Author Sean Kleefeld

Nearly every fandom is a pretty loosely knit group. Even those that have formal fan clubs associated with them aren't all-inclusive. After all, since identifying yourself as a fan is generally sufficient to be...

Alvin Toffler wrote a book in 1970 called Future Shock. In it, he described how some people, particularly older folks, seem to suddenly wake up one morning and not recognize the society in which they live. As...

Generally when you hear about a print versus digital debate regarding webcomics, it's putting the "final" formats against one another. Typically, newspaper cartoonists railing against these young upstarts and...

There have been a number of pieces written in the past few weeks discussing the rise of cosplay, and how that has been changing the face of conventions. And what is frequently overlooked is how other factors...

I've been writing columns specifically about webcomics for several years now, so it should come as no surprise that I try to read as many of them as I can. I stopped counting the number of them that I tried to...

FreakSugar's own Steve Ekstrom has made a name for himself doing reporting over at Newsarama, and has been working on a variety of comics projects since he started there, beginning with "Breakfast" from the...

I first became interested in going beyond studying my favorite comics and TV shows, and into the people who become fans of them back in the late 1990s.  Around 2002, I wrote my first paper on the subject. It...

The latest "discussion" rolling through the online comics industry right now centers around how comic conventions have become terrible places for people to actually make money, apparently unless you're the...

The concept of branding is relatively recent in the span of human history. For centuries, if you wanted to buy a horse, you'd talk to some guy like Wilbur Post and buy your horse directly from him. But by the...

Edward Bulwer-Lytton is perhaps most-remembered these days as the author who first wrote, "It was a dark and stormy night" as the opening line of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. Despite the scorn that style of...