More on fanzines

" .. the kind you find in a second hand strore"

Rasberry Berret - Prince

The British Library runs an interesting site on Fanzines at http://www.bl.uk/collections/britirish/modbrizines.html. I was interested to learn there more about a genre called Women's Zines: "Women's zines are generally independent small-circulation self-published magazines and are characterised by a striking do-it-yourself aesthetic and attitude. They are diverse, covering topics from music, art, politics, parenting, ethnicity, sexuality, class issues, religion, feminism and much more. Distributed at concerts, record shops, and at ladyfests, weekend music and discourse festivals devoted to women performers, they complement and derive from the punk-related feminist rock music scene, particularly the Riot Grrrl movement with its immediate origins in the early 1990s music scene of British Columbia, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest of the United States." I remember meeting Karren Ablze, probably not her real name, at some 90s womens punk concerts where she used to hawk a great womens' music zine called Ablaze. I wonder what happened to her?

Lew Stringer http://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2007/10/who-says-comics-fanzines-are-dead.html has written a nice blog entry about modern comics fanzines: "The glory days of numerous self-published comics fanzines may reside in the 1970s and 1980s but the internet hasn't completely killed off these labours of love. At the Birmingham International Comics Show a few weeks ago I picked up two titles that dedicate themselves to two sometimes neglected areas of comics; classic British weeklies and Fifties horror comics." This is ineteresting reading for everyone who wonders about alternatives to Web 2.0. The social networking that comes from hawking a fanzine is incredible (I met some of my best friends through the old comics and punk fanzine culture). It is like playing a gig verses distributing tunes via the YouTube. Both have their place but the web should offer an alternative not the whole enchalada.

There is a good article on how much fanzines can be worth at http://downthetubescomics.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-much-is-fanzine-worth.html. Amazingly the one on the right is going for £325.00. But as Butch Hancock once sang "Who can put a price on what you learn, baby what's it worth to you?".

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".