Just like fashion, certain kinds of people come in and out of style. I guess the way to think of fandoms is, they’re like the wiring in a house. Dormant, until you “plug something in” that completes the circuit…and if you take it out, it’s dormant again, waiting for something else to plug into the same wiring.

I hope my gentle ribbing isn’t interpreted as being disparaging or mean, because the truth is, I miss all of these guys. When are they going to come back?





The “Adult Space Comic” Guy

This is the fan who is dedicated entirely to adult-oriented space and scifi comics that were big in the 1980s. Nexus, Dreadstar, Alien Legion, Judge Dredd, Strikeforce: Morituri, any book edited by Archie Goodwin, and later than expected scifi anthologies like Timewarp, not to mention European imports like Heavy Metal. They liked weird, offbeat, adult, hypersexual and serialized storytelling you couldn’t get in the popular books of the time (usually, with robots having sex with women), but could find in the magazines. This type tended to be more tough, scruffy, edgy, working class, and more “dirtbaggy” than the usual scifi fan pointdexter, like if a Juggalo played Magic the Gathering. This is the “cool older brother into cool but weird comics.”

Favorite Creators: Jim Starlin, Mike Kaluta, Archie Goodwin, Moebius, Frazetta.

Ideal Profession: Synth musician, aspiring artist, weed dealer, roadie for Primus, your older brother.

Fictional Character They are Most Like: Mac from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Han Solo.

Favorite Characters: Judge Dredd, the platinum blonde from Heavy Metal, the cool cyborg wizard guy from Dreadstar, or the Wolverine-meets-Toshiro-Mifune convict in Alien Legion.

Does this type still exist? No, and here’s why: in the 1980s, scifi was truly rare in our popular culture, and the limitations of visual effects meant that the only place you could really get it was weird comics. You basically had to be a magazine reader to get your scifi fix. And previously, there was a straight line of demarcation between “adult” scifi comics and the more mainstream superhero stuff that was seen as more “kiddie.” That line no longer exists; you can get the kind of mature storytelling in the scifi magazine books out of even mainstream superhero books these days.

The World War II Comics Guy

This is the guy who wrote a letter in to whatever World War II period comic Roy Thomas was working on at any given point that “they’ve been waiting their whole life for a book like this!” They’re all about history and nostalgia, and get tickled pink from mentions of 1930s movie stars and Brooklyn Dodgers baseball players like Peewee Reese. They especially love military history and minutiae, and probably have a dozen model tanks at home, and can argue the difference between a cuirassier and demi-lancer…but nothing, and I mean nothing, grabs their attention more than the history and minutiae of World War II. Also, they tend to be autism spectrum (I am not saying to disparage them, only as a value-neutral description).

Favorite Creators: Roy Thomas, Dave Stevens, James Robinson.



Ideal Profession: Professor of Military History, Baseball Historian, Dan Carlin-esque History Podcast Guy.

Favorite Character: Captain America (duh), the Rocketeer, AC Comics’s FemForce, or maybe some minor DC JSA obscuros like Starman or Mr. Terrific they cheer for out of a weird sense of contrarianism.

Fictional Character They’re Most Like: David Mitchell’s sympathetic but hilarious character in “Peep Show,” who avoids tough looking elementary school kids on his street while thinking “I bet none of those little bastards have ever heard of the Battle of Stalingrad.”



Does this type still exist? Not really. A lot of the people who would be this in the 1980s are now Games Workshop types these days, or possibly strategy video games, instead of into comics. As with the Space Comics Guy, they’re not around as much because comics aren’t the only game in town anymore. Also, this type was always introverted, even by the standards of comics fans, so today, it’s unlikely you’d meet any in meatspace as opposed to online, at places like reddit.





The Warren Comics Horror Guy/Girl

The single most overlooked, unremarked on, and extraordinary fact about comics history is that come the 1970s, horror comics were as, if not more popular than superheroes. Even some comics enthusiasts don’t know this, and if they do, they don’t wrap their minds around the significance of this. There is pretty much one exception: Busiek, who in Marvels II and Astro City, explored the idea that the 1970s were the “decade of monsters.”

This one requires a bit more background than the rest to understand. We think of mainstream comics history as being a grudge match between Marvel and DC, but really, many companies came into existence that were legitimate rivals and challengers. Warren Comics, at one point in the 1970s, were the #2 comic company in the world behind Marvel. And they did it by publishing thick digest mags of black and white horror stories, paired with maybe the most legendarily honest and unsparing column about events in the comics industry (they were the first, in the 1970s, to talk openly about how Stan Lee and his collaborators no longer got along, for instance, or that Jim Shooter as EIC of Marvel was a tyrannical perfectionist).

Just like today, in the 1970s and 1980s, retro was cool (specifically, 50s nostalgia, and for the 1930s horror films). So the Warren mags had a retro-cool, sexy edge that attracted outspoken types who were horror and movie nostalgia types who wouldn’t buy Spider-Man but who were into Fangoria and Famous Monsters. There’s a lot of overlap here between this and the Adult Scifi Comics Guy, but the adult scifi guy was working class and dirtbag, this type was somewhere between metal and goth. This was the first generation to have heavy metal music and the availability of 1930s movies on television, not to mention a new invention (at the end of this era) of VHS tapes.

