Global Fandom: Naja Later (Australia)

I am writing from Narrm, also known as Melbourne, in so-called Australia. I live on Kulin Nations land, where sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land. I am part of a settler culture writing about my transnational fan experiences: my identity and community are strongly linked to British and American cultures through ongoing processes of imperialism. When I have been welcomed to country as a fan scholar, it has been through a shared love of storytelling, and understanding how stories create joy, a sense of connection, a continued history and maps of the future. In Wurundjeri tradition, songlines https://www.deadlystory.com/page/culture/Life_Lore/Songlines are maps rendered in song: a map is a song, and a song is a story, and a story is shared. Deadly Story explains: ‘Songlines are the singing celebration of Country, a cultural passport when walking on the lands of neighbouring Nations and a way to acknowledge the great Creator Spirits and their footprints in the land.’ Fandom is a celebration of stories, and communities formed around those stories. It’s an honour to live somewhere with such a strong connection between place and storytelling, where stories are part of how we travel between nations.

My fannishness began, and continues to be, primarily online. In some ways, the illusion of placelessness in virtual communities allows me to skirt the uncomfortable history and awkward geography of Australia, connecting me to fans and discovering new fandoms through international communities. In my early days of fandom, national identity was little more than an inconvenience. Being Australian meant a poor internet connection, a six-to-eighteen month wait for new seasons of television—if we got it at all—expensive concert tickets, delayed release of films, and a sparse community with loci in steeply-priced conventions and snobbish specialty shops. Meeting Aussies on forums was an opportunity for commiseration, the solidarity of being stuck on a continent as distant from each other as the British users were from New Yorkers. There were in-jokes about drop bears and ambassadorial exchanges involving Vegemite.

These days, my online fandom friends are mostly North American, British, and European: the media we fan over tends to be American or British: easy journeys from the literal south to the global north. Social media allows us to overlook a sense of place: excepting a reluctant acknowledgment of time zones, we celebrate the myth that our community is unconfined by borders and places. The servers that host our blogs and groupchats; the factories that built the devices we use to access media; even the locations where our favourite films were shot: we don’t have to acknowledge the global networks that make it seem simple. For me, the escapist joy of fandom is in part an escape from nationality: it makes this piece surprisingly hard to write.

I met my spouse through a fan community. I moved to England and lived with them for a year, though we both decided we preferred Australia. We travel as fans, going to concerts, exhibitions, and locations that relate our fannish interests. A clerk at the Alexandre Dumas’ chateau is delighted that The Three Musketeers are popular in Australia. A mother in Maranouchi is as excited by a display of vintage Star Wars toys as we are. I discover while in Tokyo that Tataouine is a real place in Tunisia. I write fanfiction where Tusken Raiders use Australian sign language (Auslan is as different from American Sign Language as English is from French). My friend in Argentina leaves kudos on it. The narrative picks up all these pieces on its journey around the world. I don’t know a lot about songlines, but I understand how a story can carry you somewhere. Some of the people I meet along the way are friends for a minute, and some I’ll keep for a lifetime. It’s like Kelly Sue Deconnick said: “You don't get that tattoo because you are a fan of something in the book. You get that tattoo because that book is a fan of something in you.” So we meet as fans of Bitch Planet, but we end up being fans of each other.

But I suspect the reason I was asked to write this piece was because I’m a founder of the All Star Women’s Comic Book Club. For six years we ran monthly meetings here in Melbourne: our well-earned break happened to time up with the pandemic. When we first started, we promised ourselves that if it were just five of us—five entire women, reading comics, just in our city! It seemed too marvellous to be true—it would be more than enough. As it turned out, our smallest meetings were 20 members. The biggest ran up into the 80s. Every month there would be regulars who’d come along just to see each other, and newcomers who’d never met another comic reader in their city. To have a place, and real people coming together, sharing food and hugging and flicking through the book of the month, is unbelievably special. It was a fan community that didn’t need to be transnational to exist.

In the comic club meetings, I was the committee’s academic: I took point running discussions for the book of the month. The actual ‘book club’ element is a small part of what we do: crafting, baking, and cosplay are other ways we celebrate fandom (and gendered expressions of fandom) in the group. As aca-fans most of us know what it’s like to wear multiple hats. Running a book club is not unlike running a tutorial, though it’s a lot more social. Considered in the context of borders and fandom, the role I’ve shared in the comic club and in university is canon-setting. The comic club’s books were predominantly published in the USA—reflecting our host store All Star Comics’ stock—although the creators hail from around the globe. In the class I teach on comics, I’ve been consciously expanding our reading list, sometimes taking books I’ve discovered through the club. We read Saga, yes, and Maus: but my students read Korean webtoons and My Hero Academia more prolifically than anything American. They stumble across bandes-dessinés and adore Moomins: they discover Qahera and are fondly familiar with Footrot Flats. We’re exploring the difference between a mythical ‘universal’ language of comics and the highly specialised set of formal conventions that feel universal. Some of them will create comics that they’ll be able to sell at zine fairs and All Star Comics. I get to be their first fan as they become part of the Australian comics scene.

In some ways, the pandemic has made even the local communities feel remote, and the remote friends feel closer: in others, my sense of place is stronger than ever. I have been restricted to a 10km circle for eight weeks. I have never been more in this place. My home is already transnational, because it is in the Australian, Wurundjeri, and Boon Wurrung nations. Today, I’m watching the orchid season Guling change into the tadpole season of Poorneet. The friend who taught me the names of local seasons also recommended me a novel. I can’t wait to message them when I’m finished the last chapter. I’m packing up some video games for my neighbour, whom I didn’t know until we were stuck in our building together. I have a fresh parcel of zines from a friend one postcode away. It’s been too easy, in the past, for me to overlook transnational aspects of fandom. I said that was escapist, but when I return to the idea, I think escapism is also a journey home.

Naja Later is an Academic Tutor at Swinburne University of Technology. She studies intersections between pop culture and politics, with a focus on superhero and horror genres. She has published papers in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, and chapters with Rutgers University Press, University of Mississippi Press and McFarland.