Things that are generally interesting apparently.
A few weeks ago I launched a discussion on this site that became buzzable. The topic was pretty simple, “What else do you like besides comics?” It was an attempt by me to figure out what qualifies as general interest, and the response was quite literally overwhelming. After 348 comments I realized it might be a good idea to actually get this torrent organized. So that’s what I did.
Methods
I sifted through all 348 comments cataloguing what people said they were interested in. There were lots of instances where people listed a few different things, and in those cases I took the first interest they wrote for fear of skewing the data towards long winded commenters. However, in many cases someone would reply to a comment to express an interest in one of the other topics listed in the original comment. So the reply tally hopefully offset any loss of data by only using the first response. There’s probably some things that I missed, and a few instances of double-counting, but I tried my best and don’t claim this is a rigorous scientific analysis.
After adding all the responses to a spreadsheet, I decided upon some categories. These were purposefully as broad as possible to try and find trends within the minutiae. Even still, I wound up with a large number of categories including: Academics, Adverstising, Anime/Manga, Arts/Crafts, Comedy, Entertainment, Exercise, Food/Drink, Games, History, Music (listening), Music (playing), Other, Outdoors, Psuedoscience, Reading, Sports (playing), Sports (watching), Technology, Video Games, and Writing.
Hopefully those are pretty self-explanatory, but if you really want to know how I categorized a specific comment I suppose you could ask in the comments of this post and I’ll let you know. I will let everyone know that the 1 response I put as “other” was “religious prayer cards” because I thought it was unique and didn’t quite fit anywhere else.
Results and Discussion
Table 1: THE RESULTS!
The results can be seen in Table 1. The total is less than 348 because not every comment was expressing a particular interest. Some people commented on the article itself, while others asked for more information on an interest they may not have been familiar with.
There are a few things to notice in this table (and for those of you wishing for a pie chart, trust me, with this many categories it was a mess). Music (29%), entertainment (37%) (movies, TV, pro-wrestling, etc.) and academics (21%) are the predominant interests amongst the iFanbase. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Entertainment was one of the broader categories, but music and entertainment are both easily classified as “general interest” so I wasn’t shocked to see them towards the top. Academics, however, is a bit more fringe. Considering the fact that I could have easily lumped History in with Academics (13% + 21% = 33%) it could have rivaled Entertainment (37%) itself. I think this means that we really are some serious nerds, which I think is a good thing.
Sports, unsurprisingly, was a very popular response (24%). What I didn’t expect was the breakdown between playing (7%) and watching (17%), I figured most people would be watchers, and fewer would be players, so that was encouraging to someone like me (not a value judgment on the sports enthusiasts, just my own personal opinion).
We have far fewer tech nerds than I thought (6%, and traditional board and card games (17%) dominated video games (4%). I knew there wasn’t a huge overlap between gaming and comics culture, but I was surprised how deep a rift there seems to be. I know plenty of you probably game regularly, but if you didn’t report it as a first choice interest it wasn’t counted, sorry.
The rest of the categories all hover between 0.5% and 4% of the group. I expected more crafts folks in our crowd (8%), but maybe I don’t know you all as well as I ought to. I was surprised a few people still put reading (9%) down as an interest outside comics. I know what they meant (and they were usually more specific in their actual comment) but it just struck me as odd that people would distinguish comics from reading, yet I’m sure many do.
Conclusion
From these data I can conclude that the iFanbase is really quite a diverse bunch of folks. Our collective Venn diagram may keep us all connected via comics, but outside our four-color habit we seem to be up to some neat stuff. Remember these results the next time you feel pigeon-holed as a comic nerd, or if you think no one else shares your love of scented candles. It’s all out there, and even the things that you think are true “general interest” generally hold sway over less than a 1/4 of our cabal.
I hope you found this little crowd-sourced sociological study as interesting as I did. And I further hope this openness about other interests brings some new flavors towards reading the comments of folks you now know aren’t as one-dimensional as the characters on the page.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Ryan Haupt did not include Ancient Astronauts in the History category, regardless of what channel the show is on. Hear him on his own show, recorded now and on earth, Science… sort of!
Find us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our RSS Feed
Some rights reserved.
One of the biggest changes I’ve seen in comics fans of the last 20 years that most of us do have a wider set of interests. A big part of it is getting older (as most fans have) and becoming more mature and diverse. Well, mature might be a stretch…
Ryan, this is great. Thank you for the effort that was surely involved in putting this together. It may not be scientific, but it sure is interesting.
