This year’s San Diego Comic Con will be inundated with Twilight fans, mostly young girls, and the accepted fannish reaction to this demographic, almost entirely untapped by the North American comics industry, will be unremitting hostility.
This year’s San Diego Comic Con will be inundated with Twilight fans, mostly young girls, and the accepted fannish reaction to this demographic, almost entirely untapped by the North American comics industry, will be unremitting hostility.
Hmmm…how can I promote a graphic novel featuring nearly no female characters of note to this demographic? (It’s cool – my plans for the sequel that are banging around my head lately revolve almost entirely around girls).
OT, Sean, but a couple of my comments seem to have gone into moderation and never shown up here afterward. I think this happened after I used the preview function, so maybe it’s a glitch?–I don’t think I said anything so untoward that you’d simply refuse to let them post.
And how similar is this to the Tyrese Gibson/MAYHEM marketing attempts?
Retailers, keep your SANDMANs handy!
I for one plan on cracking some pasty skulls. Little girls don’t buy digital comics.
Yeah! Stupid girls! Don’t they know they’re only welcome at Comic-Con if they’re (a)actresses, (b)”adult” models, (c) dressed as Slave Leia, or (d) two or more of the above?
Why do folks think that the con will be soaked with Twilight fans? Is Pattinson making an appearance? Have their fan sites been targeting the con?
Well, I for one think that if the con is really inundated with teenage girls, it’s time for a boycott of San Diego.
To be fair, not all of the regular Comic-Con fans will be hostile to the teenage girls. Some will be trying to bang them.
Tom: Define “targeting,” but yeah, they’re talking about it. They haven’t announced the guest list for the New Moon presentation but they’d be nuts not to have RPattz there.
Now that you mention it though, inundated might be too strong a word, but it’s not really central to my point–my point was that the girls on the Hall H line for the New Moon panel are gonna be looked at like nuisances.
I wasn’t challenging, I was honestly curious. Oh yeah, all the regulars will hate them.
I think they may be due for a big TV/Movie backlash from fans this year, because there’s no longer any way for the savviest in that crowd to not run the chance of being screwed. Those people are the most vocal. It’s kind of like the nerd equivalent of there not being drugs until they hit the suburbs, or when Team Comics avoided getting hit by the first NYCC.
Is it an issue who gets the slot before Twilight? Because those people may be screwed.
Heidi actually had a post about how originally there was supposed to be a panel for James Cameron’s supposedly paradigm-shifting movie Avatar before Twilight, but the Con organizers realized what was up and moved it:
http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2009/07/10/sd09-and-the-little-girls-know-how-to-screw-it-up
I think this was the first place I noticed the anti-Twilight sentiment, in the headline of the Slashfilm article about the topic that Heidi linked to. Some of the comments are real winners too.
Is it the source of their devotion that irks some folks (the Twilight series itself being seen by many as watered down Buffy-lite) or is it Twilight’s particular fanbase? My wife was desperately embarrassed to shop in the YA at Borders last week for fear of being lumped in with the TwiMoms – she said she felt like it was shopping for porn. I would have thought being married to a guy who buys comics would have long since buried that particular insecurity, but…
Maybe just a failure on the stereotypical comics fan’s part to recognize/appreciate their own level of enthusiasm reflected in the eyes of people their view as “the enemy”, i.e. normal folk who have always “looked down” on them. You know, your typical fanboy persecution complex-driven elitism bullshit.
Yeah, it’s nonsensical. If it were any other event movie, if a Star Wars-esque flick were bringing in huge hordes of adolescent boys, everyone would be all indulgent, going “aw, baby nerds.”
I personally hope the manga publishers are all over this like white on rice, shoving supernatural themed shoujo into these girls’ hot little hands. While everybody else is squawking about being invaded, they could potentially be sinking hooks deeper into a huge new market. In the case of the Twilight geeks, a huge market whose book series is already finished and who are very much in need of new reading material.
You know what’s weird is that I don’t even notice this stuff at the show. It’s like it’s all segregated. The last time I remember seeing anything programming-wise related to Hollywood at the show was when they were doing a preview of Open Water in one of the semi-big rooms and it was about 30 percent full and I switched into tennis shoes in one of the back chairs. That was six or seven years ago? It seems to me you kind of have to get worked up about this stuff on principle, because the reality is after the big registration line you probably don’t have to notice parts of the show in which you’re not interested.
One interesting thing about the Twilight stuff is that I don’t think the film was even top five for 2008, let alone had the kind of generational performance you think would make it a mockable cultural force. So that’s weird.
Goths are always an easy target. I think it’s the high contrast of skin and black clothing.
“undead amish”