- A Los Angeles art gallery presented exhibited fan art based on the work of Joss Whedon, with Whedon’s enthusiastic encouragement. At the opening, Whedon praised the artists and spoke in favour of fanwork: “If I could do this, this is what I’d do. I’d do fan art, I’d do fan fic of the stuff that I love … I just love the art so much… It’s hard to process the idea that it has anything to do with me.” [No transcript available.]
- Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead is saying thank you for “the truck loads of amazing fan art” he receives by publishing a “compilation of artwork made by his fans. The Norman/Daryl archetype is created in tattoo designs, cakes, pencil sketches, mosaics and more … It’s real art made by real people for real people.”
- FranceTV interviewed Emmanuelle Wielezynski-Debates about her new documentary on fans and fanworks. “Citizen Fan presents people who assuage the need to extend the life of fictional characters (of novels, manga, television, movies, video games etc…) who are important to them.” The documentary covers a variety of fandoms and showcases fanworks based on Harry Potter, Disney, manga, and video games, in addition to analysing the “cultural, sociological, economic and also legal” implications of fanwork.
- Media scholar Henry Jenkins also interviewed Wielezynski-Debates and declared Citizen Fan “may just be the best documentary about fan culture that I have seen.” Noting that France is “a country which provided very little protection for fair use and transformative works…I had questions about how a culture built on transformative cultural production would thrive in this particular national context. At a time when many of us in fandom studies have been calling for more work in the global and transnational dimensions of fan culture, it’s exciting to have access to this rich database of how fandom operates in France.”
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