes. Does anyone actually think men are underrepresented there? Again, something that is not predominantly about men is perceived as oppression even though it is actually an attempt to rectify the gender imbalance in the mainstream.
[2.23] What does this have to do with fandom? [2.24] Media fandom as most of us know it is often largely a female space, by which I mean that many of the circles we run in are made up mostly of women. Women write stories for other women, make vids for other women, talk with other women, and go to cons with other women. Although few of us actively want to exclude men, we're not really invested in drawing them in either. Fandom is one of the few places where you'll actually hear, "Wait, soandso's a guy?" We're kind of used to that.
[2.25] Except lately, these fairly small spaces have been expanding, and intersecting with spaces where there are more men. Often, everything is fine and dandy. It's just that sometimes, it's not.
[2.26] Let's take a post at LiveJournal community fanficrants as an example ( figure   2). Allowing for the moment that the guy was being obnoxious as all shit in his phrasing, there was still a rather disturbing amount of agreement to what was, in essence, a classic example of male privilege. [View larger image.] [2.27] It is not enough, you see, not to exclude men. We have to actively get them involved. I'm not sure what's more insidious: the notion that we must find it not only desirable that men get involved in fandom, but also some kind of imperative, or the notion that it is our, women's, responsibility to get them involved in fandom-in other words, that we are the ones who must act. Even though we carved these spaces out for ourselves (didn't nobody create those lists and cons and archives and communities for us, darlin'), we must take the further step to get men involved in them. If you are going to argue that these couple of guys are in no way representative of male privilege at work in fandom, you might want to talk to the vidders who've been told that vidding can't be an art because no men are involved. Instead, it can only be a hobby.
[2.28] Further, as implied in a response to the fanficrants post cited above (figure 3), we must do so by actively suppressing our own interests. It is not enough to make things more appealing to men; we must stop doing the things that appeal to us. That is where things can get ugly. Men can stand longingly at the window waiting for us to coax them in all they want, and ultimately it doesn't affect us. What does affect us is the attempt to reshape the spaces we have set up for ourselves to better reflect their interests. [2.30] Except that wasn't enough. Instead, some men (not all, of course) felt it necessary to actively try to stop the posts that were of interest to women, the slash and "ooh, pretty man" posts. Instead, we get "I don't understand this kind of fandom" in response to slashy commentary on DC comics scans. We get long essays on why we should not post slashy commentary on a particular set of scans. And no matter how many times we point out that the male fans have the whole rest of comics fandom on the Internet, this one space that does not actively cater to their interests by preventing us from asserting ours has become the object of contention.
[2.31] Tempers have frayed as a result. It's all well and good to try to be understanding, to try to remember that larger comics fandom is a male space, and thus that guys see us as the intruder, and so on. But in a culture of male privilege, when even the spaces we create for ourselves become sites of struggle, it can get frustrating.
[2.32] I feel the need to reiterate: I've met some great guys in fandom, guys who've joined fannish spaces and embraced fannish ways and just been, well, great. I always think of them with a bit of a squirm when I say that I'm mostly writing for women like myself. I'm happy when men like my stories or other work because I'm happy when anyone likes my work, but I'm not actively seeking them as an audience. [2.33] But you know, that should not be a problem. It should not be seen as antimale to admit that I'm mostly writing for other women. We shouldn't have to keep fighting for the spaces that we made for ourselves. We shouldn't feel any need to apologize for having made those spaces for our interests, and having made them to reflect our interests. Seriously, can we stop that? This is not oppression. It is not male bashing. It is simply a lack of male privilege, and that is not a bad thing. 1. Introduction [1.1] As it is in Denmark, so may it be in fandom. Marvel's Loki has gathered quite a following in his journey from comic to film in Thor (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2011) and The Avengers (dir. Joss Whedon, 2012). But how does one love a villain? It's indeed the how, and not the why, that's key. Where one might expect to find lengthy textual analyses rationalizing an attraction to Loki, the microblogging platform Tumblr brims with image posts, many without substantial text to contextualize or expand upon the visual (figure 1). [1.2] Has Loki fandom fallen prey to the trickster's physical manifestation?
Concluding a post about how one can "like and empathize with a villain and still disapprove of his actions," majesticgingerbear (2012) reflects. "Or, maybe, we're all just suckers for a pretty face." This demonstrates awareness of the implications of being a fan of a character portrayed by a handsome actor like Tom Hiddleston. Visual appreciation doesn't delimit overall character comprehension, yet some have used it to suggest that, as one Tumblr post asserts, Loki fans' "cognitive skills…are being hindered by Tom's beauty" and that "maybe they should just walk away from this engrossing franchise" (note 1).  (Foucault), and allpervasive imagemaking," Mitchell also maintains that "we still do not know what exactly pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and the world…and what is to be done with or about them" (1995,13). This anxiety surrounding the ubiquity of the image affects our discourse about the visual, and in considering fan activity on Tumblr, I believe that it's critical that we examine the visual as discourse.
