Chapter 4
Picture That!
Visual Arts and Comics
Fan art begins where original media sources end. Much like fanfiction writers, fan artists imagine and portray things that aren’t in the original work. Fan art includes portraits and tributes, as well as new or re-visioned content. Internet personality Brad O’Farrell describes it as “when you have characters that are from a story or a movie and you want them to be doing things that they don’t do, like wish fulfillment, but for the characters.” This chapter will be a quick tour through just a few of the millions of fandom-inspired visual expressions, which leap from Hello Kitty cupcakes to 3-D sculptures of video game heroes.
The word art can sound intimidating, as if you need a special talent to make it, but fan art relies on the desire to create, not technical ability. Still, many fan artists learn skills that allow them to better convey their own visions.
Fans still use traditional art materials––pencils work great! But intuitive and affordable digital technology opened up art to fans who couldn’t afford or didn’t know how to make it a couple of decades ago. Bryan Konietzko, cocreator of the animated TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel, The Legend of Korra, commented on the change in fan art over the years. He recalled that “back in the Avatar days [2005–2008] . . . the typical fan art we would get [around 2008] would be a charming, childish crayon drawing stuffed in an envelope. Nowadays on Korra, I take a skewed screenshot with my phone, post it, and shortly thereafter someone un-skews it, crops it, separates the character levels, clones the background, ‘Ken Burns’ it [zooms in and pans across the image] with a multilevel slide, animates the characters blinking and talking, tints it, and makes a GIF out of it, that I then see on the same phone with which I took the original picture. Times they are a-changin’.”
Digital drawing pads are used to create and alter images. A single digital pen, or stylus, can mimic not only pencils, markers, and brushes but also photo retouching and video editing equipment.
In the Beginning
Fan art has a history as long as fanfiction’s. According to art critic Jonathan Jones, “The story of art is largely a story of homages, remakes, rivalrous borrowings, nuanced imitations.” Just as Virgil riffed on Homer’s tales, artists in ancient Rome made their own versions of earlier Greek art. Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe (500–1500 CE), artists created new images to tell familiar stories, drawing on certain conventions to stay true to the original. In fact, they even used patterns and motif collections to ensure that they included the right people and symbols for each story—like a visual canon.
The medieval (of the Middle Ages) cathedral was like a comic book of the Bible and other sacred stories, created by anonymous artists. Then very few people knew how to read, so churchgoers looked to the cathedral’s pictures in stained glass, stone carvings, and more for their story cycles. According to scholar Umberto Eco, the art of the cathedral was “a sort of permanent and unchangeable TV program that was supposed to tell people everything indispensable for their everyday life, as well as for their eternal salvation.”
Medieval artists were not bound to the visual canon. Many painted scenes from the Bible as though they took place in their own time, putting figures from the book in fashionable clothing and local settings. Wealthy patrons could even order paintings that inserted themselves into the scenes, alongside saints and prophets of old.
Art history shows that artists around the world have valued the practice of replicating art. Artists in medieval China, for example, learned by copying great artists of the past. The goal wasn’t to duplicate the originals but to learn from them to develop one’s own style. The famous twelfth-century painting Spring Festival along the River, by Zhang Zeduan, is a silk scroll, 10 inches tall by 208 inches long (25 cm by 529 cm). It shows people going about their lives. It has inspired numerous copies over the centuries––including a huge, interactive, digital version in 2010––many of them updated to make the scene more relatable.
Where’s Arthur?
The legend of King Arthur has inspired artists as well as writers for centuries. Around 1316, anonymous French artists painted seventy-two richly colored miniatures on gold backgrounds for a book about King Arthur, La Queste del Saint Graal (The Search for the Holy Grail). One of the illustrations, “Arthur on the Wheel of Fortune,” depicts a common trope: the goddess of luck spins a wheel that governs the fate of individuals. Four figures of Arthur cling to a large wheel spun by a lady in a red dress. On the top, he wears a crown. On the bottom, he is almost naked.
The sorceress Vivien (played by Agnes Mangles) casts a spell on the wizard Merlin (played by Charles Hay Cameron) in Julia Margaret Cameron’s photo illustration for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.
Victorian artists loved Arthur too. The young creators of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, for example, produced many images of the legend—both canon and noncanon. The nineteenth century also brought a new technology, photography. Artists soon turned its focus on fan favorites. In 1874 English photographer Julia Margaret Cameron agreed to create photographs to illustrate Alfred Tennyson’s twelve-poem cycle Idylls of the King, a retelling of the legend of King Arthur. She recruited family and friends to play the characters, costuming her husband, Charles, as the wizard Merlin. Agnes Mangles played the sorceress Vivien, seducing Merlin to gain power over his secrets.
