Alan Moore: Fandom "sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it"
Moore wrote an editorial this week praising many forms of fandom, but called out "mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement."
Photo: Alan Moore in 2010 (Credit: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images)
Alan Moore has a reputation—not entirely earned, we’d argue—as a crank, or maybe just a fire and brimstone preacher, raining down damnation on superhero culture en masse. Certainly, the Watchman author can be scathing on the topic of comics companies, pointing a withering pen at an industry that has spent the last 30 years harvesting every idea he ever wrote for them for extremely lucrative scraps. But, reading a new editorial he published in The Guardian this weekend about the whole concept of “fandom,” we’re reminded that Moore is actually pretty thoughtful, and sometimes very funny, on this stuff.
And, sure: He does say that fandom is “sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.” (He also is old-man annoyed at people using ‘gate as an all-purpose suffix for conspiracies, which comes up when he touches on Gamergate and Comicsgate later on in the piece.) But his overall point is that fandom is great when it fosters both connection and creativity, memorializing a time when young people would attend a comics convention, connect with each other, and then go out and create zines and fan comics brimming with their own ideas.
Here’s the most interesting bit, as Moore paints a portrait of the kind of fan who actually bothers him, which we are quoting at length because it’s trenchant, but also because the idea of Alan Moore talking to his teenage grandson about obnoxious adult Pokémon fans is delightful to us:
An older animal for one thing, with a median age in its late 40s, fed, presumably, by a nostalgia that its energetic predecessor was too young to suffer from. And while the vulgar comic story was originally proffered solely to the working classes, soaring retail prices had precluded any audience save the more affluent; had gentrified a previously bustling and lively cultural slum neighbourhood. This boost in fandom’s age and status possibly explains its current sense of privilege, its tendency to carp and cavil rather than contribute or create. I speak only of comics fandom here, but have gained the impression that this reflexive belligerence – most usually from middle-aged white male conservatives – is now a part of many fan communities. My 14-year-old grandson tells me older Pokémon aficionados can display the same febrile disgruntlement. Is this a case of those unwilling to outgrow childhood enthusiasms, possibly because these anchor them to happier and less complex times, who now feel they should be sole arbiters of their pursuit?
Moore retired from writing comics back in 2019. He published a new novel, The Great When, earlier this month.