Go, Read: Milton Griepp Enthuses Over Steven Grant Column On 1970s Madison-Area Fandom Gatherings This article about finding a Steven Grant-written piece from 1973 on University of Wisconsin students meeting up to share their fan interests is one of the longer pieces not straight-up analysis that I can remember Milton Griepp writing and then posting at his ICv2.com site. I can't speak to the cultural significance of this kind of thing in terms of dates and firsts, but I imagine what Grant documented is a time when there were enough people with these interests that they could gather together in Madison, Wisconsin as opposed to simply writing letters or maybe meeting someplace like New York. One thing to remember about the generation of fans-turned-pros like Griepp and Grant (and Groth and Evanier and Gruenwald and so on) is that their early social experiences seem on retrospect like fairly intense ones and something that went a long way in driving some of these folks -- some -- to make a life near comics even when there weren't more direct career prospects available to them. You could argue that something like the early days of Fantagraphics was one of these fan meetings that Steven Grant describes, only one with a specific focus and that didn't end. As much as I'm suspicious of overplaying the modern social element in making comics as it sometimes diverts attention from the art, it's clear that this continues to be a big part of why people participate.