Photography at the time was a chore. Sitters had to hold a pose for several minutes while a glass negative coated with light-sensitive chemicals was exposed inside the camera. According to Mangles, Charles kept laughing, ruining many exposures. Cameron developed the glass negatives in her darkroom and made prints by placing photo paper on the glass and exposing it to sunlight. She manipulated her negatives for effect, scratching them or using multiple negatives to print a single picture. Out of 245 exposures, she chose 25 for Tennyson’s book.
Arthurian legend remains one of the most enduring subjects of fan art. A recent search for “King Arthur” on the website DeviantArt, an online community for artists and art lovers, returned 20,442 results for all artistic media. Gojirafan made a photo collage of still images from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), a very silly movie that pits Arthur against dangers such as the Killer Rabbit. Freakyfir shared a design for video game characters based on King Arthur and the Knights of Justice, a cartoon series about a high school football team that goes back in time to fight alongside Arthur. And Tathariel uploaded a realistic pencil and charcoal drawing of Arthur and Merlin as portrayed in the BBC TV show Merlin.
Scrapbooks and Spaceships
In the early twentieth century, a host of technological changes impacted fan artists. Cheaper full-color printing (and thus the Sunday color comics in newspapers) and affordable mass-market photo magazines, among other developments, gave fans new material and new tools.
One of the first magazines for movie fans, Photoplay, debuted in 1912 and quickly grew in popularity, offering pages of pictures of stars on and off the set. Early media fans cut and pasted, hand colored, and collaged photos of movie stars from magazines, newspapers, and other paper media into scrapbooks. “Scrapbooking was the blogging of that period,” says Ellen Gruber Garvey, a professor of English at New Jersey City University. “It has all these parallels to what we do today.” For example, modern fans assemble fandom collages in apps and share them on image-sharing sites such as Pinterest.
In general, girls and women have been the most frequent scrapbookers. Lifestyle blogger Maegan Tintari wrote about uncovering her grandmother’s scrapbooks from 1934. “She must have been around seventeen years old when she spent countless hours snipping and gluing and captioning the pages of these books,” Tintari said. “She added her own color to the black-and-white images.” Tintari notes that when she was eleven, she filled similar scrapbooks with clippings of actor Johnny Depp.
In the 1930s, the sci-fi fandom started by Amazing Stories magazine got a big cultural boost. Aldous Huxley’s best-selling novel Brave New World (1932) envisioned a dystopian future where people happily accept totalitarian (dictator) rule. One of the era’s many Hollywood monster flicks, King Kong (1933), became a megahit. And the space opera comic strip Flash Gordon began in 1934—the year many consider the beginning of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi. In this tumultuous era, mass-market publications needed lots of cover art, and artists supplied it. Their colorful and often lurid images of stellar travelers (in skimpy costumes totally unsuited to space travel), robots, bug-eyed monsters, flaming ray guns, rocket ships, and other technological wonders fired the imagination of young fans. Many of them went on to become fan or professional artists—as well as innovators in technology.
The Golden Age of Sci-Fi lasted roughly until the 1950s, the decade when J. R. R. Tolkien published his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien brought his own work to life with illustrations of dwarves and dragons, hand-drawn maps, and hand-lettering of the script of elves. Besides drawing his own visionary worlds, Tolkien had been something of a fan artist since childhood, illustrating the works of other writers to share with family and friends. He took inspiration from medieval manuscript artists and the intricate designs of William Morris, a prime mover of the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement. Tolkien’s art inspired fan artists, who contributed to the huge fandom that mushroomed around Tolkien’s work in the 1960s.
As interest in making and sharing fan art grew, con staff took notice. Conventions soon began including art shows, often with categories for amateur, professional, and even child artists. Con-goers could peruse a display of art, including tributes, comics, re-visionings, and original works on fan topics, as well as book covers, animation cels, and props from professionals. Sometimes the art was available for purchase, either direct from the artist or through an auction held at the end of the event. Fans loved the opportunity to see artworks by other fans and to bring home favorites.
