Before we continue, I want to add the usual caveat that I actually don’t want to be right about these
fandoms being dead. I like enthusiasm and energy and it’s a shame to see it vanish.
Mists of Avalon
Remember that period of time of about 15 years, where
absolutely everybody read this book and was obsessed with it? It could not have
been bigger, and the fandom was Anne Rice huge, overlapping for several years
with USENET and the early World Wide Web…but it’s since petered out.
Mists of Avalon’s popularity may be due to the most
excellent case of hitting a demographic sweet spot ever. The book was a
feminist retelling of the Arthurian Mythos where Morgan Le Fay is the main
character, a pagan from matriarchal goddess religions who is fighting against
encroaching Christianity and patriarchal forms of society coming in with it.
Also, it made Lancelot bisexual and his conflict is how torn he is about his
attraction to both Arthur and Guinevere.
Remember, this novel came out in 1983 – talk about being
ahead of your time! If it came out today, the reaction from a certain corner
would be something like “it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that tumblr
is at it again.”
Man, demographically speaking, that’s called “nailing it.”
It used to be one of the favorite books of the kind of person who’s bookshelf
is dominated by fantasy novels about outspoken, fiery-tongued redheaded women,
who dream of someday moving to Scotland, who love Enya music and Kate Bush, who
sell homemade needlepoint stuff on etsy, who consider their religious beliefs neo-pagan or
wicca, and who have like 15 cats, three of which are named Isis, Hypatia, and
Morrigan.
This type of person is still with us, so why did this novel
fade in popularity? There’s actually a single hideous reason: after her death
around 2001, facts came out that Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her daughters
sexually. Even when she was alive, she was known for defending and enabling a
known child abuser, her husband, Walter Breen. To say people see your work
differently after something like this is an understatement – especially if your
identity is built around being a progressive and feminist author.
Robotech
I try to break up my sections on dead fandoms into three
parts: first, I explain the property, then explain why it found a devoted
audience, and finally, I explain why that fan devotion and community went away.
Well, in the case of Robotech, I can do all three with a single sentence: it
was the first boy pilot/giant robot Japanimation series that shot for an older,
teenage audience to be widely released in the West. Robotech found an audience when
it was the only true anime to be widely available, and lost it when became just
another import anime show. In the days of Crunchyroll, it’s really hard to
explain what made Robotech so special, because it means describing a different
world.
Try to imagine what it was like in 1986 for Japanime fans:
there were barely any video imports, and if you wanted a series, you usually
had to trade tapes at your local basement club (they were so precious they
couldn’t even be sold, only traded). If you were lucky, you were given a script
to translate what you were watching. Robotech though, was on every day, usually
after school. You want an action figure? Well, you could buy a Robotech Valkyrie
or a Minmei figure at your local corner FAO Schwartz.
However, the very strategy that led to it getting syndicated
is the very reason it was later vilified by the purists who emerged when anime
became a widespread cultural force: strictly speaking, there actually is no
show called “Robotech.” Since Japanese shows tend to be short run, say, 50-60
episodes, it fell well under the 80-100 episode mark needed for syndication in
the US. The producer of Harmony Gold, Carl Macek, had a solution: he’d cut
three unrelated but similar looking series together into one, called “Robotech.”
The shows looked very similar, had similar love triangles, used similar tropes,
and even had little references to each other, so the fit was natural. It led to
Robotech becoming a weekday afternoon staple with a strong fandom who called
themselves “Protoculture Addicts.” There were conventions entirely devoted to
Robotech. The supposed shower scene where Minmei was bare-breasted was the
barely whispered stuff of pervert legend in pre-internet days. And the tie in
novels, written with the entirely western/Harmony Gold conception of the series
and which continued the story, were actually surprisingly readable.
