Spidey Zine, Spidey Zine

When Marvel and DC give creators carte blanche on their properties, good things tend to happen. DC's Solo gave 12 artist an entire issue to publish stories that included original characters and played with house toys. Strange Tales, the mini series filled with members of comic's independent scene, showed that the sense of humor Stan Lee used to build classic titles never went away. Thanks to parody laws and loop holes, sometimes people decide to use characters they don't own regardless of permission. One example is Air Pirates Funnies, an underground comic Dan O'Neill organized to see how far his group of cartoonists could get using Disney properties to tell stories with drugs, sex and everything else the 1970's could drum-up to irritate the house of mouse. With the Internet being used as a means for creators to offer original and fan art to the public, it's important that these loop-holes and parody laws can protect artists out there, because some of it is extremely good.

Hannah Blumenreich starts off her digital comic, Spidey Zine, with a disclaimer that reads: This is fan art and not official Marvel or Disney or what-ever and I’m going to shout this at every single person who handles this little comic collection because DEAR GOD if there is one thing I fear, it’s Disney Lawyers™. If her message doesn't save her from the threat of legal troubles, it serves up a good laugh and sets the tone for a collection of short stories that pays tribute to the comic relief Spider-Man bring to comics when fighting villains or battling personal problems. Blumenreich's short stories remind readers that Spider-Man was a teenager, trying to fit in, understand girls, figure out how to fight crime, and deal with Aunt May and a troubled past before he started to age, deal with clones and get rebooted.

The collection brings together seven stories that use one to four pages to show slice of life scenes that play with Spider-Man characters and their history. Most are built around jokes or uncomfortable moments that make you laugh, like a splash page with an in-costume Peter sitting on the couch with Aunt May while he holds her yarn and yells at The Gilmore Girls as she knits and tells him to sit on the cushions. Though the show he's watching might date the target audience, the scene reminds readers that Spider-Man started off as a teenager, the Marvel super hero the audience could see themselves in, the relatable kid with nerdy interests and super powers. These nerdy interests kick off the zine with Spidey swinging through the city while singing Leonard Nemoy's “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.” Watching a science nerd sing Spock's ode to a character from the hobbit shire, drawn with classic action shots, easy lines and fluid pacing make “Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” a quick ride with the perfect trifecta of nerdom comedy.

What makes the lives of Peter Parker and Spider-Man different from others is that he's always facing girl troubles no matter if it's with the mask (Black Cat) or without it (Mary Jane). In Spidey Zine, the main character gets his share of girl troubles. There's a comical re-imagining of Peter's introduction to Mary Jane in “Face It, Tiger,” and a story where he creates a missed connection by spending too much time talking about television to a girl that wants Spider-Man to get her home safely on Halloween in “Walk Home.”

Family is another important theme to Spider-Man stories, and Spidey Zine doesn't neglect that element. “Uncle Ben” shows how words aren't needed in comics. One of the bigger stories, “Uncle Ben” uses its panels to go through the losses in family Peter experiences to emphasis the importance of Aunt May. The lack of words paired with images that are filed with detail and information slow the tempo down and turn “Uncle Ben” into an honest story that starts off breaking your heart before leaving it mended and warm.

Because it uses a hot property, Hannah Blumenreich may not be able to charge you for it. But if you enjoyed her Not Quite Journal Comics you may want to see her apply her sense of humor and stylish work with a pen in Spidey Zine. If so, you can download it for free or donate what you want by visiting her web store and hoping it doesn't see the same conclusion Air Pirates Funnies did when it used Disney characters.

Fan Fiction, Genre and Plot

Genre is a big problem in literary theory. It's as big a problem in literary theory as it is in music. There's a level of constraint in how readers and critics approach a work when terms of designation are introduced. By introducing these terms, there's an element of expectation and the potential for complaints when a work doesn't form itself using all the expected elements. Playing the "what if" game is a staple of science fiction. If SF is "what if," then maybe fantasy is "only if." Stories in the world of Literature come about from asking "what if" and then thinking, "now only if," but present the finding in different ways, modes that reflect the same world as the reader. This is the contingency that keeps literature from becoming sci-fi or fantasy. That notion confuses genre when a reader isn't foreign to or othered by the worlds of the book. But it's possible to read a science fiction book that seems so plausible in its futurist notions that there's no need for suspension of disbelief.

