The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1905: Youngblood #2, February 2008

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The show continues, and Badrock discovers a problem with his usually impervious derma.

I quite like that there's an undercurrent, mostly from the heroes, of explicit knowledge that this reality show angle is going to blow up. There's a slightly more-archetypal story going on here that I really, really recognize. It's that moment when someone thinks that they have a handle on a situation because they've done all the research and tested everything with focus groups and done all the brand marketing and other bullshit...but they've never taken into account what it's actually like to work on the front lines where all of that research etc. means absolutely nothing. In a much less-superpowered milieu, I've seen it in stores and institutions I've worked at - the higher-ups think that their new ideas and initiatives will very easily be implemented and will make everything wonderful, but they have no experience of how things actually work on the sales floor or in the classroom, and they get crabby when someone who does know how things work tells them their idea is a bad one.

We are definitely seeing this in Youngblood, and it's thoroughly unsurprising that it's the U.S. government that is refusing to listen to people who, quite simply, know better. That idea that just because you're in a position of authority you somehow automatically know better than those in your charge is so frustrating. It completely discounts particular kinds of knowledge. Just as I was leaving academia, there were conversations about FanAcs, or fan academics, and how much authority such people should be afforded in discourse about fandom. To me, the only difference between myself as a fan and/or academic and a "FanAc" is that I've had the benefit of getting a language with which to have detailed conversations about the subject, whereas a FanAc has not. But a good, well-trained academic can recognize when someone is talking about something for which they don't have the words and then supply those words to the person. It's called teaching, and it's something that, in my experience, a lot of academics need to spend a lot more time thinking about and doing.

Well, that went off the rails into a rant about academia. Sorry.

More to follow.