2. Loki fandom as Tumblr case study [2.1] Loki fandom on Tumblr, with its pervasive image making, serves as a particularly potent case study as the fans work to enter into an already complex discourse community. Hiddleston's Loki is a filmic character that may be (or alternatively may not be) approached from multiple knowledge bases. His latest appearance, in The Avengers, can be placed in dialogue with Thor, numerous comics of different runs and universes, animated series, Norse mythology, and the additional paratext of Hiddleston's own interpretation of the character. There is, then, a plethora of material from which to construct a view of Loki that allots him depth, motivations, sympathy, empathy, and even redemption, whether as developed in fan works or anticipated in future films. [2.2] The resistance to such expression seems to stem in part from a belief that many Loki fans on Tumblr are emotionally or superficially invested in the filmic Loki as 3. Theoretical framework [3.1] In referring to the text, I adopt Roland Barthes's idea of the work versus the text: the work is what we consume (the films and comics), and the text is what happens when we "decant" the text from the work and "recuperate" it as "play, task, production, practice" (1977,. Barthes maintains that the text "exists only when caught up in a discourse" (157). Many would agree that a fan drawing constitutes play and production, but does it follow that screencaps and GIFs actively engage with the work from which they derive? Or are they copies, and further, simply copies upon copies, as they and more traditional forms of fan art are reblogged? Or can they be considered part of a discourse? [3.2] Images have a language, and in evaluating the discourse that visuals on Tumblr engage in, Mitchell's (1995) notion of imagetext provides a useful concept. In the simplest sense, imagetexts are works that combine image and text or other verbal expression: a picture with a caption, a comic, or a film. But images without text can also be considered imagetexts, because "in the act of interpreting or describing pictures, even in the fundamental process of recognizing what they represent, language enters into the visual field" (52). Whether or not I talk about an image post on Tumblr, and whether or not it even contains words, in order to make sense of the image, I enfold it into my own mental discourse, drawing upon memories and knowledge that might contextualize or interpret it for me. [3.3] Barthes also offers tools to examine the function of the imagetext in his definitions of anchorage (text that supports the image), illustration (image that supports the text), and relay (image and text that work in tandem) (1977,38). I position fancreated images on Tumblr as engaging primarily in anchorage or relay, depending upon the knowledge base with which the viewer approaches them. Here Julia Kristeva's concept of intertextuality proves pertinent. Kristeva (1980) positions any text along two axes: one that connects the creator and audience of a work, and one that connects the work to other works. Where these two axes converge is where intertextuality most strongly occurs. Many of the imagetexts function differently for each viewer, according to the viewer's ability to experience those moments of convergence; Tumblr offers a space where intertextuality develops wider coherency through its pervasive dispersion.  Barthes's "relay" mode, in which "text…and image stand in a complementary relationship; the words, in the same ways as the images, are fragments of a more general syntagm and the unity of the message is realized at a higher level" (1977,41). In a GIF with text, the question of whether image or text is to be privileged invites a critical gaze. If the use of lokism's GIF creates a feeling of connection with and validation by Hiddleston, it's ultimately the fan who controls the meaning of the imagetext in how she employs it, putting the visual into play in an ongoing discourse.   Thor: The Trials of Loki (adapted from Norse myth) in which Loki's mouth is sewn shut are particularly prevalent. What does refiguring the scene with Hiddleston's likeness accomplish? Rather than being only repetition with superficial variation, such a refiguring further challenges the notion that the Loki fan is susceptible to the lure of the empty visual text.

Intertextual imagetexts
[4.4] Thor: The Trials of Loki explores how Loki nearly begins Ragnarok through a series of events drawn from myth, but in this version of the story, Loki is allowed to contextualize his misdeeds in his own narrative. Loki lies to the dwarves Brokk and Eitri in order to trick them into creating a collection of treasures for him, which he intends to give to the other gods so that they will love him. When his trickery is discovered, however, Brokk appeals to Thor for recompense, and Thor helps to hold Loki down while the dwarf sews his lips shut to prevent him from telling more lies.
When Loki recounts this story, Thor says that he doesn't remember doing so, and a distraught Loki insists, "But you did! You helped, and you laughed…I heard the laughter as I pulled the thread from my mouth and thought: 'I do not belong…I am alone'" (AguirreSacasa and Fiumara 2011, 25-26). The brothers continue to challenge each other's memories, and whatever the truth, Loki sees the incident as particularly formative. It defines him, and he narrates it in a fashion that invites sympathy.    Barthes posits that once the text is engaged as activity, "it follows that the Text cannot stop…the constitutive movement of the Text is a traversal" (1977,157). The mobility of the image on Tumblr and the mobility of Barthes's text both suggest to me Barthes's space of a "transparency of language relations…the space in which no language prevails over any other, where the languages circulate" (1977,164). As fans increasingly migrate to Tumblr from sites like LiveJournal, understanding the language of its denizens is crucial for engaging with any fannish discourse.

