The Weirdness of Seeing a Mention You Forgot: Chicks Dig Time Lords and Torchwood Fandom

In my continuing habit of rediscovering fandoms about ten years after the fact, I started reading Chicks Dig Time Lords, a 2010 collection of short essays by women in the Doctor Who fandom. It’s a pretty neat, thorough overview, and it gave me some ideas of conventions to aim for once that’s a possibility again. (I also discovered that the fan internet hangout around this time was LiveJournal.)

But what really struck me was getting to the piece by Tammy Garrison and Katy Shuttleworth, the creators of the webcomic Torchwood Babiez. It’s the origin of their idea, told in comic strip format. I’m reading along and suddenly comes this page:

With a mention in the third panel of them getting online “word of mouth” from sites including “Comics Worth Reading”. Hunh. Turns out I did, back in 2008.

The funniest part of all that, though, was reading the post linked from that mention (from early 2007) about slash in Torchwood, in which I say I’m not interested in the genre. My gracious, how times change.

Update: Now that I’ve almost finished the book, I stumbled across a piece about the general slow-moving, cautionary approach to having companions who are feminist or bring diversity to the show in terms of race or sexuality. I was strongly reminded of the context at the time of the book’s publication — Matt Smith about to debut, Steven Moffat taking over as show runner — as the piece ends with statements about how “surprisingly promising” Moffat looks for creating strong female characters and how bright it will be for the show’s “feminist future”. That certainly didn’t happen with Amy and Clara.