The final nail in the coffin of Robotech fandom was the rise
of Sailor Moon, Toonami, Dragonball, and yes, Pokemon (like MC Hammer’s role in
popularizing hip hop, Pokemon is often written out of its role in creating an
audience for the next wave of cartoon imports out of insecurity). Anime popularity in the West can be
defined as not a continuing unbroken chain like scifi book fandom is, but as an unrelated series of waves, like multiple
ancient ruins buried on top of each other (Robotech was the vanguard of the
third wave, as Anime historians reckon); Robotech’s wave was subsumed by the next, which had different
priorities and different “core texts.” Pikachu did what the Zentraedi and Invid
couldn’t do: they destroyed the SDF-1.
Legion of Super-Heroes
Legion of Superheroes was comic set in the distant future that combined superheroes with space opera, with a visual aesthetic that can best be described as
“Star Trek: the Motion Picture, if it was set in a disco.”
I’ve heard wrestling described as “a soap opera for men.” If that’s the case, then Legion of Super-Heroes was a soap opera fornerds. The book is about
attractive 20-somethings who seem to hook up all the time. As a result, it
had a large female fanbase, which, I cannot stress enough, is incredibly unusual
for this era in comics history. And if you have female fans, you get a lot of
shipping and slashfic, and lots of speculation over which of the boy characters in the series is gay.
The fanon answer is Element Lad, because he wore magenta-pink and never had a
girlfriend. (Can’t argue with bulletproof logic like that.) In other
words, it was a 1970s-80s fandom that felt much more “modern” than the more
right-brained, bloodless, often anal scifi fandoms that existed around the same time,
where letters pages were just nitpicking science errors by model train and elevator enthusiasts.
Legion Headquarters seemed to be a rabbit fuck den
built around a supercomputer and Danger Room. Cosmic Boy dressed like Tim Curry
in Rocky Horror. There’s one member, Duo Damsel, who can turn into two people, a power that, in the words of Legion writer Jim Shooter, was “useful for
weird sex…and not much else.”
LSH was popular because the fans were insanely horny.
This is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the thirstiestfandom of all time.
You might think I’m overselling this, but I really think that’s an under-analyzed part of how some kinds of fiction build a devoted fanbase.
For example, a big reason for the success of Mass Effect
is that everyone has a favorite girl or boy, and you have the option to romance
them. Likewise, everyone who was a fan of Legion remembers
having a crush. Sardonic Ultra Boy for some reason was a favorite among gay male nerds (aka the Robert Conrad Effect). Tall, blonde, amazonian telepath Saturn Girl, maybe the first female team leader in comics history, is for the guys with backbone who prefer Veronica over Betty. Shrinking Violet was a cute Audrey Hepburn type. And don’t forget Shadow Lass, who was a blue skinned alien babe with pointed ears and is heavily implied to have an accent (she was Aayla Secura before Aayla Secura was Aayla Secura). Light Lass was commonly believed to be “coded lesbian” because of a short haircut and her relationships with men didn’t work out. The point is, it’s one thing to read about the adventures of a superteam, and it implies a totally different level of mental and emotional involvement to read the adventures of your imaginary girlfriend/boyfriend.
Now, I should point out that of all the fandoms I’ve
examined here, LSH was maybe the smallest. Legion was never a top seller,
but it was a favorite of the most devoted of fans who kept it alive all through
the seventies and eighties with an energy and intensity disproportionate to
their actual numbers. My gosh, were LSH fans devoted! Interlac and Legion
Outpost were two Legion fanzines that are some of the most famous fanzines in
comics history.
If nerd culture fandoms were drugs, Star Wars would be
alcohol, Doctor Who would be weed, but Legion of Super-Heroes
would be injecting heroin directly into your eyeballs. Maybe it is because the
Legionnaires were nerdy, too: they played Dungeons and Dragons in their off time (an escape, no doubt, from their humdrum, mundane lives as galaxy-rescuing superheroes). There were
sometimes call outs to Monty Python. Basically, the whole thing had a feel like the dorkily earnest skits or filk-singing at a con. Legion felt like it’s own fan series, guest starring Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day.
