Part One: The (Fan)Boys' Club

There’s a scene towards the end of the “A Game of You” storyline in Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” in which Barbie, the young woman very much at the center of the story, has occasion to visit a comic book store.
Barbie, a young, attractive, if slightly too-thin, woman who had, prior to that visit, never even dreamed of walking into a comic book store. Given what she experienced on that visit, it’s unlikely that she would ever return.
Barbie walked headfirst and unsuspecting into a boys’ club, a club consisting not of just any kind of boys, but of fanboys.
What are fanboys, you ask? Well, the easy explanation is to point to recurring “Simpsons” character “Comic Book Guy,” and say “That’s a fanboy.”
In general, fanboys are socially awkward, hygiene and fashion-challenged males, of pretty much any age, who have an overriding interest in a particular subject.
There are all sorts of fanboys who have all sorts of interests such as comic books, Star Trek, D & D, Star Wars, and so forth.
In a nutshell fanboys are the nerdy, often overweight, smelly guys who take their hobbies WAY too seriously.
When it comes to those hobbies there tends to be a lot of cross-pollination, meaning that a comic book fan might also be into D & D and Star Wars, for example.
Some fanboys, though, specialize, having an overarching interest in comics, for example, to the exclusion of all other hobbies. Further, a fanboy might read Marvel titles exclusively, paying no attention to anything published by DC.
Now to be fair, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a fanboy. After all, as long as they don’t take their interest to socially unacceptable extremes, they really aren’t hurting anyone, and they tend to either be loners or to move exclusively within their own social circles.
If you’re of a mind to, you can probably go most of your life without having any significant interactions with fanboys relatively easily, or at least the really extreme variety of fanboy.
As should be apparent, I’m something of a fanboy myself. I don’t think that I take it to the extremes that some fanboys do, but I have been known to have the occasional “who would win in a fight” conversation, or to obsess about the mistreatment of a beloved character by Hollywood.
However, I do bathe regularly, and while I am socially awkward, there are several factors contributing to that, and it’s not a matter of my being unable to talk (or think) about anything other than comic books.
I think that most people are fanboys to a certain extent. After all, as much as Brian decries the fact that Scott and I will occasionally sound like “Comic Book Guy” in our conversations at work, he himself has created a Web site dedicated to the TV series “Rescue Me.”
Right now the site he created doesn’t appear to be up, but the point is that he did make one, which is definitely an expression of a fanboy impulse. I’m not making any judgments about that fact, just pointing out that he does have at least a little bit of fanboy inside of him.
What does any of this have to do with female fans, one of the supposed topics of this entry?
Trust me, I’m getting to that, but I need to lay the groundwork first.
The point of all that I’ve said about fanboys is that, when it comes to comics, for most of my life my experience the fans were almost exclusively boys.
Admittedly, my experience, due to the fact that I was geographically cut off from most of the larger urban areas for much of my life (and there wasn’t a comic book store within 100 miles until I was a freshman in high school), and that I am solitary by nature, is extremely limited in that regard, but there’s no disputing the fact that if you looked back on the books being published when I was younger, comics were largely made by men for boys.
Much has changed in the industry since that time, but that pretty much remains the case.
If girls were reading comics at all in those days the odds were they were reading things like “Archie” or “Richie Rich,” which most fanboys would hardly consider “real” comics.
After all, “real” comics were about war, and super-heroes, sword-wielding barbarians, and, to a lesser extent by the time I was reading comics, cowboys like Jonah Hex, and every other imaginable juvenile male fantasy (at least those fantasies approved of by the Comics Code Authority).
Despite their general lack of athleticism, fanboys are as fueled by testosterone as any male, and as such they respond to masculine themes. In the simplistic world of comics that were created by and for males, the only roles available to female characters were that of the pest, the damsel in distress, or the unattainable object of desire.
In juvenile wish-fulfillment stories, what other possible role could there be for a girl?
Like any kind of club, comic fandom had, and still has, a certain exclusivity inherent in its nature, an exclusivity that can ultimately lead it to become an insular and closed society that is hostile to outsiders.
For comic fandom, females were the ultimate outsiders.
These were the conditions that prevailed in the world of fandom when our heroine Barbie opened the door and walked into that comic shop.
While I don’t believe that in the real world Barbie would have been welcomed with open arms, I also don’t fully believe that she’d be likely to encounter the behavior that she did in the story, in which the sweaty guy behind the counter and the slavering fanboy customers went out of their way to make her feel uncomfortable in quite the way they did.
I think it more likely that Barbie would have encountered nervous giggles and furtive stares, not rude comments about her breast size that qualified as outright sexual harassment.
Still, the fact remains that that the fanboys’ club would be a place that Barbie would be eager to leave and reluctant to ever visit again.
What we’re not taking into account, though, is that Barbie was not herself a comic book fan. She had gone in to pick up a gift for a friend, not to peruse the latest releases for her own enjoyment.
Barbie was not a fangirl.