Comics: “Everybody Draws”
For fans of comic book and sci-fi art, the next leap forward came in 1970, when 145 fans met in the basement of a hotel in San Diego, California. It was the first meeting of what would become the nation’s leading comics convention, the San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC). From the beginning, the focus was on comic book art and artists. At comic cons, art shows were featured, showcasing all kinds of work, from professional to amateur. At an early con, cartoonist Tom Gill, who drew The Lone Ranger, gave a chalkboard tutorial on how to draw comics. This began a tradition of how-tos offered for fans by pro artists. Interactions with these professionals, as well as with other enthusiastic fans, nurtured many fan artists.
The history of comics goes back more than a century and is worth a book in itself. They come in a huge variety of forms, from single-panel gags to print comic books to graphic novels to webcomics running for a few weeks or even years. As a subculture of fandom, comics can be both source material and a type of fanwork. Comics also blur the line between fanfic and fan art, since writers often work alongside artists. But in the end, comics rely on visual storytelling. Comics with no words exist, but not the other way around.
Cartoonist Rebecca Sugar grew up drawing pictures. She said in an interview, “When you’re a kid . . . everybody draws, everyone wants to draw, drawing is fun! Everyone who is working in cartoons now drew a lot when they were kids.” She continued, “At some point, when you’re growing up, someone tells you ‘this is not something you can actually do for a living’ or ‘this is not actually a good drawing.’” But, “As long as you don’t stop, you can make as much art as you want.”
Sugar did not stop. She kept drawing and then working in comics. In 2013, when she was twenty-five, the Cartoon Network greenlit her series Steven Universe. It’s about a family of three intergalactic Crystal Gems who protect Earth and take care of a young boy, Steven, whose mother was a Gem. The Gems have no gender (they’re magic stones from outer space), but they all present as female and use female pronouns. Some are in romantic partnerships with other Gems. The cartoon became the network’s first female-created show and inspires a whole new generation of fan artists. In a winning combination, the characters are fairly easy to draw and the story world is childlike, yet complex.
Self-taught cartoonist Adrian drew a wordless comic, “Lion: Origins.” Imagining the origins of characters is a popular creative fan pursuit. In twenty-two color panels, Adrian depicts her headcanon (a fan’s personal version) of the unexplained connection in Steven Universe between the magical pink Lion and Steven’s mother, Rose Quartz. In Adrian’s comic, Rose finds a wounded baby lion lying near its dead mother. Rose heals the cub with her tears, which also turn him pink. She visits him as he grows up, and before she says a final farewell, she places some cherished objects in his magic mane.
Bend It Like Hermione
Representation is an important issue in comics and fan arts, as it is in the larger culture. Dwayne McDuffie (1962–2011) grew up as a comic-loving, self-described “proto-nerd” and a “motor-mouthed black fanboy.” There were almost no comic book heroes during his childhood who looked like him, McDuffie recalled for the New York Times. “You only had two types of [black] characters available for children,” he said. “You had the stupid angry brute and the he’s-smart-but-he’s-black characters. And they were all colored either this Hershey-bar shade of brown, a sickly looking gray, or purple.”
After finishing college and graduate school and attending film school, McDuffie landed the job of his fanboy dreams: he became an editor and later a writer at Marvel Comics. His first high-profile project was the Marvel comic sitcom, Damage Control, created with artist Ernie Colón, about a cleanup crew that repairs the damage superheroes leave in their wake. Determined to bring well-depicted, diverse characters to comics, McDuffie joined several other African American artists to found Milestone Media, the most successful minority-owned comic company. There McDuffie cocreated Blood Syndicate, a comic book about a multicultural crime-fighting crew.
But not all fans have the chance to become creators. Racebending is one creative way fans seek to repair the damage done by racism in existing media. The term was coined as a protest when the 2010 film Avatar: The Last Airbender cast a white actor for the main character, who is an Asian boy in the anime-inspired TV show of the same name. Despite fan protests, studios also cast white actors in Asian roles in the 2016 Marvel film Doctor Strange and in the 2017 US film adaptation of the 1990s manga and anime Ghost in the Shell.
Frustrated fans have renamed the practice of replacing a canon character of color with a white actor whitewashing. They use the term racebent to mean the opposite: reimagining white characters as nonwhite ones. The website Racebending calls for depictions of characters that represent communities of color in “meaningful inclusion in the American storytelling landscape.” To do it well, a fanwork should do more than just change the character’s appearance: it must realistically reflect how a change in race changes the character’s entire social setting.
