Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hanna, Erin, 1980 author.
Title: Only at Comic-Con : Hollywood, fans, and the limits of exclusivity / Erin Hanna.
Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019009182 | ISBN 9780813594712 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813594705 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: San Diego Comic-Con. | Comic book fans. | Comic books, strips, etc.Marketing. | Motion pictures and comic books. | FandomUnited States. | Popular cultureUnited States.
Classification: LCC PN6714 .H36 2019 | DDC 741.5/973dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009182
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copyright 2020 by Erin Hanna
All rights reserved
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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
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Nerds have never been more important for Hollywood.
Marc Graser, Variety, 2008
In December 2017, a federal jury ruled in favor of the San Diego Comic-Con in a trademark infringement suit against Dan Farr Productions, organizers of the Salt Lake Comic Con.
Their argument was a compelling one. Though the history of the San Diego Comic-Con dates back to 1970, when the event attracted 300 attendees and was known as San Diegos Golden State Comic-Con, the first convention to use some iteration of comic con in its title was 1964s New York Comicon.
I decided to open Only at Comic-Con with this court case for two reasons. First, because it captures some of the (understandable) confusion surrounding Comic-Cons place in what has become, in recent years, an increasingly crowded field of popular culture conventions. In 2016, the Wall Street Journal published an article called The Rise of the Cons, which commented on an explosion of fan conventions catering to a wide array of tastesfrom fitness buffs to beer drinkers. In an effort to capitalize on recent growth, the article read, international event-planning firms have been buying up mom-and-pop cons, starting new events and diving into unexplored markets. ShowClix, a platform for live-event organizers, tallied 519 major pop-culture fan gatherings in the U.S. last year, up from 469 in 2014, and comic cons were reported to be the beating heart of this empire.
Salkowitzs observations about the conflict between the corporate and cultural ownership of a term like comic con is indicative of the contradictions arising under what Henry Jenkins calls convergence culture, where consumers participate alongside industries in the production and circulation of culture. While this labor might yield a kind of affective ownership or sense of a communal popular culture, the underlying structures of institutional power, as this book argues, remain largely unchanged. Depending on how the term circulates and who uses it, comic con can feel like it belongs to everyone, despite a push to make it the legal property of a single organization. For this reason, the Comic-Con lawsuit also provides an entry point to a concept that is central to this book: exclusivity. The term comic con the defense argued, was a generic one, but Comic-Con organizers, in defending their trademark, seemed to suggest that the popularity of their event was at least partly responsible for popularity of the term. They had made Comic-Con a viable brand, one that they now owned. So as the term grew increasingly popularand profitableso did its value as an exclusive trademark. When you think about it, the idea that something can become more exclusive even as it becomes increasingly generic, seems a bit contradictory. But this contradiction is indicative of how exclusivity functions as a cultural construct that relies on the power to produce, enforce, or negotiate limits. This same contradiction is evident in discourses about fans, Comic-Con, and Hollywood, where popularity, mainstreaming, and growth somehow manage to simultaneously inflate and dilute the events exclusivity. Hollywood, this book argues, engages with audiences through a system of exchange built upon both the construction of exclusivity and its subsequent undoing: Media fans are said to constitute an exclusive audience of influencers, but everyone is (or should be) a fan of something; the content presented at Comic-Con is exclusive, but stories about it are meant to be shared widely. Only at Comic-Con makes sense of these contradictions by thinking about the material and ideological boundaries that I call the limits of exclusivity. The remainder of this introduction follows these two threads, providing further context surrounding Comic-Con as an object of study by situating it in a landscape of fan conventions that has exploded in recent years and elaborating on the limits of exclusivity, a theory that grows out of Comic-Cons place at the intersections of fandom and the media industries. Similarly, this book draws on both fan and media industries research to interrogate industry power and fan labor at the San Diego Comic-Con.
Why Comic-Con?
When I first attended Comic-Con in 2009, I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan embarking on the first research trip of my career. I took the trip because I wanted to witness what I had been hearing about for several years: the massive proliferation of Hollywood promotion at the convention. At the time, I knew I wanted to do research that examined media industries and fans, but when I boarded the plane to San Diego, I did not know that I would devote so many years of my life to thinking about Comic-Con. On the last day of the convention, I walked up an outdoor staircase to the second floor of the San Diego Convention Center to snap a picture of the crowds (figure I.1). As I watched people flowing in and out of the convention center, I thought about all the celebrities, previews, giveaways, and other exclusive promotions I had encountered over four days at the convention. I traveled to Los Angeles for the first time during this same research trip, but the San Diego Comic-Con brought me closer to Hollywood than I had ever felt in my life. In that moment, I realized that the answers to so many of my questions about how the ever increasing discourses about the power and influence of fan culture could possibly square with the economic and cultural heft of an industry like Hollywood were right there, only at Comic-Con.
