ABSTRACT
Fandom is an increasingly popular area of audience study. Although fanzines have been around since the 1940s, it is only with the development of cheaper technology and the development of a new wave of fanzines such as those associated with the punk movement and football (such as the fanzine When Saturday Comes), that the idea of fans as something worthy of critical study has taken hold. Many early ideas about fans saw them as ‘obsessives’, ‘anoraks’ or ‘geeks’, whose obsessive interest in a particular cultural object was cultivated to hide or make up for their social inadequacy.
