A comic con-versation with a Media Studies professor

J. Richard Stevens is an associate professor of Media Studies in the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information, where he studies popular culture, new media theory and digital media skills. He contributed to the book “Articulating the Action Figure: Essays on the Toys and Their Messages”, which was released in March. Recently, Stevens attended Denver Comic Con, where he served on several panels and attended events with CMCI graduate students. The following conversation has been edited for style and clarity.

How many times have you attended the convention and what set this year's event apart?
I’ve attended Denver Comic Con since its initial appearance in 2012. So I guess that makes this year the sixth trip. I used to attend cons in college, mostly science fiction. Denver Comic Con began as an intersection of research, education and popular culture. Its host organization, Pop Culture Classroom, is a nonprofit group dedicated to improving literacy for children using comics and pop culture. The research conference embedded in Denver Comic Con was originally organized by area scholars, but now has a national draw. And of course, Denver was recently named the Independent Comics Capital of North America, making the popular culture offering natural strong with loads of local talent. Denver Comic Con is also unusual for the large amount of children’s programming it offers.

This year’s event had the largest attendance on record—though it’ll be a few weeks until we get final numbers—and I understand that the attendance may approach that of New York Comic Con, which is the second largest such event, after San Diego Comic-Con.

Several CMCI students came along. What types of majors did these students have? Were they all from one department, or were there students from various areas? 
We had several CMCI students involved in the research track of the convention. Page 23 is a research conference embedded within the comic con that brings together scholars from all over the country interested in the study of popular culture. Graduate students from the Media Studies and Journalism departments presented research to an audience comprised of scholars and fans. In addition, some graduate students from the English department presented research. 

I also saw some undergraduate and master’s students in the audience for some of the research panels. I saw some of my Information Science colleagues at one of my panels and ran into one of the Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design faculty members on the floor. So CMCI and CU had quite a presence at the con. 

What is the benefit of attending the conference for CMCI students? 
The benefits vary by discipline. My home department is Media Studies, and we emphasize public engagement in our research activities, using knowledge to facilitate social exchanges and bridges to community. Popular culture events are great locations for this kind of work, where a scholar has to learn to be able to code-switch between communicating with peers and with members of the public in the same room. It helps students learn how to demystify their expertise in order to create shared knowledge with the public. And that, in turn, gives us opportunities to bring our knowledge into communities that can use it. 

It’s also a good place to see culture building occurring in the wild. Many of the theories and constructs we bring to bear to consider social problems can be quickly grounded in a passionate fan disagreement. 

And finally, it exposes our students to the difficulties of communicating with strong-willed but inexperienced communicators. Many of the fan conflicts that permeate our culture owe as much to poor communication as to differences in values or opinions. Learning to mediate disputes and help participants in a conversation find agreement, even if it’s just on terminology, is a valuable experience for students. 

Did any students participate in panels or make other contributions that stood out?
I thought several were great. It’s hard to pick individual standouts, because it’s impossible to see every panel.

One of our students, Rachel Watson, participated in both the academic track and in a fan track. That takes a lot of guts, because talking science fiction in front of a popular audience is harder than talking about it to academic peers. But all of our students brought interesting work to bear on problems related to popular culture. 

It looks like your son joined you on a panel about superhero toy franchises. What was the benefit of including children in that discussion?
That was an experiment for me. Chris Bell and I have been working on a book about Hasbro and its relationship with media companies. The book examines the political economy involved in creating culture in order to sell toys, but it also explores fan involvement in those texts. So we thought we’d host a fan panel to discuss some of the different ways fans interact with Hasbro properties. 

We brought a lot of toys, showed commercials, clips from cartoons and movies and panels from comic books. We traced the narrative histories of the G.I. Joe and Transformers franchises through the last 40 plus years. We used a little bit of theory and framed some simple analysis in laymen terms for the audience. 

Part of the point in doing that was to propose that while we all gravitate to the brands that Hasbro pushes, our narrative connections are quite different from one another, owing to different media experiences, exposure to different eras of programming and many other variables that influence values and attitudes. So after Chris and I briefly explored the differences in our own readings of the original texts, we asked children to do the same.

My son and his daughter were on the stage with us, and after we presented a selection of media and analyzed it, our kids explained their own interpretations of the text: what they liked and what it meant to them.

It was fun to involve my son in that experience, though I think we are going to work a bit more on microphone etiquette before I try anything like that with him again. 

What was the craziest outfit you noticed this year?
Oh, there were several. Perhaps my favorite was the Star Wars/Beauty and the Beast mash-up group. There were some large costumes that were eye-popping. I particularly enjoyed the families that wore coordinated costumes. 

I can't cosplay when I attend, because I have to switch into academic presentation mode so often. My son wore his Lego Batman costume for half the day on Saturday, and it was fun watching him get compliments. 

What is the best part of attending Denver Comic Con? 
Well, the best is the stimulation. Not only do I get a dozen new ideas for research projects, but the engagement with fans gives me insight into why so many of these texts are becoming so powerful to so many people. It’s great to interact with those that produce that culture as well, and to get to dig into their thought processes and values.