Bleeding Fiction

Thanks to a link from Megatokyo a few weeks back I found this PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi. A Doujinshi is a fan manga - a manga drawn by a fan using the characters from a pre-existing manga. It's essentially visual fan fiction.

This PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi is tremendously awesome. It's got great art, which is part of it, but it also extends beyond the realms of the PPG cartoon itself to bring in pretty much every major character from a Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon cartoon series, including Samurai Jack, Dexter's Lab, Invader Zim, Courage, Fairly Odd Parents, Teenage Robot, Time Squad, Megas, Billy & Mandy and Johnny Bravo and it actually blends these characters together in a way that's surprisingly compelling and true to form. So, I really dig this comic.

I don't generally get fan fiction. I'm not trying to insult the quality of the material; I've never read more than a handful of examples. I mean only that I don't understand what would prompt someone to spend time writing it or why a fan would much want to read it. I suppose it's because I tend to have as much love of an author's writing style as I do a character and tend to think of characters as being fairly inextricable from the stories that they're involved in (which is to say I put primacy on story and character as the fuel for that story, as opposed to primacy on character and the story as the thing a results from the character's actions; a subtle distinction). And yet here I am, delighting in the insanity of this comic, which is a fan fiction.

And even as I'm thinking about this I'm doing research/taking notes for two different comic proposals (one to Marvel, one to DC), both of which involve pre-existing comic characters. And I stop for a second and I realize that writing a comic book for a pre-existing character is writing fan fiction. You pick up your pen and you write (or draw) a Superman story not for the unique voice of Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster or for the "strange visitor from another planet" story but to attach your name to the power and iconography that is Superman, that has been Superman for more than fifty years (I can't find the quote right now, but a great comic writer once wrote "When you write Superman, you don't leave your mark on him; Superman leaves his mark on you.").

It makes sense, of course. At least to me. Superheroes are the only characters that I see as big enough, that I see as having enough of their own reality (separate from their stories), that I have enough of a sense of ownership of or entitlement to to write about. (And this is limited to only a few superheroes, at that.) Superman's my mythology; why shouldn't I tell a Superman story if I have one to tell? If someone else feels that strongly about Harry Potter or Captain Kirk or whoever else, well, more power to them, and through the lens of superheroes I can understand, on some level, what they're doing even if I don't feel the same connection to their characters of choice.

At the same time, I wouldn't have an interest in writing fan fiction for non-professional reasons. That is to say, I'd want to see if I could get it published. Green Thoughts, which I guess is a sort of Green Lantern fan fiction, came to me as prose, but even as I put the first word to paper I knew that when I was done, when I'd gotten the structure of the story down, I'd turn it into a comic script and send it off to DC. That, of course, may just be my desire to do this writing thing for a living coming through, though.

Today, with all of that bubbling in my brain for the past few weeks, Teresa blogged about something she saw relating to the discussion of fan fiction vis-a-vis professional fiction. To wit: because of that sense of ownership, because of the nothing-to-lose-non-professional nature of fan fiction, because of the slashy nature of a lot of the stuff and because of a dozen other reasons, fan fiction writers are more engaged with the "squishy" stuff (the sex and the blood), and often better engaged with it than professional writers, who tend to feel uncomfortable with it and either handle it stiffly or avoid it altogether, to the detriment of their writing.

Which could bring me to an issue I'm trying to tackle with the Fables right now. But I realize that I've gone on long enough already and that the story currently available to the viewing public does not yet make this a good topic for conversation in a public place.