December meme: Zines

dorinda requested:

please talk about fanzines! For instance, maybe the first time you discovered them, your relationship to them, what you liked/didn't like about them, specific zines that might come to mind that were particularly good/interesting (or not)...just anything about zines that you care to share.

Oh, zines. <3

I may have seen them around earlier (probably did, in fact), but I discovered zines in the mid-80s. I was at an SF con, probably Boskone, and was in a dealer's room -- she didn't have space in the main Dealer's Room, she was selling out of a hotel room, and she had lots of zines. I was poking around, sort of vaguely interested but not enough to shell out any money; I was sadly too indoctrinated into the SF world's then-snobby response to media fandom, despite being at heart a media fan myself.

Then I hit the box marked with the strong, clear K/S on the top, and reached my hand in to poke around in there like I had everything else. I was in my early 20s, and looked like I was in my mid-teens, and the woman who owned everything (and who I suspect had been keeping a wary eye on me as I wandered toward the slash box) instantly asked if I knew what the slash meant. I didn't; she told me. My eyes went round, my eyebrows went up, and I held out my spending money for the weekend and asked her how much that would get me.

Seriously, nothing like discovering slash and zines basically at the same time. The money let me buy six zines, I think, all K/S, and I read them over and over again for the next several years. There were a few Naked Times, and a Daring Attempt, and maybe a couple As I Do Thees, and I thought they were the greatest things I'd ever read.

I was in college at the time, and didn't want to risk more issues coming to me either at the dorm or at my parents' place, so I just hoarded those few zines and hoped to find more at another SF con -- but I never saw that dealer again, and I don't think anyone else ever brought any, either. (Really, the mindset against media-fandom stuff was hard to break past back then.)

So technically I was reading zines in the zine heyday. But I was never part of zine culture; never wrote a LOC, never tribbed, never even wrote to a publisher asking for more, or for a flyer. Then I got online almost a decade later and discovered media fandom and realized I was home. <3 Online fanfic was amazing, but I still loved my zines, and when I got into Due South, I started buying everything I could.

This was a kinda dicey proposition; especially early on, almost everyone I ordered from was in the UK or Australia, and there was no Paypal then. I wrapped up cash carefully and sent it off, hoping to get a zine back. And I did, and they were fantastic. When I started buying from US publishers, I could use checks, and I wrote them religiously. For the next several years, I was buying zines as often as I could -- new, used, whatever -- and borrowing/swapping zines around with a bunch of people. DS, Pros, Starsky and Hutch, multi-media, Quantum Leap, Alias Smith and Jones, Sentinel, Ladyhawke, Robin of Sherwood, Equalizer, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, you name it.

I loved online fic and devoured it, but there was just something about holding a whole book of stories in your hands - especially if you'd tribbed to it. Which I didn't do often, but there were a few! So my collection grew. I was particularly determined to have a good Pros collection; so much good Pros fic was in zines, and the lists talked about them regularly. You could get really good recommendations just by hanging out on the list and watching the convos; you could figure out whose tastes aligned with yours, and whose tastes were exactly opposite to yours. You could also write to the list and say you wanted to order some zines, you liked x and y stories by a and b authors, what should you be looking for? And people would give you a list of things that would probably appeal to you. Fantastic resource, Pros fandom back then.

Anyway, so, I bought hundreds of zines over a few years. I loved them; I waxed enthusiastic about them to anyone who'd listen. But then somewhere in the very early '00s, I stopped buying so many, and then tailed off very fast into basically not buying any at all. ( It was a combination of things )

( Some of my keepers )

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Full request list here, still open!

(ETA: Wow, I feel like this is really disjointed and odd. I totally ran out of time. Sorry! If I wind up with empty slots maybe I'll take another stab at this...)