Occasionally, racebending in fandom leads to change in a story’s canon. In her Harry Potter series, author J. K. Rowling described Hermione as a clever girl with frizzy hair and brown eyes. From early on, many fan artists depicted Hermione as a girl of color in illustrations, photosets, and other fan art. Hermione attends wizarding school with Harry, where she faces prejudice as a mudblood—a wizard from a Muggle (nonmagical) family—which fans of color said they could relate to. Tenacious fans even created a popular hashtag, #blackHermione.
Five years after release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 2 (2011), in which white actor Emma Watson played Hermione, black British actor Noma Dumezweni portrayed the character onstage in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Rowling gave the casting her enthusiastic support, saying in a tweet that she had never specified Hermione’s race. Popular fan artist Marianne Khalil celebrated the new casting, saying, “What’s most amazing to me is the palpable influence of the fandom in this. I don’t think this could have happened if they hadn’t been so vocal.”
Spreadable
Photoshop and other editing software programs or apps are a huge part of remix culture, empowering fans to change media to say what they want. Digital manipulation and reproduction of images became possible in 1990 when the powerful and—compared to traditional photography—affordable editing software Photoshop came on the market. This software radically changed visual arts by making advanced techniques easier for amateur artists. Since then many inexpensive digital-art tools have been released. Even the free photo-editing apps on smartphones offer far more options than Julia Margaret Cameron could have dreamed of in her darkroom.
Fan-made digital visuals aren’t all exactly what one would call art. For instance, image macros, or block text overlaid on images, are more like potato chips: lightweight, fast, and easy to make on meme-generator sites. Memes spread quickly and often disappear just as fast, but some are quite sticky. An image of the Lord of the Rings character Boromir saying, “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” from the 2001 movie The Fellowship of the Ring, spawned a zillion image macros bearing some variation of “One does not simply x.” The meme spread far beyond the LOTR fandom and still pops up more than a decade later—an incredibly long life for a meme. In crossovers (which are as big in fan art as in other fanworks), fans make Doctor Who versions (he does walk into Mordor and gets lost), Frozen versions (Elsa does not simply let it go), and more.
Digital Painting and Drawing
Digital painting is like traditional painting except the artist pushes around pixels instead of paint. Graphics tablets allow artists to draw directly on the screen with a stylus, which works like a pen, pencil, or brush. The surface registers every tiny shift in pressure, angle, and direction of the writing tool. Sophisticated software blends colors, and brushstrokes lay down layers of texture, light, and shadows.
Ashlee Casey (username AVCasey) is a self-taught fan artist in her twenties. “Sometimes people try to tack on negative connotations when they call someone a ‘fan artist,’” she said in an interview. “I don’t think it makes you any less of an artist. Art is what inspires, what makes you feel . . . and fan art is definitely of both those things.” Casey was working at her cashier job in a small Texas town when the editor of Iron & Air motorcycle magazine messaged her about her digital portrait of popular Walking Dead character Daryl Dixon posed with a silhouette of a wolf’s skull on the red wall behind him. When the editor messaged that he wanted her art for the cover, Casey said, “I stared at my phone for probably twenty to thirty minutes before I could muster up the brainpower to say yes.”
Binkk7 is a professional artist who continues her childhood habit of making fan art for fun. “I make fan art for the same reasons probably most fans do,” she said, “out of the desire to participate in things I love and to pay homage to characters.” Like many fans, she makes more than one kind of art. A fan of Doctor Who, she animated Daleks knitting and chanting “extermi-knit” instead of their trademark “exterminate.” In a mix of old and new, she photoshopped her dog into Star Trek screen captures and made slide-show vids out of them. (In fandom no style is ever defunct if even one fan keeps it alive.)
Fan artist Binkk7 drew Michonne, from the TV series The Walking Dead, in the style of fifteenth-century Dance of Death woodcuts.
Borrowing from art history still works too. In a series of black-and-white digital drawings, Binkk7 inserted the zombie-killing Michonne from The Walking Dead into medieval Dance of Death scenes. An hourglass sits nearby, reminding the viewer that life is uncertain. The art trope of skeletal personifications of Death dancing with victims was popular in fifteenth-century Europe, when plague was decimating the population. It appealed to Binkk7 because, she said, “the medieval mood was apocalyptic, which is big in our times too. Also, Michonne has this really cool Japanese sword, like the medieval knights who are trying to fight off death with a sword.”
