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johnny dangerously's avatar

This is an excellent article, and I really appreciate your deep dive onto the subject. I learned a lot about the histories of different genres, and I agree with your origins of urban fantasy.

One small note, and it's mostly a nitpick -- Alan Moore never wrote Hellblazer, he just created the character John Constantine. The most famous writers of Hellblazer (and there were a lot, the thing ran for 300 issues) are John Delano and Garth Ennis (who also wrote the comics The Boys and Preacher). Moore's John Constantine would be more accurate, he is a prototypical urban fantasy wizard, but when Moore wrote Constantine, he actually appeared in Swamp Thing (which is very much in the mix of horror / southern gothic / urban fantasy you're talking about).

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Rick Waugh's avatar

I appreciate the delineation. One thing to add is that, for the writer, the choice of genre and adherence to the tropes and rules thereof is in large part a marketing decision, as that’s what the genres do in book selling sites -- give readers a way to find the kind of stories they want. You can always write what you want, of course, but if you can’t state what the genre is, and make the readers who love that genre happy, it’s a lot tougher to sell a book.

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