Conclusion
6. Note 1. I've refrained from identifying Tumblr users by name whose stances my essay in some manner seeks to challenge, so as not to make them feel targeted or draw what may be unwanted attention to them. The blog post I refer to can, however, likely be found by searching for the tag "Loki fangirls" on Tumblr; that tag is used primarily to direct criticism toward those who express sympathy and empathy for Loki. Tumblr users mentioned by name have given their permission for their words or works to be shared in this article. Note that the availability of posts and consistency of user names are particularly unreliable on Tumblr and any sources may disappear or become difficult to trace. white in the comics…But not that many people had seen these characters-not that many moviegoers are familiar with them" (Marshall 2010). Changing the race of these characters mattered less because they were not household names in the same way that SpiderMan was. Lee continued, "Everybody seems to be familiar with Spider Man, so I say that it isn't that it's a racial issue-it's just that it might be confusing to people…But that's a matter for the people at Marvel to take into consideration" (Marshall 2010). Lee explicitly stated that he was not advocating a particular view, but that Glover should have a chance to audition for the role. Academics weighed in too:

Amazing beginnings, ultimate innovation
Phillip Cunningham (2012), in an essay about "Donald Glover for SpiderMan," pointed to other creators and fans who addressed the universality of SpiderMan and who saw no reason why the character could not be black, Latino, or something other.      producers, which resulted in a change in SpiderMan's race in a print comic book (Truitt 2011a(Truitt , 2011b There was a Maine Comics Club that met every month or so. And a couple of these friends and I planned and executed a handful of trips to Boston, which seemed so far away that first time. The trips were for the purpose of attending comic book conventions-the first a smallish one called Sunday Funnies (because it was held on Sunday). The next couple we went to were pretty big deals because some of the professional guys who actually worked on the books were guests at the shows.  [4.2] A: That's a very interesting question for me, because I actually disappeared from the convention scene and from most of anything to do with the business (apart from the actual work, that is) for several years before slowly making my way back to cons in the middle of the last decade. And I've only in the last year or so become involved with the modern interaction with fandom that happens throughout the Internet. My stepping away was intentional, because as with so much of any entertainment field, I felt things were becoming increasingly dark-in tone and in spirit, and graphically. I had become a committed follower of Jesus Christ, and I simply was uncomfortable with much of what was going on with these characters that used to be so wholesome and heroic. There was too much blurring of the lines. A very little of that goes a long way for me. for me, it is. I believe either of those numbers will be the most I've ever done in a year. As I think we discussed earlier, my first interaction was at a con in Boston-and it seems that this kind of pro/fan contact is pretty much the same as it was (once there).

Fans and conventions
[4.6] One thing that's super important to me-the most important to me-is remembering that whatever interaction I have with whomever, I am an ambassador for Christ (as the apostle Paul wrote). I stopped doing shows altogether when I came to faith in Yeshua/Jesus about 11 years ago, because of a dark tone that continues to grow darker at the shows and in the industry. But about 4 years later, I felt led in my heart to go back, interact, and share as opportunities arise. I know sharing the Gospel at a comics convention in between sketches of Wolverine and Spidey must sound a bit odd, but I've had some pretty profound conversations with total strangers, some of whom have since become my friends, or at least regular correspondents.
[4.7] The last show I was at, I hung out with two guys in the business, one of them an indie guy who was previously a standup comic. He's one of the funniest people I've ever met, even when he's not trying to be. I laughed until I hurt-something I hadn't done in a lonnng time. I asked why he left the comedy, and he told me there was no community-a lot of backbiting, stealing of jokes, and paranoia over having jokes stolen. He compared it to his comics experience: generosity, community, kindness, and creative people all wanting to see each other do well (with exceptions, of course).
And I think he's right.
[4.8] One last thought on the con experience: the hours and years of sitting alone can take a toll on the psyche. I've often wondered-being the social person I think I am-why I chose this profession to begin with. The reality is, I like both; I love working in solitude with my thoughts, my music, and God…and I love being with people, learning about them, sharing a few card tricks (okay, more than a few), and talking about big things…life, eternity, God. [5.4] The sales numbers are nowhere near where they were 30 years ago per book, but because there are so many more titles being produced, I don't think the overall number of units sold industrywide is much different-or at least the difference isn't as great as the sale of individual titles makes it appear. [5.5] But for me, the greatest change is the actual material-what I alluded to before -tone, spirit, etc. And it's a reflection of the culture at large, really. In many ways, comics have lost a sense of a strong moral compass because we (the culture) have lost that same sense. It's harder to tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. We see in Washington moral convictions of convenience rather than sticking to convictions even when it hurts your guy-your party-your whatever. Same with some of the heroes-they bend and break a little bit too soon for my tastes in many cases… but thankfully not in all cases.