This suggests that genre can be as much a temporal construct as it is a form to build upon. An example would be a point in humanity's future where the problems presented in a work such as Philip K. Dick's, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," manifest themselves from a natural progression in humanity: If, in the next 100 years, humanity creates artificial intelligence while letting the environment continue to degrade to the point where acid rain gets caustic, plant life struggles to maintain and animal life follows to the point of extinction, the world of Androids would not be so fantastic but realistic. This is to say, if the predictions in a Science Fiction work of the past manifest, the work becomes a reflection of the present in the same way a work of contemporary literature does. A scientific analog would be when a theory turns into a law of physics after being proven correct. While a theory at the time of inception, it develops into something else, a law, without a single change occurring to its makeup.

Asking "what if" does not always create science fiction. It may be the cornerstone in the genre, but it's also the cornerstone of Fan Fiction, a genre that can't help but open a can of worms that each have their own tinier can. It is a genre that exists as an extension of previously published works, characters that someone else fleshed out and created. While it may not be considered Fan Fiction, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea won several literary awards even though it exists as a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen takes several characters from the annals of genre fiction, such as Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man and many others, and puts them in a Victorian setting where technology grew faster than it historically did. Is League now a steampunk book because of these elements or is it a work of fan fiction because it's the product of a person building something with other people's characters? Or, is League something else entirely because it takes existing characters and puts them together in a new world, an alternate England? But Moore is a creator with a very distinct tone, present when he writes Watchman or WildC.A.T.S. This begs the question of whether or not Moore has the right to be called an auteur, the word that seems to be the answer a lot of people (academics) use when trying to solve the problem of genre. While auteur is properly designated to filmmakers and cinematic criticism, it has been applied to all forms of artists that create a body of work that suggest the creation of an entirely new genre.

Before we go on, let's take a look at an entry for Fan Fiction provided by Dictionary.com:

noun

a fictional account written by a fan of a show, movie, book, or video game to explore themes and ideas that will not or cannot be explored via the originating medium[...]

According to the definition, both Wide Sargasso Sea and League are fan fiction. Both books take previously created characters out of the (cold dead) hands of the original creators and puts them into the hands of fans to tell different stories. With League, the use of Dr . Jekyll/Mr. Hyde could even be seen as bringing a character back to life since the original work suggested the character was dead... though by the words of an untrustworthy narrator, the town drunk. According to the definition, most super hero comics are also fan fiction, as are all Star Trek and X-Files novels. By the definition, every issue of Spider-Man and X-Men not written by Stan Lee is also fan fiction, as are all non Bob Kane Batman stories. This shows franchise as something that has a life blood of fan fiction.

But fan fiction can't be seen as a genre. While a science fiction novel can, in time, no longer appear to represent an alternative once the theories are proofs, thus seem more like literature, fan fiction seems more like an original story only after the original text is lost to the people reading it. How many readers know that Family Matters, (the actual name of the Urkle show), is a spin-off (thus a fan fiction) of Perfect Strangers? Never hear of Perfect Strangers? That's the point. This shows fan fiction to be something as fluid and personal as language (colloquialisms), a way to recreate things to make them relevant, keep them alive. When looking at fan fiction this way, it's easy to view it as a force of literary memetics. As long as the ideas behind the characters, what they stand for, is relevant, more fan fiction will come of it. But, the second it becomes old hat, it turns into cultural fodder or gets stored in the memory of the readers and their computers.

Fan Fiction is truly the reincarnation of the imagination. While the proliferation of fan fiction may owe a lot to the internet, it does so poetically. If the internet does become some sort of common ground, where everyone shares ideas and creations for free (like I'm doing right now --screw you academia!), our forms of entertainment may become quality works that do more than blur the line between the entertainer and the fan, they may erase the line altogether.