Saturday, September 13, 2008

Fanzines


"Let's go crazy" - Prince (get it?)


My first experiance of self publishing, which was a distant precursor to this blog, was a fanzine called Planet, which was printed by my mother Shirely Slimane. She worked long and hard on that!

In those days we used Gestetner duplicating printers. A recent visit to Comics Kingdom in Syndey took me right back to the era. There were some fanzines from back in the day. It is amazing that they have survived over thirty years.
The picture at the top of the page is of Bemusing, which was a great fanzine published by Martin Lock. I have a soft spot in my memory for The Comics Times (published by Asher Rospigliosi back when we called him Pel) and the works of Paul Hudson (later emporer of Comics Showcase in Covent Garden and Oxford and now a postman), Guy Lawley and Nick Niocholas. There was also an interesting chap called Andy Polaris who went onto be the singer in the great forgotten band Animal Nightlife (he and his mates were the generation just after us who went around comic conventions dressed rather stylishly as Rick Deckard from Blade Runner when we still dressed like Shane McGowan without the class). In the words of my old mate Si Spannavich "all those blokes came good".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like it. I love that emergent technology stuff, and the epoch when professional publishing tools became widespread enough to allow non-professionals to gain access saw a flowering in creativity. I am thinking both of the burgeoning comic book scene, and the 'do it yourself' ethos of punk.
I was part of an enjoyable debate regarding how much of that ethos can aid educators today, in the Edupunk at fringe (F)ALT-C, in Leeds last week. Steve Wheeler has his Edupunk presentation on Slideshare
.

I blog about it here