The Non-Fan's Perspective

Last year, I enrolled in a "Superheroes in Comics" class at the college I'm attending. It was part of the college's "democratic education" program, the same program that's delivered to the world such illustrious courses as "Introduction to the Rubik's Cube," "The Simpsons and Philosophy," and "Elvish." These courses are taught by "facilitators," (i.e. fellow students) though each has its own faculty sponsor, and yes, they are worth actual units that count towards graduation. The class was populated by a nice mixture of both fans and non-fans.

Anyway, I was really surprised by what my fellow fans in the class knew and didn't know. My main exposure to other fans had been online, where we tend to know about characters all across the board. Well, there's segregation along company lines, with DC fans who know little about Marvel and vise versa. Still, if you bump into a Flash fan on the web, chances are he'll at least have general knowledge of the other DC Universe characters, if not of the more minute details.

Not the case with my classmates, though. They'd mention the most obscure bit of trivia one moment and then demonstrate unawareness of a much more common fact the next. For example, there was one guy who could recite chapter and verse of the minutiae of X-Men continuity, able to fully explain the Summers family tree... and he asked one day, "Did the Hulk used to have intelligence?" There was one woman who knew who Dr. Fate was and even mentioned his propensity for ankh-shaped energy effects, and she asked if the Golden Age Green Lantern wears a helmet. Some people who held Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Waid in high regard had no idea Gail Simone worked in comics (though they knew her name from the Women in Refrigerators site, interestingly enough). So on and so forth.

Make no mistake, I'm not criticizing these people for having obsession unequal to mine, not shouting "false fan" or anything like that. (That should go without saying, but I've seen folks in online fandom cop just that attitude.) But I am genuinely slightly boggled as to how these people come about. How does someone get to the point where he knows about the Wally Wood/Power Girl breast size urban legend, yet not know that the JLA's archer is named Green Arrow? (That's a real example!) You'd think anyone as immersed in fandom circles to know the former would have at some point learned the latter, right? This species of fans isn't all that common in the circles of Internet fandom, yet it was the only kind I met in the class. Is this the true face of the fans of superhero comics? Is it a more accurate representation of the majority readership than what we see on message boards and the comics blogalaxy?

In the coming weeks, I'll probably be intermittently writing about the class's reactions to the TPBs we were assigned. It was fun to see things from their fresh eyes, or at least it was for this long-time reader who long ago lost the ability to see the forest for the trees.

First up, when I get around to it: "The Death of Superman." One of the facilitators, upon assigning it to us, actually said, "It's a classic." Yeah. I couldn't tell if he was being ironic or not.