Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jhonen Vasquez

Nostalgia can be a soft trap, but Vasquez uses it like a scalpel: a quick look back at “old emails” becomes a census of who comics were for, who found them, and how fandom ages in public. The detail is doing the work. He doesn’t say “my audience was older”; he remembers the floor: “15 or 16,” then “20’s and 30’s.” That specificity signals an era when discovering an underground-ish cartoonist meant you were old enough to be unsupervised online, literate in irony, and maybe a little hungry for art that didn’t talk down to you.

The subtext is an oblique comment on how the internet changed the intake valve of culture. Early web fandom was narrower, self-selecting, and frictionful: you had to seek things out, write an email, risk looking earnest. Vasquez’s medium (comics) and his brand (dark, abrasive, adolescent-in-the-best-way) suggest he’s clocking a shift from “fans” as peers or near-peers to “fans” as a much younger, algorithm-delivered demographic. It’s also a quiet meditation on time: the artist ages, the work remains frozen, and the audience keeps cycling. That can feel flattering, eerie, or both.

There’s an implied ethics question tucked inside the age range: what kind of relationship did creators and fans have when the audience skewed older, and what changes when it skews younger? Vasquez frames it as simple recollection, but it lands as a cultural before-and-after snapshot: pre-social media intimacy, post-social media scale.