The comics industry
[5.6] Right now, for whatever reason, I feel more a sense of responsibility to bring a little light into what has been dark. I think there are other creators who feel the same way. In a strange way, I feel as excited about doing this work as I have felt in a very long time.
[5.7] Q: There seems to be a backlash against this movement in comics-writers like Kurt Busiek and James Robinson offer a more classical vision of the superhero, and artists seem to be moving toward a less graphic portrayal of action and violence.
Given the industry needs (and the new presence of Disney in the market), has this loss of moral compass begun to change? [5.8]  to pull off on screen in a way that could be taken seriously. The Cap movie did just that.
[6.6] A very clever moment in the Avengers movie is how the fan is brought into the plot…even to the point of being the catalyst for the team finally getting together. Phil Coulson was us, so in a sense-even though the book didn't have fans until it existedthey found a way to make a fan ("the fan") be the reason for their being…very M. C. Escher-esque.
[6.7] For years the proportion of adults to kids has continued to move toward the adult-though I think the movies may be creating a little push back. Also, I have found a lot of the art collectors are guys who read my books as kids. One of the most wonderful emails I ever got was from a young man in Australia who hadn't had a very good relationship with his dad. One day, at 15, while digging through the attic, he found his dad's comic collection. Well, Dad was a fan of my work, and this young man and his father ended up finding common ground and bonding over their shared enthusiasm for it. patch together on her own, not a fully developed costume-and something practical, chunky, loaded with accessories, rather than skintight, sexy and revealing." So we were on the same page from the start.
[4.3] An early character document describes Cat as "attractive, physically fit to a college sports level but above all, incredibly smart." I certainly didn't want her to have the conventional superheroine physique or to adopt conventional superheroine poses.
She is slim, but later developments give us a curvier, plussize Cat, so we move further away from dominant representations.
[4.4] From my point of view, the writing was more about elements I wanted to include or change-fashions you might actually want to wear, rather than silly costumes, and more people of color-than things to avoid. I did explicitly aim to avoid coding Carnivale in the way Joker is often represented, in terms of gay deviance. I think he ultimately operates as a queer figure in the broader sense, but so do Cat, Enrique, Kit, Kay, and Dahlia, in that change, subversion, play, and fluidity are associated with positive values in this story, and it's monolithic, rigid straightness, in the form of Urbanite, that is really held up for critique and ridicule.
[4.5] Sarah Zaidan: I think the most effective way of answering this question is visually, with a rough draft of the cover art for MSCSI #1. [4.6] Foremost in my mind was that this was not going to be a cheesecake image, and I wanted to get as far away as possible from presenting Cat as a sexualized object. So she might be getting dressed, but she's not showing off. Her expression may indicate an awareness that she knows the reader is looking at the cover-this work is meta in a lot of ways and I wanted to add an element to the cover that could be read that way-but she also knows the reader has come way too late to the party to engage in voyeurism, a subtle message that if you pick up this comic, you'll be getting a different representation of a female superhero. The placement of her hands holding her skirt shut as she finishes pulling up the zipper deliberately echoes the classic handsonhips superhero pose while subverting it: this is a superhero text, but with an everyday young woman as its protagonist. If she's got her hand on her hip, she's not doing it to pose; it's part of the everyday act of getting dressed. The papers and books surrounding her are a reference to her intellect and studies, and will include images and objects that subtly foreshadow her story in the final version.
[4.7] Suze Shore: Drawing the pages for the MSCSI comic has been very much about including a sense of reality in depicting both Cat and her environment. Since I'm working off Will's script, this isn't challenging; we're very much of one mind about giving the characters practical costumes and believable personalities.
[4.8] This approach is immediately avoiding the comic conventions I've never been keen on, namely the onesizefitsall approach to female characters and the tendency to skimp on personality in favor of treating a character as a scene accessory. Will's script is circumventing these status quos wonderfully-Cat has depth that we're seeing fleshed out even within the first issue, and character images are being based off personality. That is to say, while there will be people sporting less than full coverage, it won't be at odds with those characters and their situations. Cat's larger figure later on in the story will take MSCSI another step further from the usual comic approach to female bodies and showcase a heavier girl being no less smart or capable than her previous self.
[4.9] Q: Sarah touched on getting "as far away as possible from presenting Cat as a sexualized object." Could you elaborate on specific elements of comics layout that might encourage or avoid such imagery? How does a storyboard for My SoCalled Secret Identity work to challenge these stereotypes?