It helped that the boundary between
fandom and professional was incredibly porous. For instance, pro-artist Dave
Cockrum did covers for Legion fanzines. Former Legion APA members Todd and Mary
Biernbaum got a chance to actually write Legion, where, with the gusto of
former slashfic writers given the keys to canon, their major contribution was a
subplot that explicitly made Element Lad gay. Mike Grell, a professional artist
who got paid to work on the series, did vaguely porno-ish fan art. Again, it’s
hard to tell where the pros started and the fandom ended; the inmates were
running the asylum.
Mostly, Legion earned this devotion because it could reward it in a way no other comic could. Because Legion was not a wide
market comic but was bought by a core audience, after a point, there were no self-contained one-and-done
Legion stories. In fact, there weren’t even really arcs as we know it, which is
why Legion always has problems getting reprinted in trade form. Legion was
plotted like a daytime soap opera: there were always five different stories going
on in every issue, and a comic involved cutting between them. Sure, like
daytime soap operas, there’s never a beginning, just endless middles, so it was
totally impossible for a newbie to jump on board…but soap operas know what they are doing: long term storytelling
rewards a long term reader.
This brings me to today, where Legion is no longer being published by DC. There is no discussion about a movie or TV revival. This is amazing. Comics are a world where the tiniest nerd groups get pandered to: Micronauts, Weirdworld, Seeker 3000, and Rom have had revival series, for pete’s sake. It’s incredible there’s no discussion of a film or TV treatment, either; friggin Cyborg from New Teen Titans is getting a solo movie.
Why did Legion stop being such a big deal? Where did the fandom that supported it dissolve to? One word: X-Men.
Legion was incredibly ahead of its time. In the 60s and 70s, there were barely
any “fan” comics, since superhero comics were like animation is today: mostly
aimed at kids, with a minority of discerning adult/teen fans, and it was
success among kids, not fans, that led to something being a top seller (hence, “fan
favorites” in the 1970s, as surprising as it is to us today, often did not get
a lot of work, like Don MacGregor or Barry Smith). But as newsstands started to
push comics out, the fan audience started to get bigger and more important…everyone
else started to catch up to the things that made Legion unique: most comics
started to have attractive people who paired up into couples and/or love
triangles, and featured extremely byzantine long term storytelling. If Legion
of Super-Heroes is going to be remembered for anything, it’s for being the
smaller scale “John the Baptist” to the phenomenon of X-Men, the ultimate “fan”
comic.
The other thing that killed Legion, apart from Marvel’s Merry Mutants, that is, was the r-word: reboots. A reboot only works for some properties,
but not others. You reboot something when you want to find something for a
mass audience to respond to, like with Zorro, Batman, or Godzilla.
Legion, though, was not a comic for everybody, it was a
fanboy/girl comic beloved by a niche who read it for continuing stories and
minutiae (and tojack off, and in some cases, jill off). Rebooting a comic like that is a bad idea.
You do not reboot something where the main way you engage with the property,
the greatest strength, is the accumulated lore and history. Rebooting a
property like that means losing the reason people like it, and unless it’s
something with a wide audience, you only lose fans and won’t get anything in return
for it. So for something like Legion (small fandom obsessed with long form plots
and details, but unlike Trek, no name recognition) a reboot is the ultimate Achilles
heel that shatters everything, a self-destruct button they kept hitting over
and over and over until there was nothing at all left.
E. E. Smith’s Lensman Novels
The Lensman series is like Gil Evans’s jazz: it’s your
grandparents’ favorite thing that you’ve never heard of.
I mean, have you ever wondered exactly what scifi fandom
talked about before the rise of the major core texts and cultural objects (Star
Trek, Asimov, etc)? Well, it was this.
