The Cartoon Fandom Subculture Thread

[PicardMan]

I wanted to create a thread on the subculture of the cartoon fandom where we can talk about the past and present of the subculture. It is interesting to wonder when and how this subculture came to be. I think the Simpsons episode "The Itchy, Scratchy, and Poochie Show" was the first pop cultural acknowledgement of the cartoon fandom as a subculture with Comic Book Guy as a satirical depiction depiction of the "cartoon nerd" obsessed with silly details like the sounds effects being unrealistic and making it the "worst episode ever." At least since the 1990s, cartoon fans were seen a geek subculture. Earlier depictions of adult cartoon fans seem to be merely weird manchildren characters like Full House's Joey Gladstone. DeviantArt has been the home for cartoon fans to draw art, some pretty weird. The 2010s is when the nickname "cartoonaboos" came as a nickname for the cartoon fandom, but it seems mainly to be a divisive term and rarely one of self-identification. YouTube pundits like Mr. Enter, Pan Pizza, Saberspark, and the like came into prominence, for better or for worse. At least YouTube brought the "cartoonaboo" subculture much more visibility, even if a lot of it was toxic and anyone who liked whatever YouTube cartoon critic hated got attacked online.

What I am surprised about is the fact that Western cartoon centric conventions aren't really a thing like anime and furries. Western cartoon voice actors appear at general comic cons, but cartoon conventions aren't really a thing. You can find Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, and many other Western cartoon cosplayers, but they don't have a con of their own.

Anyway, this is broad thread topic, but I wanted a place to talk about the fandom subculture as it is an interesting subculture.

 

[JMTV]

What I am surprised about is the fact that Western cartoon centric conventions aren't really a thing like anime and furries. Western cartoon voice actors appear at general comic cons, but cartoon conventions aren't really a thing. You can find Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, and many other Western cartoon cosplayers, but they don't have a con of their own.

Well, there is Brony conventions, but that was long ago.

 

[Pooky]

As far as I can tell Cartoon Fandom as a subculture has its roots in the 1970s, at least in the US/the English language. That's when a lot of the earliest notable books on the medium were published, most notably The Art of Walt Disney by Christopher Finch, Tex Avery: King of Cartoons by Joe Adamson and The Fleischer Story by Leslie Cabarga (also I believe The Animated Raggedy Ann and Andy by John Canemaker might have been the first book to chronicle the making of a single, then current, animated film), leading to more seminal books being published in the early 80s (like Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic and Jerry Beck and Will Friedland's Complete Illustrated Guide to Warner Brothers Cartoons), until you started to be able to fill shelves with books on animation in the 1990s. It perhaps didn't fully crystalize or perhaps just waxed and waned until the late 80s, but animation was starting to be genuinely respected as an art form in its own right, arguably for the first time, or at least the first time for those other than Disney. If you were in the right place at the right time you could go to revival screenings, or hear a lecture by Bob Clampett, the collectors market for 8mm prints picked up which would inform how animation would be distributed on VHS. United Artists released the semi-serious, quarter-accurate documentary/retrospective Bugs Bunny Superstar which inspired (surely?) Warner Bros to release their own similar Great American Chase by the decade's end. Of course most of this was celebrating animation's past rather than its present or future, which did shape the way much animation fandom would develop, for better or worse.

Arguably the primary chronicler of this period was Michael Barrier, who started the Funnyworld fanzine. His site offers some insight into what it might have been like in this era. His zine was followed by others like Animato, Wild Cartoon Kingdom, the imaginatively named Animation Magazine and, here in the UK, Animator.

(EDIT: Incorrect information edited out here, see below)

What I am surprised about is the fact that Western cartoon centric conventions aren't really a thing like anime and furries. Western cartoon voice actors appear at general comic cons, but cartoon conventions aren't really a thing. You can find Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, and many other Western cartoon cosplayers, but they don't have a con of their own.

This is a generalisation and it may be a slightly dated one, and one I hope is not offensive, but I sort of feel like Western Cartoon fans tend to be more into the extratextual elements (the production processes, the history of the show or franchise etc) whereas Anime fans often seem to be most interested in the world building, lore and characters, which leads to a greater propensity for cosplaying and other more active fan activities suited for conventions. At least before the internet I think there was a bit of tradition of animators giving lectures and making similar personal appearances, certainly a lot of Golden Age artists towards the end of their lives and I know David Silverman did a tour or at least a few shows in the 90s talking about The Simpsons.

As @JMTV mentioned there were, maybe even still are, Brony conventions for a number of years and there have been Transformers conventions since the 90s, though these are of course both toy brands at their very core which adds a different element.

 

[PicardMan]

As far as I can tell Cartoon Fandom as a subculture has its roots in the 1970s, at least in the US/the English language.

The 1970s? That surprises me as that era is often thought of as the darkest days of television animation and stuff that aired in that period like Superfriends and Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space is very hard to watch for the modern viewer. That's probably when cartoon culture focused on nostalgia. The thing is that television animation dramatically improved beginning in the late 80s.

As @JMTV mentioned there were, maybe even still are, Brony conventions for a number of years and there have been Transformers conventions since the 90s, though these are of course both toy brands at their very core which adds a different element.