[4.10] Will Brooker: I played some conscious part in this process through specific directions in the script: the first page, for instance, notes that "the idea here is a sequence of 'girl getting dressed' that immediately subverts and offers an alternative to the more conventional cheesecake/tease scene." [4.11] There are other moments where I've specified a deliberate angle or perspective that in some way subverts mainstream representations of women in comics-Cat sitting down in a library with a pile of books is described as "the hero shot," and there's a sequence where she explicitly closes the door on the viewer (and on Kat and Kit) when she gets changed. [4.13] I think these directions could easily have been ignored or misinterpreted by artists who wanted to draw a different, more familiar type of comic, though, so really it's mostly been in the hands of Suze and Sarah, and the many artists who have drawn sketches and character designs for the project.
[4.14] That, thanks to Suze, the hero shot isn't just an image of a young woman with a pile of books in a library telling us she's really smart, but also looks down at her from above but without showing any cleavage, really epitomizes what this project is about and distinguishes it from (to pick a particularly relevant example) this cover image of Oracle.

Figure 5. Cover, Battle for the Cowl #2 (2009). [View larger image.]
[4.15] Suze Shore: The main concept I've been working with for issue #1 is to treat Cat's shots as is appropriate to what's going on in the story. I think a lot of comic artists flip this order of thinking; the first priority becomes "this woman must look sexy," and that sexual pose is then placed within the context of the scene whether it works or not. The best example of this would be fight scenes between women in which the poses have been taken from pornography. The result is a scene carried by the text and the accessories, with the basic posing and expressions of the characters entirely at odds with the situation.
[4.16] I've found that by using a scene's mood and context as my primary inspirations, it's been easy not to fall into the trap of nonsensical sexiness. My favorite sequence so far is the leadup and reveal of Cat's hero pose in the library. To use this sequence-in which her superpower is revealed to be her intellect-as an excuse to break out sexually charged camera angles would have been utterly undermining.
[4.17] I wouldn't say I'm aiming so much to subvert stereotypes as I am to keep the characters real. When there is sexiness, it will be genuine to the character's personality.
[4.18] Sarah Zaidan: I adore the reveal of Cat's hero pose in the library; the energy she embodies in that scene is fantastic, and it came through in both the script and Suze's art. To me, what makes that image so powerful is that it's true to the character.
[4.19] What frustrates me about overtly sexualized imagery in comics is that it is very seldom in keeping with the personalities of the characters depicted; instead, it's just there. Perhaps a way to avoid this kind of imagery, or utilize it more mindfully, is to take a minute before drawing or writing to ask if it really needs to be there, taking into account the characters' personalities, motivations, and actions. For a femme fatale type like The Spirit's P'gell, overt sexiness has a point. For a character like Cat, it's out of place. Being on the same page about this as Will and Suze really adds to the experience of working on MSCSI. What have the benefits and challenges been? [5.2] Will Brooker: I think the collaborative approach is valuable for this project for a number of different reasons. [5.3] Politically, I do think it's important to recognize privilege and try to make positive use of it. I have a decent reputation as a Batman scholar and have a variety of ways of gaining publicity for a Batmanrelated project (this roundtable discussion is one of them), so I think there is some value in me sharing that platform with a group of others and helping to showcase a range of creative talent. One key aspect I wanted to address was the traditional gender imbalance in mainstream comics, which I deliberately tried to reverse in terms of the people I initially approached. [5.4] Aesthetically, the idea of a scrapbook was always key to the project. It connects to Barbara's scrapbooking-and while it's Jim Gordon who is sticking things in a memory album when Barbara is shot in The Killing Joke, I think scrapbooking, especially in its digital form of Pinterest, has associations of more feminine creative work, which distinguishes the project helpfully from mainstream superhero comics for teenage boys and young men. A scrapbook aesthetic also works to undermine any sense of a single, restrictive look for the characters-instead, we have various interpretations of Cat and the supporting cast-and gently subverts mainstream ideals of female representation in comics. [5.5] Institutionally, comics are almost always collaborative, of course. So I would always have planned to work with visual artists, though I hope Sarah and Suze are getting a better deal of it than artists (and indeed writers) often have within the comic book industry. [5.6] In terms of fan culture, I think (though again, it wasn't conscious) this way of working chimes with the practice of beta reading and collaborative online writing that's been long established within (predominantly female?) fan communities. So there may be something about transformative works that is particularly suited to joint creation.

Collaborative and transformative criticism
[5.7] And on a personal, creative level, there were simply some things I didn't know well enough from personal experience. Enrique Garcia's character is hugely informed by lengthy online discussion with Juan Ramos, whom I first reached out to on Twitter.
One of Cat's flashbacks about how she is treated within the academy was taken from a conversation with Sarah. L. J. Maher prompted me to think about the relatively uniform body types of all the women in the comic, and sparked the idea of a curvy Cat. The Egyptian stylings of Sekhmet are supported by research from another friend, Paul Harrison, who also provided ideas about Misper's fighting style; when Sekhmet's outfit started looking a little too showgirl, I ran it past feminist scholars-including the authors of this article-for their feedback. I've only just now had an email from TWC editor Kristina Busse (about the idea of a mother yelling "Catherine Abigail Daniels!" at a freckled, tomboyish little girl) that made me realize we haven't seen the young Cat, and that it would be great to explore her childhood in a future issue.