Lensmen was the subject of fanfiction mailed in manilla envelopes during the
30s, 40s, and 50s (some of which are still around). If you’re from Boston, you
might recognize that the two biggest and oldest scifi cons there going back to
the 1940s, Boskone (Boscon, get it?) and Arisia, are references to the Lensman
series. This series not only created space opera as we know it, but contributed
two of the biggest visuals in scifi, the interstellar police drawn from
different alien species, and space marines in power armor.
My favorite sign of how big this series was and how fans
responded to it, was a great wedding held at Worldcon that duplicated Kimball
Kinnison and Clarissa’s wedding on Klovia. This is adorable:
The basic story is pure good vs. evil: galactic civilization
faces a crime and piracy wave of unprecedented proportions from technologically
advanced pirates (the memory of Prohibition, where criminals had superior
firearms and faster cars than the cops, was strong by the mid-1930s). A young officer,
Kimball Kinnison (who speaks in a Stan Lee esque style of dialogue known as “mid-century American wiseass”), graduates the academy and is granted a Lens, an object from
an ancient mystery civilization, who’s true purpose is unknown.
Lensman Kinnison discovers that the “crime wave” is actually
a hostile invasion and assault by a totally alien culture that is based on
hierarchy, intolerant of failure, and at the highest level, is ruled by
horrifying nightmare things that breathe freezing poison gases. Along the way,
he picks up allies, like van Buskirk, a variant human space marine from a heavy
gravity planet who can do a standing jump of 20 feet in full space armor,
Worsel, a telepathic dragon warrior scientist with the technical improvisation
skills of MacGyver (who reads like the most sadistically minmaxed munchkinized
RPG character of all time), and Nandreck, a psychologist from a Pluto-like
planet of selfish cowards.
The scale of the conflict starts small, just skirmishes with
pirates, but explodes to near apocalyptic dimensions. This series has space battles
with millions of starships emerging from hyperspacial tubes to attack the
ultragood Arisians, homeworld of the first intelligent race in the cosmos. By
the end of the fourth book, there are mind battles where the reflected and
parried mental beams leave hundreds of innocent bystanders dead. In the
meantime we get evil Black Lensmen, the Hell Hole in Space, and superweapons
like the Negasphere and the Sunbeam, where an entire solar system was turned
into a vacuum tube.
It’s not hard to understand why Lensmen faded in importance.
While the alien Lensmen had lively psychologies, Lensman Kimball Kinnison was
not an interesting person, and that’s a problem when scifi starts to become
more about characterization. The Lensman books, with their love of police and
their sexism (it is an explicit plot point that the Lens is incompatible with
female minds – in canon there are no female Lensmen) led to it being judged
harshly by the New Wave writers of the 1960s, who viewed it all as borderline
fascist military-scifi establishment hokum, and the reputation of the series
never recovered from the spirit of that decade.
Prisoner of Zenda
Prisoner of Zenda is a novel about a roguish con-man who visits a
postage-stamp, charmingly picturesque Central European kingdom with storybook
castles, where he finds he looks just like the local king and is forced to pose
as him in palace intrigues. It’s a swashbuckling story about mistaken identity,
swordfighting, and intrigue, one part swashbuckler and one part dark political
thriller.
The popularity of this book predates organized fandom as we know it, so I wonder if “fandom” is even the right word to use. All the same, it inspired fanatical dedication from readers. There was such a popular hunger for it that an entire library could be filled with nothing but rip-offs
of Prisoner of Zenda. If you have a favorite writer who was active between 1900-1950,
I guarantee he probably wrote at least one Prisoner of Zenda rip-off (which is
nearly always the least-read book in his oeuvre). The only novel in the 20th
Century that inspired more imitators was Sherlock Holmes. Robert Heinlein and
Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton wrote scifi updates of Prisoner of Zenda.