Now that you mention Transformers, I just realized something. Probably the reason action cartoons like Transformers and battle shonen like DBZ are so associated as "nerd shows" is because action cartoon fans are more apt to collect action figures, cosplay, write fanfiction, talk on forums, and engage in obsessive fan activity. It's probably the association of action cartoons and anime with con and cosplay culture that makes them considered part of nerd stuff. I have seen comedy cartoon cosplayers for titles like Spongebob and Fairly Oddparents, but way past both shows' primes. Western comedy cartoon cosplay seems like a significantly more recent phenomenon than anime, superhero, and action cartoon cosplay.

 

[Pooky]

The 1970s? That surprises me as that era is often thought of as the darkest days of television animation and stuff that aired in that period like Superfriends and Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space is very hard to watch for the modern viewer. That's probably when cartoon culture focused on nostalgia. The thing is that television animation dramatically improved beginning in the late 80s.

Well it seems little of it was to do with what was on American TV at the time, there was some interest in some people working on the fringes of contemporary animation like Ralph Bakshi, Richard Williams and Bob Godfrey, and in productions like Watership Down, but it was mostly about exploring the mediums' past. In my experience Animation fandom was pretty Golden Age-centric until the 2000s. The Animation renaissance in the 90s was seen as welcome, sure, but not quite the glory of Camelot. This end of the animation fandom can still be seen at places like Cartoon Research.

 

[5YearsOnEastCoast]

Cartoon fandom subculture is such a weird beast. I have known about cartoon fandom subculture on Internet for a decade now. I think the modern cartoon subculture was born around 2010 when My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic exploded on Internet. I know cartoon fandom existed before, but it seems that once MLP FIM premiered (along with Adventure Time and Regular Show becoming more popular), I felt like it gave a new life to cartoon fandom.

And yeah DeviantArt was sort of a main place for cartoon fans back in early to mid 2010s. That place had a lot of great fanart, but also some very cursed stuff, unfunny "reaction" images from cartoon characters and unintentionally funny hate art of cartoons they hate with Johnny Test being the biggest victim (people back then treated Johnny Test like it killed their dog).

 

[PicardMan]

Cartoon fandom subculture is such a weird beast. I have known about cartoon fandom subculture on Internet for a decade now. I think the modern cartoon subculture was born around 2010 when My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic exploded on Internet.

Yes, the 2010s was when cartoon fandom in its current form seems to have existed as a distinct subculture. Cartoons existed for decades, but it seems like the fandom as we know it today was a very recent phenomenon. What Pooky describes as the 20th century fandom sounds like a bunch of boring, stuffy people wearing suits, but it's okay if those people enjoy what they did. A-Kon and anime cons and cosplay started in the 1990,and Botcon in 1994 but it seemed to take until 2010 for the general Western cartoon community to come into its own. It seems like it took a while for the general cartoon fandom to embrace cons and cosplay like the anime, superhero, and Transformers fandoms.

 

[Zorak Masaki]

As @JMTV mentioned there were, maybe even still are, Brony conventions for a number of years and there have been Transformers conventions since the 90s, though these are of course both toy brands at their very core which adds a different element.

I think there were some Jem conventions as well, but I cant be sure of that.

 

[Classic Speedy]

Arguably the primary chronicler of this period was Michael Barrier, who started the Funnyworld fanzine. His site offers some insight into what it might have been like in this era. His zine was followed by others like Animato, Wild Cartoon Kingdom, the imaginatively named Animation Magazine and, here in the UK, Animator.

(Side-note; only just seen that Barrier passed away in February, so R.I.P. He made it to 90)

I'm afraid you've been a victim of the Google algorithm giving mixed results. You're mixing up the animation historian with the Star Trek actor- the latter is who passed away this year. Trust me, if Michael Barrier the animation historian has passed, we'd have a Cartoon Research post about it.

 

[Pooky]

I guess the now somewhat forgotten era is the early internet usenet/newsgroups era, in which some animated shows developed quite a following for their time, especially Animaniacs and (unsurprisingly) The Simpsons. You can see a lot of old newsgroup Simpsons posts, especially episode reviews, at The Simpsons Archive site. It's still wild to me to that Al Jean called out one of the old users, Ondre Lombard, in an interview just a few years ago.

Here is a video of some of the Animaniacs fans gathering and getting to meet some of the cast and crew in 1995. One of the fans seen here uploaded the video, another would later gain infamy on a more widely used internet as "Tron Guy".

(Non-animation side note; I recently learned that Parker Lewis Can't Lose was one of the first shows to gain a notable online following. Interesting to me as it doesn't really fit in with my image of the early internet.

I'm afraid you've been a victim of the Google algorithm giving mixed results. You're mixing up the animation historian with the Star Trek actor- the latter is who passed away this year. Trust me, if Michael Barrier the animation historian has passed, we'd have a Cartoon Research post about it.

Ah, thank you, I was slightly surprised I hadn't heard about it.

I think there were some Jem conventions as well, but I cant be sure of that.

I'm remembering now that there were and maybe still are Gargoyles conventions for a time too ("Gathering of the Gargoyles"). I guess if a show is Sci-Fi or Fantasy that increases the likelyhood. I don't know if there's ever been a Masters of the Universe convention but I'd be somewhat surprised if there has never been at least one.

 

[PicardMan]

Toonzone itself is pretty important to the cartoon fandom as well as Cartoon Brew. R/Cartoons might be the cool place now, even if it's less structured and organized than a threaded forum. Don't know why Reddit is cooler than forums despite how disorganized it is.