Some people of a certain and more decrepit age bracket may remember a day not that long ago when there was no Internet. No blogs. No forums. It was actually a time that seems Medieval but was really not far into the past that our world existed in this primitive fashion. I remember when video games at the little pizza place run by George from Greece (later busted for selling LSD along with his excellent pepperoni pizzas) jumped from Atari ping pong and the slow moving cowboy shootout thing to Space Invaders and then to Gallaga. But even then when the whole technological world seemed to transforming at a ludicrous pace there was still no Internet or blogging and people had only one option for reading and learning: holding a book or magazine in their hands and looking at it. Many people now may not realize what a luxury being able to sign up to a place like WordPress or Blogger really is. You can sign up for an account and then have a film blog up and going in a matter of a few minutes. And you can reach some sort of reading audience. Here at the Uranium Café I am proud to get about 1500 to 2000 hits a day on average. At my other blog, Necrotic Cinema, I only get maybe 15 to 20. I cannot figure that out. The Café is hosted and WordPress based and I spent some considerable time figuring out sitemaps and SEO plug-ins for it. It gets promoted on Google, but my Google based Blogger blog does not really do much even though the same brilliant mind is behind both sites. Well what do these numbers  matter to me when at one time my dream to self-publish a ‘zine’. Sometimes called fanzines, or zines for short, these were usually short little booklets that were basically the size of typing paper (maybe folded in half), Xeroxed off (sometimes on a Xerox machine at some one’s job) and hurriedly stapled together. They were almost always only black and white and full of hard to correct typos. You had to type it right the first time or use loads of white out. The themes were usually about off the wall films or bands no one had ever heard of and that did not get much coverage in the more mainstream music magazines of the day. Hit Parader or Circus just did not cover The Cramps or The Dead Kennedys.

Zines typically had an extremely limited readership. They may have even been given away free at local record stores or comic book shops rather than sold. While the appearance of the zines were often crude the material on the inside was as well researched as you could get at the time. Remember there was no Internet to do the research on. No IMDB. People had to try to find printed material on people Lucio Fulci or Barbara Steele any way they could. And getting a hold of images was tough too. I have no problems now either finding images on the net or capturing them from an AVI file. We can all create images from a film now that no one else has published if we want. In the days of the zine people relied on images already long published in magazines. Some images have now become rather iconographic in nature because of the sheer number of times they have been reproduced first in magazines and then in fanzines and fan styled poster art. The more successful of the zines were able to advertise in the back of some sort of near underground type magazine or comic book. You had to  mail order them and I used to have a small collection of cool little fanzines I had ordered from the back of magazines. Magazines like Psychotronic Video Magazine had loads of cool ads. I think that is where I saw the ad for The Betty Pages (later the Bettie Pages) and managed to get every single copy at one time simply by ordering them and then waiting by the mail box for a couple weeks. Maybe some readers remember these days.

I have a small little collection of old zines in digital format and thought I might share some samples here once in a while. Here are some pages from a zine called Video Voice. Published by Tim Paxton and Dave Toderello out of Oberlin Ohio it is a little more polished looking than many fanzines and sported a, by then standards, hefty price of $3. It has a nice layout and even has some advertising. There are some pages here with small reviews of some horror/cult films and they are pretty good in my opinion. Mind you I love the net and that I have a couple movie blogs people actually check out and that I even belong to a sort of blogging community where I have some sort of reputation. I doubt that would have ever happened if I had created and published my own paper fanzine and tried to distribute it. I have now learned to manipulate the net and I can get all sorts of groovy things for free. But in the end they are all ‘digital things’. JPEGS. MP3s. PDFs. AVIs and MPEGs. And that is all cool too. But there was really something almost magic about ordering some grainy little pulp zine from the back of Film Threat Magazine or some of those Jim Steranko publications I forget the name of now and then having it arrive in your mailbox in a drab manila envelop and laying back with some chips and dip and reading it and smelling the paper as you turned the pages. I have enough material here to make this a regular category so expect more in the future.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Comic Books and Magazines, Fanzines and Independent Press . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.