Doctor Who lifted the plot wholesale for the Tom Baker era episode, “Androids
of Tara,” Futurama did this exact plot too, and even Marvel Comics has its own copy of Ruritania, Doctor Doom’s
Kingdom of Latveria. Even as late as the 1980s, every kids’ cartoon did a
“Prisoner of Zenda” episode, one of the stock plots alongside “everyone gets
hit by a shrink ray” and the Christmas Carol episode.
Prisoner of Zenda imitators were so numerous, that they even
have their own Library of Congress sub-heading, of “Ruritanian Romance.”
One major reason that Prisoner of Zenda fandom died off is
that, between World War I and World War II, there was a brutal lack of sympathy
for anything that seemed slightly German, and it seems the incredibly Central
European Prisoner of Zenda was a casualty of this. Far and away, the largest
immigrant group in the United States through the entire 19th Century
were Germans, who were more numerous than Irish or Italians. There were entire
cities in the Midwest that were two-thirds German-born or German-descent, who
met in Biergartens and German community centers that now no longer exist.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how the German-American
world he grew up in vanished because of the prejudice of the World Wars, and
that disappearance was so extensive that it was retroactive, like someone did a DC comic-style continuity reboot where it all never happened: Germans, despite
being the largest immigrant group in US history, are left out of the immigrant
story. The “Little Bohemias” and “Little Berlins” that were once everywhere no
longer exist. There is no holiday dedicated to people of German ancestry in the
US, the way the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day or Italians have Columbus Day
(there is Von Steuben’s Day, dedicated to a general who fought with George
Washington, but it’s a strictly Midwest thing most people outside the region
have never heard of, like Sweetest Day). If you’re reading this and you’re an
academic, and you’re not sure what to do your dissertation on, try writing
about the German-American immigrant world of the 19th and 20th
Centuries, because it’s a criminally under-researched topic.
A. Merritt
Pop quiz: who was the most popular and influential fantasy author during the 1930s and 40s?
If you answered Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, you’re wrong – it was actually Abraham Merritt. He was the most popular writer of his age of the kind of fiction he did, and he’s since been mostly forgotten. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has said that A. Merritt was his favorite fantasy and horror novelist.
Why did A. Merritt and his fandom go away, when at one point, he was THE fantasy author? Well, obviously one big answer was the 1960s counterculture, which brought different writers like Tolkien and Lovecraft to the forefront (by modern standards Lovecraft isn’t a fantasy author, but he was produced by the same early century genre-fluid effluvium that produced Merritt and the rest). The other answer is that A. Merritt was so totally a product of the weird occult speculation of his age that it’s hard to even imagine him clicking with audiences in other eras. His work is based on fringe weirdness that appealed to early 20th Century spiritualism and made sense at the time: reincarnation, racial memory, an obsession with lost race stories and the stone age, and weirdness like the 1920s belief that the Polar Arctic is the ancestral home of the Caucasian race. In other words, it’s impossible to explain Merritt without a ton of sentences that start with “well, people in the 1920s thought that…” That’s not a good sign when it comes to his universality.
That’s it for now. Do you have any suggestions on a dead fandom, or do you keep one of these “dead” fandoms alive in your heart?
This is great, thanks for putting this together. Couple of additional comments:
1. It’s just occurred to me that Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks, the sexiest novel of 1907, was an *erotic* Prisoner of Zelda ripoff/Ruritanian romance.
2. There’s one late example I can think of from the A. Merritt/1920s occult-based subgenre of Weird, that *is* still popular— and it’s the original 1984 Ghostbusters. If you look at the way the supernatural works in that movie, it’s absolutely grounded in late-19th/early-20th-century Spiritualism, complete with ectoplasm— of course the offstage cultists who built a skyscraper designed to trigger the apocalypse were working in the ‘20s, so the details make sense in context. Also I suspect Dan Aykroyd and the other writers are big fans of the fantasy of the era; an episode of the subsequent animated series, “Collect Call of Cthulhu,” is also full of affectionate references to Weird Tales writers, though mostly the ones like Howard and Lovecraft who are still known today.
Mooncustafer 