[5.8] I feel the story is still in my voice, rather than written by committee, and overall I've been pleasantly surprised by the way conversations have always led to great new ideas, and haven't, so far at least, encountered any obstacles. Maybe it comes down to all being on the same page about what kind of project it is, and where it's going.
[5.9] Suze Shore: The committeestyle setup of this project is one of the reasons I find MSCSI so rewarding to be involved with. We're doing something still relatively new with this series and, among other aspects, its treatment of sexuality and gender, and with such a range of voices within the comic, I believe it's essential to also have a diverseness in the voices guiding its production and direction.
[5.10] I think that the main challenges in this collaboration result from what is also its largest asset, namely the fact that we're from all over. Since geography requires we communicate via the Internet, there's always the risk that nuances of ideas get lost in transit. That being said, I've thus far been blown away by how in sync everyone has been and believe this similar vision combined with the contributors' individual uniqueness will result in a fantastically rich final product.
[5.11] Sarah Zaidan: This is the sort of project I've been waiting for ever since I went to art school and discovered I wasn't the only person out there who created characters and their worlds and visually realized them. What's surprised me about the process is the fantastic interplay of ideas that everyone involved has contributed, and how it really does create a visual and textual mosaic-all of which has served to create a stronger, betterrounded cast and setting. This makes the scrapbooking aspect of the project's imagery meta on another level, as it can be read as being representational of the process behind the project.
[5.12] Q: In some respects, My SoCalled Secret Identity is part of a much longer fannish tradition of transformative textual production. This project has also come together in a year marked by vocal critique of the representation of women in comics, mounting concerns about the paucity of female comic creators, and projects like Womanthology, a Kickstarterfunded, fandriven response to these concerns. Do you think there have been any signs that comics publishers like DC and Marvel are taking note of transformative works (and the criticisms/alternatives they embody)? [5.13] Will Brooker: I'd love to say that they are, but I can't personally see any signs of it. As far as I know, Gail Simone remains the outstanding example of a female (feminist) fan entering the mainstream and shaping it from the inside, and unfortunately I get the sense she's being used by DC editorial as a kind of token fan service.
[5.14] I haven't personally met or spoken to Gail Simone, and I'm not an expert on her work. But I think it's wrong if one writer is expected to shoulder the responsibility of female representation within DC Comics. It's wrong for a range of obvious reasons, including the fact that one person can't adequately live up to that expectation and is limited in what she can do within the dominant system. I like Simone's work on Birds of Prey very much, but her recent run on the New 52 Batgirl has disappointed me. It reads like what I expect it is-a compromise and negotiation.
[5.15] So it's great to see the transformative works on offer this last year, and the boundaries between fan and professional seem to be blurring further with Kickstarter funded projects, but I think the DC mainstream has a long way to go. [5.16]  [1] Scholars working in fan studies, and specifically on American comic book fandom, will be familiar with Matthew Pustz's Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (1999). This important book appeared years before the current boom in comics studies, and it traced the interactive and participatory dynamics of American comics, and superhero comic books in particular, throughout the second half of the 20th century. Pustz's most recent comicsrelated work, the edited essay volume Comic Books and American Cultural History, is also interested in historical investigation. As Pustz writes in the introduction, its first goal is to "demonstrate how comic books can function as dynamic primary sources that can help scholars, teachers, and students to understand various periods of modern American history" (4); its second goal is to take "another step in the integration of comic books into the field of history" (8). Both of these goals are crucial. They remind us that comic books are popular artifacts whose impact on American culture warrants close critical attention, and they emphasize the power of comic books to teach scholars, students, and fans important lessons about American history.
[2] With close to 300 pages, the volume is of substantial length, subdividing its 16 essays by mostly American scholars into four sections that each contain between three and six essays. More than half of these essays are accompanied by blackandwhite illustrations; these illustrations (a total of 19) contribute to the appealing look and design of the volume, and they allow readers to relate specific arguments to their primary sources. Comics scholars will be familiar with a few of the contributors (Alison Mandaville, Matthew J. Costello, A. David Lewis), while the presence of many unfamiliar names attests to the healthy influx of new voices into the field of comics studies.
