BOOK: It Happens at Comic-Con: Ethnographic Essays on a Pop Culture Phenomenon

[Ryan Goble]

Excerpt from http://www.bleedingcool.com/ - a Frank Baker tip...

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Dr. Matthew J. Smith, a Professor in the Department of Communications at Wittenberg University in Ohio, about a field study course, “The Experience At Comic Con“, that he runs at San Diego Comic-Con for college students, and it turns out that the course has already helped generate an academic essay collection edited by Dr. Smith and Ph.D. candidate Ben Bolling: It Happens at Comic-Con: Ethnographic Essays on a Pop Culture Phenomenon from McFarland Press.

Both Dr. Smith and Ben Bolling are Pop Culture scholars and authors with a deep interest in the phenomenon of comic cons, and developing a collection of essays is in many ways the first step toward bringing Pop Culture Studies to the attention of universities and starting to codify the many cultural aspects of fandom for future generations. Naturally, there is some resistance in academia to bringing Pop Culture courses into the college curriculum as well as biases (even from students!), and there are also challenges to gathering information about comic cons, but Smith and Bolling are undeterred. And they aren’t alone. In collecting the materials for the book, they’ve demonstrated that there are many potential Pop Culture scholars out there, and it’s a matter of providing the framework and encouragement for developing this field of study further.

I asked the co-editors quite a few questions about how they went about putting this book together, and also, given their interest and experience pertaining to comic cons, how they feel about the role of comics in con culture and where they think the explosive growth of cons is headed.

Read the full article HERE.