Surprisingly for this era, this type could be either gender. The women loved dressing like vampires and wanted vampire boyfriends, and formed the core of what we today call the cosplay scene (it wasn’t called that until the 2000s). If you went to a convention in the 1970s, you ran into 25 Vampirellas. Vampirella was the Harley Quinn of the 1970s. This was the first time it was possible to get a lot of notoriety for being a cosplayer in fandom (see Angelique Trovaire, the first cosplay “star”) so Vampirella was chosen not just because she was cool, an idealized self concept much like Wonder Woman or (ironically!) Buffy Summers, but also because the swimsuit outfit stopped people in their tracks. It actually was moderately lucrative to be a horror cosplayer in the 1970s, as Warren Comics actually published volumes of Vampirella cosplayers, including one around Heidi Saha, a girl who was 13 (!) pushed into the scene by her parents (considering what we now know about her upbringing, this comes off as incredibly icky, particularly considering she was just a kid).

Favorite Characters: Vampirella, Vincent Price’s disembodied voice narrating things

Ideal Profession: Mortician (both genders), Guy in pro fanzines who “tells it like it is about the comics industry” (if male), professional cosplayer (if female), writer of Malkin-esque books about old cheesy movies (both genders, usually male), horror director of z-budget slasher films (both genders).

Is this type still around? Nope, this is a world that vanished after the 1970s, one that was “Gone With the Wind.”



Goth Girls into Sandman

This is a distinctly female type, just like the WWII Comics Guy is distinctly a male type. In the 1990s and for a long stretch into the 2000s, if you were a certain kind of lady (more specifically, the type of semi-wiccan cat owner that loved Mists of Avalon) usually, the one comic you were into was Neil Gaiman’s Sandman…and maybe one or two or the Batman books.

Ideal Profession: Having a needlepoint store on Etsy, Saucy Ren Faire Wench

Favorite Creators: Neil Gaiman, Gail Simone.

Favorite Characters: Death of the Endless, Nightwing (they like him more than Batman), the lesbian Batwoman introduced after Infinite Crisis.

Fictional Character they’re most like: The Norwegian comic character Nemi, because I like how they didn’t take her “I’m a cool goth/metal” mystique at face value and showed her doing laundry and being kinda boring and normal.

Are they still around? This is the only one on this list where the answer is an unqualified yes, since they were identified as a market in the mid-2000s and a lot of material was made either for them or friendly toward them (Gail Simone comes to mind) but they’re not exclusively reading Sandman anymore because a lot more books are made for that audience. Recently, when Ruby Rose got a Batwoman show (a character created for this very market), this type went nuts on social media.







Dad/Dork Hybrids

Back when you could buy a comic at a wire tree at any given Walgreens, a lot of people read comics who you wouldn’t think would, which includes the male audience for “men’s adventure” paperbacks, which were usually sold right next to the comics. This was the type of guys who like Don Pendleton’s the Executioner novels and all the war/special forces books of the 1980s, not to mention series adventure westerns like Long Arm. They all tended to be Dads who are the audience for when cable channels show marathons of Westerns, or when TBS shows Hondo or reruns of the Equalizer. These types tended to write into the old comic lettercols in numbers disproportionate to their actual readership with letters like “as a 46 year old accountant” (they always started like this) “I have to tell you how Hawkeye, with his no-guff tough guy attitude, is the best of the Avengers.”

They’re entirely fixated on anxieties and fantasies about stopping crimes for the same reason dorky kids love to imagine what they’d do if zombies attack - Freud said that we only think about disasters when we long for them to happen. This worldview overlaps with racial paranoia occasionally. I have, however, met black versions of the dorky angry dad. Black men over 40 who often are ex-army vets, henpecked by their wives, and who think young kids these days are whiners who need more “common sense” are surprisingly right-wing.



Favorite characters: The Punisher. No character captures their attention as much as this one does. Also, the more scruffy were ultra-into the biker book Ghost Rider, which absolutely baffled Marvel in the 1970s; it seemed that that book created an audience that didn’t buy any other comics at all. There was a lot of speculation that essentially, Ghost Rider created an audience that only bought that book. Another very popular comic that had an audience that didn’t seem to overlap with nearly anything else was GI Joe, which at one point, was Marvel’s #1 top seller through subscriptions.

Ideal Profession: Dad “with a particular set of skills that make me a nightmare for people like you,” pool supply company small business tyrant in the suburbs, shoe salesman, neighborhood watch captain, gym teacher, writing weird, rambling letters to the editor in local newspapers.

Fictional character they’re most like: Too many to possibly list since it seems nearly all of pop culture was made for dorky dads from the 1940s-1980s. Being someone this kind of guy can identify with created the entire career of Charles Bronson. But I’d have to say Rob Reiner’s character in Wolf of Wall Street who lost his cool when his son interrupted him during The Equalizer.