Dreaming of new horizons

“I’d have the biggest arguments with people about the legitimacy or otherwise of fanfic. I’ve got a real issue about people who dismiss fanfic with a sweep of the hand just because it’s not official. And I find it staggering that you could be an artist—a professional artist, a professional Transformers artist—and no one bats an eye when they hear, ‘You know what, I’ve been doodling Ultra Magnus since I was eight.’ Or 'I’ve spent ten years painstakingly drawing my favorite Transformers characters, and now my ability has been recognized and I’m doing it professionally.’ As an artist, that’s entirely normal. But if you’re a writer who expressed your love for the … Maybe I’m just airing all my personal grievances now. But you know what I mean, it shouldn’t be any different for a writer. And actually these days, surely professionals in the comics world—or beyond, but particularly comics … Dan Slott, for example. He didn’t create his first Spider-Man story when he was given the job of writing Amazing Spider-Man. Fans become pros; people have a love of things, and that encourages them to be creative, and there’s an overlap of what they love and what they write about or what they draw. It happens. But you know, fanfiction is used almost exclusively as a pejorative term; it’s used as a term of abuse. As I said, I don’t read it now, but you mentioned Telefunken—I wrote fanfic, Transformers fanfic. I’m proud of writing it; I gave it my all, as I give More Than Meets the Eye my all. And there were other writers, at the time—my contemporaries—who wrote Transformers fanfic, and they are fantastic, and the stories they wrote are fantastic. And it’s the same in other branches of fanfiction, too.”