The thing is, if fans start taking money for fanfic, then there would be much greater incentive on the part of copyright owners to stomp on them with cease and desist orders. Even if they're fine with fanfic in principle, if money is involved, they have to protect their copyright or risk losing it.

You're right; I really hadn't thought that through all the way. I guess that was my gut-level (or knee-jerk) reaction to the mediocrity of the comics.

This has caused some odd arguments where some newbie fan runs across the concept of print fanzines and has a hissy fit because OMG money changes hands.

Huh. I read in the NY Times recently that printed fanzines undergoing something something of a resurgence.

I have heard that in some fandoms the concept of commissioning fic the way you might commission fan art is starting to pop up, so maybe this is changing.

Is money changing hands re: fanart? I've commissioned that banner from comlodge but of course she was doing it as a freebie; and I tend to think of "prompts" in the same way. It's an interesting idea - or at the very least, maybe we need to re-examine our power as fans and the "ownership" of intellectual properties? (Copyright law has metastasized out of all proportion anyway; it started because Charles Dickens and other authors were seeing their novels printed in the US but getting absolutely no money for it; now it's a device to ensure that the big corporations have their properties - Mickey Mouse and such - safeguarded into perpetuity.)

My personal opinion is that people who pay Mark to squee incoherently are wasting their money,

*LOL* I looked at his site once or twice a year ago and just didn't see the appeal. Especially the OMWF post, which was simply a video pointed at his face as he "reacted" to the episode. Oh PUH-LEEZ.

But it doesn't work for demons overall.

Exactly. And it's because IMHO they are "borrowing" the issues for drama's sake rather than actually make a coherent point about them. But then a lot of shows do this. Or they have the one "racism is bad!" episode (I'm looking at you, Crossing Jordan) but they repeat some of the same old tropes and undermine their point: White people coming to the rescue of black people, etc etc. (Crossing Jordan was funny because the show takes place in Boston - when my partner lived in the midst of city-wide race riots and severe racial tensions - but for the episode about racism the characters go down to Mississippi because, clearly, racism only happens "down South". *headdesk*

BtVS's scorecard on racial issues was Not Good.

Yeah, MASSIVE fail on that one.