[Comicsstudiessociety] IJOCA book review - US only - A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy

[Mike Rhode]

US only due to postage costs I'm afraid. Available to the first person who
writes ME back at mrhode at gmail.com

Thanks,

Mike


A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy
Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill
University Press of Mississippi 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/A-Portrait-of-the-Auteur-as-Fanboy__;!!KGKeukY!hFpggLmw0Kb2_DUdaHzPqKLeFHya42ChqrpQT07Rw7s7ngb4sjYCJ1C_nzLFBQ4Ufyg5TmQJmJMu$ 
Description

Increasingly over the past decade, fan credentials on the part of writers,
directors, and producers have come to be seen as a guarantee of quality
media making—the “fanboy auteur. ” Figures like Joss Whedon are both one of
“us” and one of “them. ” This is a strategy of marketing and branding—it is
a claim from the auteur himself or industry PR machines that the presence
of an auteur who is also a fan means the product is worth consuming. Such
claims that fan credentials guarantee quality are often contested, with
fans and critics alike rejecting various auteur figures as the true leader
of their respective franchises. That split, between assertions of fan and
auteur status and acceptance (or not) of that status, is key to unravelling
the fan auteur.

In *A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in
Transmedia Franchises*, authors Anastasia Salter and Mel Stanfill examine
this phenomenon through a series of case studies featuring fanboys. The
volume discusses both popular fanboys, such as J. J. Abrams, Kevin Smith,
and Joss Whedon, as well as fangirls like J. K. Rowling, E L James, and
Patty Jenkins, and dissects how the fanboy-fangirl auteur dichotomy is
constructed and defended by popular media and fans in online spaces, and
how this discourse has played in maintaining the exclusionary status quo of
geek culture.

This book is particularly timely given current discourse, including such
incidents as the controversy surrounding Joss Whedon’s so-called feminism,
the publication of *Harry Potter and the Cursed Child*, and contestation
over authorial voices in the DC cinematic universe, as well as broader
conversations about toxic masculinity and sexual harassment in Hollywood.
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