[3] The first section, "Doing Cultural History through Comic Books," begins with two essays that focus on teaching methodology. In the first of these essays, Jessamyn Neuhaus discusses her experience as a history professor teaching a methodology course with comic books as primary and secondary sources. Neuhaus shows that comic books can be utilized to foster active engagement with history-for instance, by raising the students' awareness about their own consumption of and involvement with popular culture as historically situated and culturally significant practices. She smartly conceives of comic books as material artifacts that feature not only serial stories but also editorial columns, letters pages, and advertisements, all of which can and should [7] But how do these essays fare in comparison with other comics scholarship, and do they fulfill the objectives formulated in Pustz's introduction? I think it is fair to say the essays allow scholars, teachers, students, and fans to get a better sense of specific aspects of American history. Neuhaus and Marshall offer useful suggestions about how to teach which comics and how to achieve specific didactic goals. Moreover, while Mandaville's discussion is not very explicit about the didactic possibilities of Kelso's Alexander Hamilton Trilogy, it connects the participatory dynamics of Kelso's comic with the participatory demands of the political process and the interactive making of national history. The other essays in the volume, however, remain mute about the teachability of the primary sources they analyze; instead, they offer case studies that are instructive in and of themselves but add little to our understanding of how comic books can be used to teach American history. Thus, the volume only partially fulfills its didactic aims (note 1).
[8] Whether the volume achieves its second goal, to facilitate the integration of comic books into the field of history, is difficult to gauge. All of the essays deliver pertinent analyses of their source texts, and they do a good job of embedding individual comics and genres in their historical contexts. But this kind of historical contextualization does not seem entirely sufficient. If we really want to take comic books seriously as "dynamic primary sources," we should venture beyond arguments about how comic books "reflect" or "illustrate" (both terms that appear frequently across essays) historical developments or discourses: we should treat them as truly active artifacts that perform specific cultural work by offering material as well as imaginative spaces for the production and negotiation of historical meaning. Not all of the essays in this volume subscribe to a notion of comics as mere reflectors of history, but it is noteworthy that only a small number consider comic books as actual makers of history.
[9] As a volume that aims to bring American comic books into the realm of historical analysis, Comic Books and American Cultural History walks a fine line between the kind of theoryheavy writing that academic readers might expect and the detailed close readings of individual comics that might attract teachers, students, and fans.
There certainly is enough theory here to satisfy academic readers interested in learning more about comic books and their historical contexts, but what is sometimes missing is a sustained engagement with the intricacies of historical analysis and the many complexities we confront when we approach comics as primary and secondary historical sources (note 2). Moreover, a more focused treatment of a specific aspect of American cultural history might have created a more cohesive volume with a stronger overarching narrative; upon finishing the final essay, one has a sense of being left hanging in the balance, of confronting unresolved questions that might have been addressed in an afterword.
[10] My final critique of Comic Books and American Cultural History addresses more than this single text. It is a critique that pertains to many other books in the field of American comics studies that, like Pustz's volume, conceive of comics as a largely American cultural form and of its history in almost exclusively American terms.
Indeed, some of Pustz's contributors speak of "our history," "our allies," and so on. I realize that the very point of Comic Books and American Cultural History is to investigate different aspects of the nation's history and the role of comic books within that history, but I do believe that comics studies can benefit much from an infusion of international and transnational perspectives. As John A. Lent's International Journal of Comic Art (1999-) and essay collections edited by scholars from outside of the United States underscore, to look at the history of comics through an overwhelmingly American lens always entails the danger of reaffirming dominant national myths and exceptionalist selfimages at the expense of marginalized perspectives both from the inside and outside (note 3).
[11] All in all, I can recommend Comic Books and American Cultural History, albeit with the reservations expressed above. The book will be most rewarding for those interested in specific comic books and historical issues as they are covered in individual essays. While I do think that the volume as a whole would have benefited from a stronger theoretical frame and more a rigorous understanding of comics as dynamic artifacts and active historical agents, I very much appreciate the fact that it covers a range of intriguing primary sources and presents a series of valuable case studies, all of which will surely encourage further historical investigations of comic books.
conditions in which they engineer a given cultural production but also respond to it, no matter how inferior it may subjectively appear in relation to consecrated art forms" (xix). Despite this stated objective and the author's desire to draw upon the theoretical models established by Pierre Bourdieu, Gabilliet's book is only tangentially a cultural history. Unlike Bradford Wright, whose Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (2001) extensively intersected analyses of individual comic titles with occurrences and shifts in American culture, Gabilliet never utilizes extensive textual analysis to elaborate on his portrait of the American comic's cultural history. However, the author does succeed in producing one of most definitive historical accounts of the industry behind the American comic book.
[3] Gabilliet divides his book into three sections. The first part serves as an historical survey of the comic, rendered in broad stokes. The second section, covering the producers and consumers, builds on the historical survey by analyzing some of the previously discussed historical moments with more rigor to provide a vividly realized portrait of the industry, its creators, and its readers. Finally, Gabilliet accounts for the significant cultural shifts the medium has witnessed over the past century.
