New Publication: “How to Be a Fanboy”

Lab director Benjamin Woo and Friends of the Lab Kalervo Sinervo and Anna Peppard have a new article out in the journal Popular Communication based on their ongoing research on Wizard, a glossy magazine for comics fans and other nerds in the 1990s and 2000s.

In “How to Be a Fanboy: Wizard Magazine and the Pedagogy of Comic Book Fandom,” Sinervo, Peppard, and Woo discuss shifting discursive frames for the meaning of comic book fandom over the magazine’s run. They chart a shift from hobbyist magazine to a (men’s) lifestyle magazine akin to Maxim or FHM to a mainstream-ish entertainment magazine. Throughout, inclusion and exclusion – notably, the inclusion of heterosexual men and the exclusion of women and people of colour – are negotiated through editorial voice.