I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost, because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home, a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture, writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books.

Smith is reflecting on how early “fan culture” habits—letter columns in comics, writing to magazines, and other pre-digital forms of participation—prepared a generation to thrive once the internet arrived. The quote frames the web not as the origin of fandom but as an accelerant: it lowered barriers to finding like-minded people, sharing commentary, and producing amateur criticism or fiction. Implicitly, he’s also describing a continuity between analog and digital communities: the same impulse to connect, debate, and create simply gained speed and reach online. Coming from a filmmaker closely associated with comic-book and pop-culture communities, the remark highlights how participatory culture shaped both audiences and creators.