[4] As a result of its short length ("Seventy Years' Worth of Images" is covered in 104 pages), Gabilliet's account of the medium's history hits many familiar notes. The American comic book found its origins in the form of the newspaper comic strip and came into its own by initially offering reprints of those newspaper strips. As the cost of the rights for reprints rose, Major Malcolm WheelerNicholson decided it would be more feasible to publish original content; this gave birth to DC Comics. This original content spread across genres from the superhero comic to adult genres like crime, horror, and romance comics by the 1950s. These genres ultimately raised the ire of social progressives, who blamed comics for the post-World War II rise in juvenile delinquency. This outrage, fed by the shoddy psychological scholarship of Dr. Fredric Wertham, climaxed in a series of government hearings that ultimately resulted in the formation of the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954 and decades' worth of selfcensorship, powered by the Comics Code.
[5] Yet despite its brevity, Gabilliet's historical account is able to leap minor histories with a single bound precisely because the author never allows brevity to result in generalization. For instance, when analyzing the effects of the Comics Code on the industry, the author provides a complicated and nuanced narrative. He notes that the mid1950s decline of comics actually began one year before the Comics Code crisis.
Moreover, the decline had less to do with the code and more to do with an unstable market that had overexpanded beyond actual demand, the rise of television, and the end of tiein sales distribution practices (comics, like the films of the Golden Age, had to be purchased by distributors on an allornothing basis).
[6] When the author returns to the same crisis in the second section of the book, which is focused more intensely on the industrial forces at work, he further elaborates on the element of television. Gabilliet uses sample studies to inform us that 75 percent of fourth graders read nine comics a month in 1950. By 1960, that number dropped to 41 percent as television expanded its reach into American households . By the end of the chapter on "The Readers," the author's utilization of data sources ranging from a survey commissioned by Marvel Comics, to the American Library Association, to retailer questionnaires, make his concluding argument clear. He concludes, "At the dawn of the 1980s, comic books were no longer a mass medium, but were a sector of the cultural industry that was increasingly structured around a 'fan' audience, in the strongest sense of that term" (204). In cutting through the prevailing myths and origin stories of the American comic book industry with hard, quantifiable, data, Gabilliet's monograph exhibits its greatest strength in its elaborative role.
[7] For instance, Gabilliet succeeds in providing nuance to the portrait of the contemporary comic book audience, offering up some frightening statistics focused on the gender divide in readership that should prove fruitful to the fan studies scholar.
Specifically, his dissection of quantifiable data (approached "with caution" from sources ranging from surveys produced by Comics Retailer and marketing firms like Melchoir Thompson) makes it depressingly clear that the demographic data the industry has access to shows an audience that is only six percent to 13 percent female (208). The author goes on to trace this gender divide to the predominance of superhero titles that provided masculine escapism, the industry's abandonment of the romance genre, and the "masculine cultural practices of collecting and speculation" that came to fruition with the direct market system (209). He notes that these demographics have probably experienced a "radical shift" thanks to the link between the general bookstore and the graphic novel but that the specifics "are still unclear" (211).
[8] In the third section, Gabilliet finally circles back to Bourdieu when he argues that "Comics…can be analyzed as a 'field,'…as a social space seen through the prism of relations between the agents who participate in it" (248). He then goes on to chart the different areas of "consecration" the form has witnessed, both internal (prizes, fans, conventions, and specialty magazines) and external (how comics are viewed and written about by cultural critics like Gilbert Seldes and Harold E. Stearns and by academics). The book is structured to climax with this section, but instead it deflates, primarily because of the lack of signposts bringing us back to Bourdieu. By the time the reader finally reaches the discussion of cultural legitimation, they have long forgotten the objective of the monograph stated 244 pages earlier.
[9] The book is not without a handful of minor flaws that should be noted. First, the elliptical structure matches Gabilliet's desired objective, but admittedly the nonlinear approach results in some inevitable duplication. More significantly, Gabilliet undercites some sources. In a paragraph explaining DC and Marvel's jockeying for the top position among the publishers in 1986, the author notes that Marvel had fallen into second place for the first time in 20 years and contrasts DC's Alan Moore and Frank Miller's successes with the "commercial failure" of Marvel's Elektra: Assassin (93). Yet Gabilliet never gives us any quantifiable figures or a source for why he has such an impression. In a book that includes an essay on bibliographic sources and is at its best when it avoids generalizations and provides nuance to the grand history of American comics with concrete data, such an omission is all the more glaring.
[10] Thus, while Gabilliet ultimately only halffulfills his objective of providing a cultural history of American comic books, he does provide a fairly definitive institutional history of the form. Gabilliet's book is also an achievement because his balance of rigorous research and accessible prose is capable of engaging both scholar and comic book fan alike. This should put the author-who laments that the integration of comics on the campus "did not give rise to remarkable scholarly works" and that the field has yet to expand across the pages of the Journal of Popular Culture (298-99)-at ease. The field has come a long way since he initially put his pen to paper in the early 2000s. With works like Of Comics and Men providing comics studies scholars with a model, the field will continue to evolve faster than Professor X's students.