Creative Project #2: Fan Creation
If there’s one act of fan creation I’ve always loved, it’s the incorporation of famous characters into satirical web comics. The worlds of Pokemon, Sonic the Hedgehog and superheroes are full of inconsistencies and ironies that are just begging to be made fun of.
I, along with just about everybody on the Internet, love Batman. Furthermore, I love making fun of Batman. Here we have a brutal vigilante trying to get the criminal underworld to take him seriously, a goal which he decides can be best accomplished if he dresses up in a spandex bat suit. Does it get better than that? All of his gadgets are bat-themed, he has a brightly-clad sidekick, and his archenemies dress even more ridiculously than he does. And yet Christopher Nolan and the like have spent the past decade trying to get us to take the Dark Knight seriously!
Well, I for one refuse. Batman is magnificently absurd, and I will treat him as such. For my creative project, I produced some (woefully artless) Batman webcomics. The setting of the comics: a world where Batman’s quest to free Gotham City from crime has succeeded. With supervillains and organized crime a thing of the past, what is an aging Dark Knight to do?
I, along with just about everybody on the Internet, love Batman. Furthermore, I love making fun of Batman. Here we have a brutal vigilante trying to get the criminal underworld to take him seriously, a goal which he decides can be best accomplished if he dresses up in a spandex bat suit. Does it get better than that? All of his gadgets are bat-themed, he has a brightly-clad sidekick, and his archenemies dress even more ridiculously than he does. And yet Christopher Nolan and the like have spent the past decade trying to get us to take the Dark Knight seriously!
Well, I for one refuse. Batman is magnificently absurd, and I will treat him as such. For my creative project, I produced some (woefully artless) Batman webcomics. The setting of the comics: a world where Batman’s quest to free Gotham City from crime has succeeded. With supervillains and organized crime a thing of the past, what is an aging Dark Knight to do?
As Henry Jenkins writes in an essay on interactive audiences, “The World Wide Web is a powerful distribution channel” (The New Media Book, pg 163). It is the ease of online distribution through services like Weebly that allows a user like me to produce something like a web comic and distribute it without much trouble. The only tools I needed were available right on my desktop: Microsoft Paint, which comes bundled with every copy of Windows, and an internet browser. Now that I have posted them online, the comics I produced for this project could easily go viral, circulating around the web to be viewed by millions of users. That won’t happen, of course, since they are nowhere near funny enough, but the point is that the potential is there. For Jenkins, this principle of easy distribution through online channels is what enables modern fandoms to coalesce. On that, I agree wholeheartedly.
One question that occurred to me as I was working on the project was this: does something count as a work of “fandom” if it explicitly makes fun of the target material? In other words, do spoofs and satire fall into the same category as stern, serious Star Wars fan films? And to the owners of content like Batman or Star Wars, do works of fandom, serious or otherwise, have a net positive or negative impact?
Depending on the situation, the owners of intellectual property like Batman react in a variety of ways. In Rip! A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor, 2009), we meet a man whose Mickey Mouse satirical cartoons were considered so disrespectful that he was faced with legal action on behalf of Disney. Contrast that with George Lucas in Love, a 1999 Star Wars spoof that met no legal challenges, perhaps because it merely referenced characters from the films instead of reproducing them directly (The Social Media Reader, pg 204). My comics portray Batman in a less-than-favorable light. Which side of the matter do they fall on? Are they benefiting the owners of Batman, or sabotaging the character? Jenkins outlines the two sides of the equation nicely in “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars: Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry:”
“As we have seen, the media industry is increasingly dependent on active and committed consumers to spread the word about valued properties in an overcrowded media marketplace, and in some cases they are seeking ways to channel the creative output of media fans to lower their production costs. At the same time, they are terrified of what happens if this consumer power gets out of control, as they claim occurred following the introduction of Napster and other file-sharing services. As fan productivity goes public, it can no longer be ignored by the media industries, but it cannot be fully contained or channeled by them either” (The Social Media Reader, pg 205).
Could it be that my comics are actually helping “spread the word” about Batman? At the risk of tooting my own horn, I’d like to say “yes.” Precedent suggests that whoever owns Batman would probably think so too - because there are an awful lot of other webcomics out there making fun of Batman and never receiving so much as a “cease and desist” letter. We all love making fun of Batman, but that’s really because we love Batman himself. In other words, even spoof-style fan creations can be an act of appreciation. Just as George Lucas in Love enriched the Star Wars experience by gently spoofing it, Batman-related webcomics help the Dark Knight remain a cultural icon.
One question that occurred to me as I was working on the project was this: does something count as a work of “fandom” if it explicitly makes fun of the target material? In other words, do spoofs and satire fall into the same category as stern, serious Star Wars fan films? And to the owners of content like Batman or Star Wars, do works of fandom, serious or otherwise, have a net positive or negative impact?
Depending on the situation, the owners of intellectual property like Batman react in a variety of ways. In Rip! A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor, 2009), we meet a man whose Mickey Mouse satirical cartoons were considered so disrespectful that he was faced with legal action on behalf of Disney. Contrast that with George Lucas in Love, a 1999 Star Wars spoof that met no legal challenges, perhaps because it merely referenced characters from the films instead of reproducing them directly (The Social Media Reader, pg 204). My comics portray Batman in a less-than-favorable light. Which side of the matter do they fall on? Are they benefiting the owners of Batman, or sabotaging the character? Jenkins outlines the two sides of the equation nicely in “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars: Grassroots Creativity Meets the Media Industry:”
“As we have seen, the media industry is increasingly dependent on active and committed consumers to spread the word about valued properties in an overcrowded media marketplace, and in some cases they are seeking ways to channel the creative output of media fans to lower their production costs. At the same time, they are terrified of what happens if this consumer power gets out of control, as they claim occurred following the introduction of Napster and other file-sharing services. As fan productivity goes public, it can no longer be ignored by the media industries, but it cannot be fully contained or channeled by them either” (The Social Media Reader, pg 205).
Could it be that my comics are actually helping “spread the word” about Batman? At the risk of tooting my own horn, I’d like to say “yes.” Precedent suggests that whoever owns Batman would probably think so too - because there are an awful lot of other webcomics out there making fun of Batman and never receiving so much as a “cease and desist” letter. We all love making fun of Batman, but that’s really because we love Batman himself. In other words, even spoof-style fan creations can be an act of appreciation. Just as George Lucas in Love enriched the Star Wars experience by gently spoofing it, Batman-related webcomics help the Dark Knight remain a cultural icon.