Some working artists incorporate fannish references in their professional pieces too. Chicago-based fine artist Debra Yepa-Pappan, for instance, playfully remixed Star Trek imagery in her photo-manipulation Spock Was a Half-Breed (Live Long and Prosper). In this colorful piece, the starship Enterprise appears in the sky above two teepees bearing the science logo worn by the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock. In the foreground is a nineteenth-century photograph by Edward Curtis manipulated to show an American Indian woman with Spock-like pointed ears giving the Vulcan salute. Like Spock, Yepa-Pappan is mixed race. On her father’s side she is Jemez Pueblo, and on her mother’s, Korean. She said, “It always amazes me how ahead of their times science fiction shows, movies, novels, etc., were and are, in their use of different technologies and their inclusiveness between different races of people, humanoids, and species.” She has shown her manipulated photographs in art galleries. Spock Was a Half-Breed was reproduced on the side of a building as part of the Painted Desert Project, hosted by Chip Thomas, a.k.a. Jetsonorama.
Timeless Tools
Pencils, ink, scissors, and glue remain popular materials for fan artists. Graphic designer Laurent Beuten challenged himself to blend aspects of every character in the video game Overwatch with those of a similar Pokémon. He drew the mashups with Prismacolor pencils instead of his usual digital tools, explaining on a subreddit that a friend had showed him how the pencils’ look lent power to his art. In one illustration, a smiling yellow Pikachu appears to bounce toward the viewer wearing Tracer’s goggles, leather jacket blinker belt, and pulse pistol.
Artist Melissa Moffat continues the tradition of cut-and-paste with actual scissors and glue. She makes paper collages, taking days to cut up enough fashion magazines, comic books, and other printed material to make one collage. She organizes the scraps by color, pattern, and shape and assembles them into something like a modern-art puzzle. Her dense and intense images don’t tell a story. They reflect the feel of the character. “I like to deconstruct [analyze] the images of the characters and break them down into parts and create a new abstract image,” she said. “Like with my Joker piece, I tried to channel insanity,” she said, “and with [my] Superman collage it was the strength, heroism, and justice.” She also made a collage series for Star Wars: The Force Awakens using Star Wars comic books and glossy tribute magazines.
Mycks Sato, who lives in New Jersey, paints in ink using traditional Japanese brush techniques. Her fan art often incorporates samurai, or Japanese warriors. She uses the name Mycks (pronounced “mix”) when she collaborates with her mom, who is a Japanese calligrapher [handwriting artist], and sometimes with her little sister too. Mycks paints their pieces in watercolor and sumi, a type of black Japanese ink. She said, “The inspiration of each piece might come from old Japanese samurai and ninja [stealthy fighters], or more modern pop culture icons such as characters from Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. I am mostly inspired by the brushwork, using traditional Chinese calligraphy brushes, brush pens, watercolor brushes, etc.” Her portrait of Tolkien’s character Legolas shows him as a samurai archer alongside the Japanese word for light, rendered in her mother’s calligraphy. A Han Solo–inspired samurai appears with the word for adventure, and Star Wars hero Rey, wearing a kimono, carries her staff next to the word for hero.
Every year InkTober challenges artists to draw with ink throughout October. Jake Parker started the event in 2009 to encourage himself to improve his inking skills. Thousands of artists at all levels all over the world have joined in. The rules are simple: draw something in ink (or pencil and then ink), and post it on social media tagged with #inktober. Participating artists draw whatever they want. Parker supplies a prompt for each day to give artists ideas. Eric Kwun posted Star Wars–inspired art twenty-five out of the thirty-one days of InkTober 2016. He recommended the event, saying, “Artists of all skill levels can participate together with no fear of judgment or criticism and just celebrate the art of putting ink on paper and creating some beautiful.”
Some fan artists mix traditional and digital arts. Artistiq draws her favorite celebrities with graphite and color pencil on paper. She uploads some of these delicate and realistic portraits into an animation program. When she’s done, autumn leaves cascade through the sunlight of pop singer Taylor Swift’s hair. An animated hummingbird flits through a cloud of cherry blossoms around Jennifer Lawrence.
Fan Crafters, Makers, and Body Artists
Fan crafters are endlessly, mind-bogglingly inventive. They model Dalek chess pieces from clay and paint their refrigerators to look like the TARDIS from Doctor Who. They sew Marvel plushies out of felt and crochet pastel squid that look like My Little Ponies. To them, kitchen drawers or bathroom cupboards are repositories of possible crafting materials. A circular lip balm container becomes the Star Wars Death Star; a gold-foil-wrapped chocolate makes an excellent snitch from the Harry Potter game of Quidditch. Glass beads + nail polish = Steven Universe gems. Little fannish figurines take up residence inside empty jars, living in fan-made habitats there. Comic book pages are pressed into service as covers for shoes, phone cases, and picture frames.