I am someone who would distinguish my interest in comics from reading. While I enjoy reading novels and do so a lot, comics are so much more to me. Just about everything in this medium is interesting to me, not just the stories.
“We have far fewer tech nerds than I thought (6%, and traditional board and card games (17%) dominated video games (4%). I knew there wasn’t a huge overlap between gaming and comics culture, but I was surprised how deep a rift there seems to be. I know plenty of you probably game regularly, but if you didn’t report it as a first choice interest it wasn’t counted, sorry.”
While I love(d) tabletop RPGs and I do a fair amount of gaming on my PS3, I can definitely concede the point that I’m far less of a gamer and far more of a comics fan. Can I talk about how awesome Red Dead Redemption or Arkham City are? Yep. But I’d rather talk about how awesome Planetary is or how amazing Ditko was in his prime.
As we learned from our time on Revision3, the tech/comics overlap isn’t quite as large as one might think. It’s only been made clearer in the digital comics divide.
I would argue that tech is such a large part of our days, which could potentially highlight why so few people refer to tech as general interest. I love my computers and tech items, using my iPhone constantly, even to login into iFanboy at my LCS to make sure i am picking up all my books for the week, but i wouldn’t say that i have a general interest in tech because it’s so second nature to me.
This is not to say that you can’t have a general interest in tech, as i see Ron is quite into Android, and promotes that interest in various places, but i think having a general interest in tech may be very specific to a certain brand or device/item (apple, google, smartphone, televison).
And Conor, are you saying that digital comics are not popular with people who are interested in tech?
@WeaklyRoll: No, I didn’t say that. I said there isn’t as much of an overlap between comic readers and people really into tech as one might think, and one piece of evidence is the digital comics divide. Many comic book readers seem to have a strong luddite streak in them.
@conor, thanks for the clarification, much appreciated. the tech/comics overlap threw me off.
Surprisingly large amount of Sports fans. The Nerds and the Jocks are becoming one? =)
“Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!” Somebody better call Peter Venkman to figure this all out!
It’s all about rooting for characters in costume as they do amazing things.
I’ve been a baseball/football fan as long or longer than a comics fan. They go hand in hand for me.
hey thats a good point. The parallels are there. I do have good guy and bad guy teams.
Like the Yankees, those guys are the worst!!!!
“Like the Yankees, those guys are the best!!!!”
Fixed to account for all those rings. 😛
no need to fix. It was correct the first time. 😉
Bobby Valentine LOOMS!!!! ahhh yeah well um…. yup. nevermind on that one. =p
Gaming was that low? Huh.
I’ve been trying to find a way to smash together my love of comics and theatre for a long time and these articles have just re-invigorated that pursuit. Does anyone know of any stage shows that deal with comics? If not, I wanna get to work on a stage production of the early days of Marvel. It’d be a lot of fun to wrangle some actors to play Kirby, Lee, Ditko etc. Talk about a challenge!
interesting results, but we should remember to take them with a grain of salt. this is only reflective of those who chose to answer. This isnt necessarily indicitive of the entire ifanbase (only the ifanboys know the total downloads, page hits, active members etc so we cant know what % of the total fanbase 348 responses shows) and certainly not fandom in general.
the lack of overlap between comics and gamers was unexpected, as most of my comic reading friends are gamers, i know a lot more comics fan gamers than not. however i dont know any comics fan gamers who listen to comics podcasts
I think that Ryan makes it abundantly clear in the piece what these numbers reflect.
It’s ok, nobody ever reads the methods section, even in real science papers.
These stats made me wet. More stats please.
I so want to ask what was put into pseudo-science but will refrain from doing so as it is my conviction that almost literally everything is pseudo-science.
And yes I mean physics also.
Almost literally everything? Including physics? Seems like a demonstrably absurd position, but this also isn’t really the place to get into a philosophy of science debate. Suffice it to say if physics didn’t produce scientifically valid results, I’m not sure how I’m able to see the computer, input data through a board of lettered buttons, and send that data through the air for you to read.
You angered me just now. And I’m okay with that. I love your article anyway.
And I love you.
Like I said, happy to have that debate, just not here and now lest we anger the mighty Conor. (You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.)
Another example of why iFanboy is the best comics website around. Great article Ryan. Although it does make me wonder, is Jason Wood still around? I haven’t seen one of his articles in awhile and I’d love to see his thoughts on DC Marvel market share.
Where are you WOOD?
Comic books, quantitatively… what a wonderful concept. Ps I remember reading that article and seeing the multitude of comments and saying, “aw forget it, theres no way my vote will mean a thing” and then moving on. My bad, add one for playing sports, historical studies and an amateur doodling.