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Conventions occupy a unique space within fan culture and the creative enterprises of comics, gaming, and genre-based work. Yet, what began as niche gatherings have become sprawling spectacles, mirroring the mainstreaming of fandom from subculture to mass culture. Many changes to the structure and character of fan conventions, and thus fan culture, derive from the massive popularity of the San Diego Comic-Con, the largest and most prominent pop culture convention in North America. In this chapter, Rob Salkowitz analyzes how San Diego Comic-Con has retained its position at the top of convention industry and fandom, balancing the powerful forces of commercialization against its original mission to champion comics and fandom. It draws on interviews, economic research, convention demographics, and social media analysis to show how various subsegments—or “tribes”—use the Con as a platform for their own interests while simultaneously helping maintain the show’s integrity.

Chapter 6 examines the localization of screening community during Hong Kong’s 1960s industrial modernization. It examines the intersections among gendered labor, the Chinese patriarchal family, celebrity culture and fandom, through films starring 1960s idols, Connie Chan Po-chu and Josephine Siao Fong-fong. While fandom and celebrity culture were created by the real demographics of an increasing number of female workers who became Connie’s and Josephine’s fans, their viewership became discursive sites that contributed to the constructions of a gendered community both within and outside of traditional Confucian familial hierarchies. My analysis of films such as Her Tender Love ((Langru chunri feng, dir. Lui Kei, 1969) and Teddy Girls (Fenü zhengzhuan, dir. Lung Kong, 1969) demonstrates that masquerade not only becomes a point of identification for fans, but also a focusing lens for the convergence of seemingly conflicted experiences of teddy girls and factory girls. As much as they embodied the contradictions of urban industrial modernization, factory girls and teddy girls (both on- and off-screen) and their experiences constructed youth fandom as a discursive site for the creative imagining of freedom and empowerment. And both contributed to making and screening of the industrializing and modernizing city that was 1960s Hong Kong.

This paper analyzes gender performativity in the form of cross-dressing cuteness through cosplaying by a popular male-cosplaying-female fan group “Ailisi Weiniang Tuan (Alice Cos Group)” based in China. Drawing from cute studies, gender/queer studies, and fan studies, this paper examines the phenomenon of fake girls as a venue of redefining the boundaries of identity and gender using cosplaying and the notion of cuteness to achieve queerness to address the issue of gender performativity through queered cuteness in today’s China.

Steampunk aesthetics in the production design of Guy Ritchie’s 2009 film production of Sherlock Holmes and its sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) reinforces a burgeoning alliance between steampunks and traditional Sherlockian fan cultures.  This chapter explores how such a presentation of the character and world of Sherlock Holmes further popularlizes steampunk aesthetics for mass-market consumption and demonstrates the natural fit of a steampunk interpretation for this most popular of Victorian narratives.It also discusses how the film’s attraction for steampunks enthusiasts makes it a remix of the character and story for contemporary sensibilities rather than the more usual pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle’s style and voice that reinterpretations have so often been. Finally, it extrapolates that this process of “remix,” that is replicated across other literatures and their interpretations, might be the correct descriptor for the larger aesthetic and cultural movement of steampunk.

Drawing from Umberto Eco and Federic Pagello, this chapter discusses superhero texts’ serialized narration in light of the repetition of storylines and how this is (or is not) produced in both comics and television format by elaborating on the link between hypermasculinity, physicality, and the powerful body through textual and extra-textual strategies. This chapter explores the way the main actor – Stephen Amell – narrates his masculinity and interlocks it with Oliver/Arrow’s, including Amell’s continuous communication with fans over social media and forays into WWE wrestling. The use of textual and extra-textual strategies highlights how serialization ritualizes the display of gendered bodies and how TV, with its use of live actors, further erodes the lines between reality and fiction.

The concluding remarks consider the popular culture legacy of Lost, and Lost’s standing as a significant milestone in science fiction television. It’s position in terms of being an important example of telefantasy is set out, including how this is achieved in relation to its hyperdiegesis and perpetuated hermeneutic. It is further contextualised in terms of its position in the evolution and development of transmedia storytelling, and the importance of its paratexts in fan culture.