Comic book fans: productivity, participation and creativity

This dissertation is an examination of the consumption practices, the criteria used for judging comic books and the use of comic books to create a social identity or habitus on the part of comic book fans. It also looks at how these fans use comic books as a resource or a starting point for their own creativity. To do this, I carried out a series of directed interviews over a period of more than two years in places where the fans would feel comfortable. The rationale behind this research was twofold: firstly, to place fans, and comic book fans in particular, within the context of general cultural consumption. Secondly, to test the validity of John Fiske’s adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, as it relates to fans, through research. My results seem to contradict the notion that there is an essential difference between the consumption of popular culture and official culture and the cultural capital created therefrom. The comic book fans interviewed displayed a multiplicity of strategies and criteria to explain their tastes, including those of official culture and, crucially, a canon of work enunciated independently by the fans themselves. This leads to the conclusion that comic book fans, operating in the context of a decentred postmodern culture, are neither unusual nor abnormal in their creation of distinction. Instead, like all agents in postmodern culture, they use a variety of sophisticated and conscious decisions which mix productivity, participation and creativity in order to create a sense of identity which stems from the pleasure they derive from consuming comic books