Look, it’s a Fans! strip! Written by T Campbell and Jason Waltrip usually, and also here. No, this isn’t a Sunday strip. All Fans! strips are full pages. So, uh, Jason Waltrip kinda got a raw deal, havin’ to keep up with my seven-days-a-week schedule drawing full pages, while I kept on doing Sundays and dailies. D’oh.
This is Shanna Cochran! Her name is Shanna Cochran. She was a normie who got stuck covering her college’s science fiction club. Well, a recovering normie. Of the Fans! characters, she’s the most fun to draw.
So, let’s kick off this escapist crossover yarn with some light and fluffy character exposition. We need a goofy hook too, like Clark Kent and Peter Parker getting assigned to cover the same event or Clark and Bruce Wayne booking seats on the same cruise ship. Or hey, how about some RELATIVES WITH EARLY-STAGE DEMENTIA, who’ll just ignore a random interdimensional jump?
Shanna Cochran is a journalist who mingles with science-fiction fans and is ever so slowly becoming one. Her mother Judith got into fandom around the same time that Judith began to lose her mind (future science “cured” her not long before this story, and you can probably guess how long that lasted). These two facts should tell you a lot about Shanna’s fears and anxieties, and they make her so awkward here that her stilted last balloon actually sounds about right to my ear.
At one time, print journalists like Shanna didn’t think much of TV channels like CNN, making Shanna’s second attempt at conversation here even more strained. These days, presidential attacks have shifted the landscape and weakened such old rivalries, sort of like they did at the end of The Post, only more permanently.
In a sense, I think she might be the biggest badass of the Fans! universe. Although you could make that argument for almost any of the main characters.
Did she just not notice that her daughter has disappeared entirely?
Shanna’s mom has an off-and-on relationship with reality.
Shanna’s relationship with her mom rings true. Don’t ask me how I know.
I’m so glad you guys are providing exposition for this. I’ve always gotten the impression that Fans is a really cool webcomic, but I’ve never had time to read it all the way through, so a lot of the characters and their relationships with each other are lost on me.
I actually started re-reading it, but then stopped when it hit this crossover, because I wanted to experience it along with everyone else on the site. I don’t know how much I’ll be doing that going forward though, depends on the state of the comments section. It’s a little quieter this evening.
I’ve read Fans all the way through twice, and to be honest I still didn’t really know what was going on. T. Campbell’s storytelling has always been a little obtuse for me and unless I dove into the forums I’d inevitably lose track of why character x was mad at character y or who was secretly a robot double or whatever. I always felt vaguely guilty about it because clearly the fanbase had no problem tracking events but I had a similar problem with Penny and Aggie.
I liked the crossover because they’re meant to be self contained so I wasn’t missing anything.
Anyway sorry to bust in just to complain about someone else’s webcomic but I’ve been sitting on that for, like, six years and had to tell somebody.
Also Shanna is far and away the character I like best from Fans.
Fun fact: this is the first Fans! strip I ever read, and eventually I went back and binged the whole archive basically because I was interested in Shanna’s mom’s backstory.
Turns out there wasn’t really all that much of it?
But the joke’s on be, because the whole strip was great from beginning to end, and also the reboot.