To see just a few samples of the many items created out of one fandom, check out the dozens of ways to make the iconic starship Enterprise, from Star Trek, on the DIY website Instructables. It appears as a bicycle, a bookshelf, a cake, a climbing tree for cats, and more. User iGreeny constructed the ship from hardware fasteners: wing nuts, bolts, and screws, with a horizontal washer for the ship’s saucer. User bchafy employs office supplies: a CD for the saucer, pens with colored caps for the engines, and binder clips. Other projects use gingerbread, yarn, Legos, biodegradable clay made of cornstarch, 3-D printed plastic, and origami paper.
Bodies can be a place to display fan art too. The most elaborate body arts are seen in cosplay, but some fans show their commitment daily with a tattoo. Tattoos may be elaborate and obvious, such as the face of a character on a forearm. Or they may be recognizable only to other fans, such as a small, subtle tattoo of the number 9 3/4, the railway platform where Harry Potter catches the train to Hogwarts.
Fans display less permanent body art in intricate miniatures on their fingernails. JeeA Lee paints intricate designs on her fingernails freehand, with a very fine, modified paintbrush. She posts photos of her weekly nail art on Tumblr and Instagram. In one crossover, she painted reindeer antlers on Chewbacca, a hairy warrior from Star Wars, on one of her nails. The other nine nails featured Disney Christmas scenes. Fans who feel less confident in their ability to paint ambidextrously can buy decals of images from major fandoms, such as DC or Marvel Comics, to apply to their nails.
Japanese nail artist Yoko Matsuda used pop culture sensation Hello Kitty as inspiration for her fingertip art.
A Video Game Emperor and a Rebel Princess
Fans also use images from their fandoms to express opinions about real-world issues. It’s a way to use media to talk back and say something about yourself. During the US presidential campaign of 2016, supporters of winning candidate Donald Trump made triumphant fan art. A popular meme photoshopped Trump into the Warhammer 40,000 video game, in which a god-emperor in gold armor protects humanity from cosmic threats. He also appears photoshopped into paintings of Napoleon, George Washington, and even Jesus.
After President Trump was inaugurated in 2017, critics of the new administration also used pop culture to express themselves. Graphic designer Hayley Gilmore captured the mood of media fans who were not fans of the president with a protest poster featuring Leia Organa, a rebel leader from Star Wars. Gilmore placed the text “A Woman’s Place Is in the Resistance” over a 1977 photo of Leia holding a blaster pistol. After the inauguration, millions of people around the world joined grassroots women’s marches to demonstrate in support of human rights. Many of their handmade signs utilized pop-culture quotes and images, from Beyoncé’s lyric urging ladies to get in formation to the warning “Winter is coming” from Game of Thrones. Printouts of Gilmore’s poster, alongside handmade signs featuring Leia, popped up at marches from Los Angeles to London.
“Don’t Give Up”
Community is often an important part of fan art, and art for the surreal podcast Welcome to Night Vale Fan demonstrates a kind of mind meld that can take place within it. The audio-only show claims to be a community radio news broadcast from the desert town of Night Vale, with announcer Cecil reporting on distinctly odd happenings in a deadpan manner. The podcast is supported entirely by fans through donations and sales of T-shirts and other merchandise. With almost no canon descriptions of the characters beyond cryptic visuals such as “a dark hooded figure with unknowable powers,” the show is something of a prompt generator. A fanon, or fan canon, has evolved about the main characters’ appearances. A lot of fans see Cecil, for example, as a nerdy-looking white guy, wearing a button-down shirt and sweater vest—with a third eye in the center of his forehead.
Fan artist Toril Orlesky, who started posting comics online at the age of twelve, created a series of stark Night Vale comics. One image accompanies Cecil’s typical Night Vale proclamation that no one has seen anything unusual “because all of us are normal!” While it’s slightly ominous in the show, that proclamation could be a happy motto for fandom, where artists of all kinds are free to pursue their visions, no matter how strange they may seem to others.
The love of a fandom can keep artists going. Professional artist and longtime SDCC participant Allison Sohn holds popular How to Draw panels at conventions. “I do a step by step,” Sohn said of her art-marker tutorial, “taking a drawing of a portrait of a popular film or television character all the way through to final finished colors. I talk about tricks that help, and things to look out for.” Asked for advice for beginning artists, she replied, “DON’T GIVE UP!!!!”