Originally published November 21, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1253
We were speaking last week of how satisfying all fans, everywhere, is an impossibility. How fans can set such expectations for those whose careers they follow that meeting those expectations can become an insurmountable task.
It can become extremely frightening for those who are in the public eye. For every thousand fans who are decent, polite, caring folk (and there are thousands, tens of thousands out there) there’s the one or two who have their own agendas. Some of them deliberately target you for the purpose of building themselves up, or proving something by showing they can be tougher or smarter than “the pro,” or feel the need to show that they are not intimidated by you—even though intimidation was never your intention. (I can’t tell you the number of times fans have told me that they were afraid to come up to me; what did they think I was going to do, bite their heads off like a circus geek?)
And then there are the fans who are so obsessive, it gets… well… scary.
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