Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett looks at the explosive potential for comics fan fiction, plus the new Sanjay and Craig animated series.
 
Way back in 2007 (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Manga Fatigue") I wrote a column about an article that appeared in the October issue of Wired, "Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex" by Daniel Pink.  At the time sales of manga were on the decline (they may very well still be declining; I couldn't find any current circulation figures available anywhere online) and Pink suggested doujinshi could save the medium.  Doujinshi being manga done by amateur creators who use characters taken from popular manga and anime series but given their own individual, most often homoerotic, spin. 
 
Pink suggests the doujinshi model could be used in America and while I found the notion intriguing to say the least, I'm on record as saying this was something that was never going to happen. I really haven't thought much about this since.  But last week came the news of the launch of Amazon’s Kindle World, a "digital publishing platform where writers can publish fanfiction under official licenses."  So far the deal is limited to the TV series Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars and The Vampire Diaries, all franchises belonging to Warner Bros. Alloy Entertainment.  And, talking about limits, writers will receive 35% percent of profits while the rest go to Amazon and Alloy--and it almost goes without saying, but no pornographic material.
 
And they'll own everything.  Not only will the respective copyright holders hold onto their respective copyrights, any new characters or ideas fan writers come up with become their property as well.  Which probably doesn't seem all that that different from the work for hire contacts comic book creators have signing for decades, but as you might imagine this caused something of a stir in the world of fiction writers.
 
So, paid fanfiction, unprecedented, not to mention an oxymoron, sure, but how exactly does this affect any of us?  It doesn't at the moment; right now (although comics are listed as one of the eventual sources of IP for Kindle World).   I'm still wondering if Kindle World actually has a viable business model.  Leo Sun of The Motley Fool seems to think so.  In a piece titled "Inside Amazon’s Brave New World of Fan Fiction" he says it follows the successful "content-creation model of social networks" like Facebook, which is driven by its users.
 
But will it be successful enough to expand to include other properties owned by parent company Time-Warner, and have other companies follow suit (like Scholastic who owns Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, Hachette Livre Twilight, Disney Star Wars, etc.). As Sun points out, just because J.K. Rowling isn't writing any new Harry Potter books doesn't necessarily mean there won't be any new Harry Potter books.  Not anymore.
 
But ultimately what will drive this is what drives most things--money.  And not just money but the kind of exponential amount of money that corporations can make by doing almost nothing; their very favorite kind.  One of the things that kept America from using the doujinshi model has corporate lawyers afraid that those kind of fan comics would cause market confusion and weaken copyrights.  And the only thing that could trump that fear is the bigger fear of missing out on an exponential amount of money. 
 
Meaning, we may very well one day see online fan comics of Superman, Batman and Iron Man.  Marvel already seems to be onboard, seeing a show they've used the term "Science Bros." as the title of an Avengers trade paperback in spite of the fact it's also the name for a subject of fanfiction where Tony Stark and Bruce Banner are a couple.  It's still not very likely but it's definitely now in the realm of the possible; and it's hard to imagine them being any worse than a lot of the "professional" comics I've recently read.
 
Last weekend a sneak peek of Disney XD's new series Avengers Assemble premiered and while it's certainly perfectly adequate (so far my verdict is "better looking than Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes but not nearly as much fun"), much better was the debut of Nickelodeon's new series Sanjay and Craig.  I really haven't had any interest in Nickelodeon since they killed Amy Poehler, Cynthia True and Erik Wiese's The Mighty B to make room for an apparently endless series of spin-offs of DreamWorks movies.  But this show is the creation of Jay Howell (he did the character design for Fox's Bob's Burgers and it shows), Jim Dirschberger and Andreas Trolf.  The Executive Producers are Chris Viscardi and Will McRobb, creators of The Adventures of Pete & Pete; for those unfamiliar with it, this was the greatest live action kids TV series ever conceived by the mind of man.
 
It's the story of an Indian-American kid and his talking pet snake and while I have to admit I didn't care much for the plot of the first episode (involving the world’s first butt transplant), I'm admittedly not ten years old.  Still, it's clever and anarchic and is just odd enough to place it squarely in my wheelhouse.
 
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.