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ABSTRACT
My essay examines the blogging culture surrounding San Diego Comic-Con. Con-bloggers share desirable strategies for navigating the convention, including access to tickets, hotel rooms, and panels. I argue that con-blogging’s focus on wait times, the convention space, and communal experiences among fans functions as an adjacent yet external “extra” to the industry’s promotional discourse. The popularity of con-blogging demonstrates that fans’ interests exceed industrial offerings. Con-bloggers’ primary fandom is the ephemeral experience rooted in a specific time (four days in July) and space (the San Diego Convention Center), expanding the usual definition of fandom as centering on a media text. Even though con-bloggers’ fandom remains apart from industry buzz, they adopt industrial strategies to promote their blogs, including branding, sponsorships, and swag. The complex economy of knowledge production among con-bloggers reorients our understanding of industry-fan interactions at conventions and beyond.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Marshall (Citation2017).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Melanie E. S. Kohnen
Melanie E. S. Kohnen is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies at Lewis & Clark College. She researches media industry-audience interactions on social media and at conventions. Her scholarship has appeared in Cinema Journal, Media Industries Journal, Journal of Popular Television, and several anthologies. Her book Queer Representation, Visibility, and Race: Screening the Closet was published by Routledge in 2015.