Eltingville As A Meme

If you don't follow me on Twitter -- and I wouldn't blame you if you don't -- the past month or two has been kind of bizarre for me on that site. At the same time that I was trying to ratchet down my involvement on Twitter -- for obvious reasons -- my feed gained over three thousand new followers. And they're not bots. Almost all of them are Eltingville Club fans.  And they're mostly younger people in their late teens and twenties. And many of them are from South America. 

Excuse me???

It sounds like a joke, but it isn't. Eltingville has apparently enjoyed a simmering underground fandom for a few years, owing to the animated Adult Swim pilot. I was aware of some of what was going on through online osmosis -- some fan art and writing, character shipping and that sort of stuff. But I always thought it was a very small contingent. And while it isn't a huge fandom by any means, it isn't quite as small as I figured. 

Here's what happened. The Eltingville Club became a meme on TikTok about two months ago. Yeah, I know. Eltingville? The failed pilot from twenty years ago that aired three or four times in crappy time slots and never had a direct commercial release? Based on the comic that only a few thousand people cared about, collected six years ago to no fanfare and low sales? 

Don't ask me, but it's true. I saw the numbers. People posted Eltingville stuff and Eltingville-related posts/memes got over 5 million hits or views on TikTok. I saw the number on a search and stared at it for like half a minute. It's not a number cartoonists tend to see in any relation whatsoever in regards to their work. I know it means nothing in terms of reach, sales or recognition. Social media only means so much, if followers meant readers and buyers, most folks in comics would be in fairly decent shape, if not actually swimming in it. 

But. Anyway. Yeah. 

The Tiktok stuff spilled over into Twitter after some people posted about the meme (or something like that. I'm not aware of a Tweet Zero or what it was exactly that sparked things off). I became aware of it because my Twitter following started ticking up by the hundreds. Today it stands at nearly 20.200 followers. Which is nuts, because most creators are losing followers post-Musk, and losing reach. I can relate, because I lost over a thousand followers or so after a purge of bots, and after many followers bailed on twitter for reasons that should be obvious. 

So, instead of winding down my Twitter activity, I've been actively engaging with people almost daily. I was getting dozens of questions and comments when things first surged, about the pilot, mostly, but also about the comics. I found out that there's a (relatively) large South American following because of the Spanish language version of the pilot. I learned that there are people making not just fan art but comics and animatics. The image at the top of this post (and how friggin' cool is that?) was done by a fan who is on Twitter (@lightrayrobot) and Tumblr: https://irregularsweater.tumblr.com. They've also done quick animatics of the characters based on the pilot designs. Unreal.

(Above: Twitter post by @LuliPop36, a 20yr old Argentinian follower who read the collection and said: "I HATE THEM SO MUCH YOU HAVE NO IDEA (except jerry))"

I've seen a lot of fan art in the past weeks, not Spider-Man or Sailor Moon-levels, of course, but for these characters it's been pretty overwhelming. I'm still answering questions and getting over 1,000 likes on some Eltingville-related posts. I'm not used to that kind of attention. Not that I'm complaining. The Eltingville HC collection sold out (finally) during the surge of interest, copies of M&C and Dork also sold, things were hopping for a while. If we had more copies we could have done some business. This isn't the way things usually go with a project that's been gathering dust on shelves, and hasn't been revived by news of a Netflix series or a Hulu option or anything like that. it's just a comic and an old pilot, with no new anything in the works. Some young people dredged Eltingville up out of the dollar bin of pop culture history and took it home with them and had a conversation about it. I've never seen anything like it before, none of my work has ever had such a public response before. It's been very gratifying, I have to say.

But still bewildering. The surge has finally died down, two months or so after things started happening. But I'm still fielding questions from viewers and readers on Twitter. People are asking about reviving the cartoon (not happening unless someone with a budget and a studio is a fan), new comics (Eltingville is finished as far as that goes), the chances of a Spanish translation (weirdly, the only translation ever published was in Spain in 2007 -- I sincerely doubt anyone would tackle translating it again), and about the collection getting reprinted in English (watch this space, is all I can say). 

And I'm still getting followers. So I'm not weaning myself off Twitter anytime soon, despite how much it stinks over there on the whole. I'm riding this out as far as it goes, even though I'm not in a position to benefit much from it other than as engaging with the audience. I have no books to sell. I can only assume by the time I do have books to sell, people will have moved on. Who knows? I'm just happy glad this all happened. My publishing career is in a weird place, I don't get invited to conventions or events anymore, the Eltingville wrap-up/collection was something I worked very hard on and was a big disappointment, sales-wise (it's still in the red, even with the sell-out). So this was a nice shot in the arm, emotionally. 

Even as it winds down it continues to be interesting and fun to deal with. I see people posting about the Club, arguing about the Club, using "Eltingville" as an adjective. There are folks talking about the story and the characters in a way that I haven't seen since the Hectic Planet days, people actually invested in the material and the "lore" (as one poster put it). Only all the hectic Planet/Pirate Corp$! feedback was mostly through handwritten letters and conversations at the con table. My work has never generated this kind of attention online (or anywhere) before. And it's The Eltingville Club. 

If you're on Twitter and have any interest in seeing what's being said (and drawn), do a search for "Eltingville" and see what pops up (a lot of it is in Spanish. Bonus, Staten Island bus route information and complaints). I guess you can also just do an online search to see some of this stuff. Jerry has a lot of fans who are rooting for him. isn't that neat? Bill has fans who think they can "fix" him. Isn't that...I don't know exactly what that is. Bill sucks. Bill is poison. God can't fix him, folks.

Whew. Like I said, bewildering. And also, like I said, very gratifying. I intend to enjoy the spot of attention while it lasts, and engage with whoever is interested. I'll be posting some more design work from the pilot here in the coming weeks, as well as scans of the storyboards done by the great Stephen DeStefano (I have the first act in xerox form, but have the original boards for the other two acts). I unboxed all that stuff last week and found some cut material from the pilot that I had forgotten about. I also found the WB Superman and Batman animation model packs, as well as the Simpsons character guide/color guides we were sent by Bongo while working on the Treehouse of Horror comic where I tried to fit in/kill as many characters from the show as I could). I'll be dipping into some of that material here as well. 

Fingers crossed the scanner doesn't burn out.