The Fanzine Book and thoughts on fanzine 'golden ages'
Several books have previously anthologised articles first published in Doctor Who fanzines but never before has a comprehensive history of the Doctor Who fanzines scene been attempted, until now. Published by Telos Publishing late last year, The Fanzine Book by Dr Alistair McGown is a lavish hardback pictorial history of the phenomenon of Doctor Who fanzines. It includes a foreword by prolific fanzine scribe Martin Wiggins and an afterword by Chris Chibnall, who is one of several people to dabble with fanzines in their youth and later work on the revived Doctor Who.
For the uninitiated I should explain that fanzines were amateur magazines made by fans, for fans. They were driven by love, not money, and came in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Often their reproduction was crude and their release schedules erratic, but fanzines thrived on enthusiasm and fan cooperation, even when their circulations were tiny. Fanzines gave a voice to fandom before the internet and, like the internet which came to replace them, they provided a forum for the best and the worst of fandom.
In his exploration of fanzines, McGown restricts himself to the time period of the mid-1960s, when fan publishing activity started in a modest capacity, to the end of the original run of Doctor Who in 1989. In the book’s subtitle and text, McGown labels this period the ‘golden age’ for fanzines, which is a concept I’ll return to later. He also limits himself to titles published in the UK, although mention is made of a few from the far shores of New Zealand, Australia and North America.
Physically, this book is a thing of beauty, with well-laid out text and hundreds of fanzine covers reproduced to illustrate the breadth of fan creativity displayed by fanzine culture. From that angle my only criticism is that I would have liked to have seen more images of fanzines’ internal pages to illustrate their visual realisation away from their covers, with the book containing only two such examples. I note that where blocks of article text are seen in the images (i.e. more than just headlines) the images are reproduced at such a size as to render the text illegible. This is due to copyright, as McGown explains:
“It’s all about being reasonable within copyright law. We felt this was ‘fair use’. I’m writing hundreds of thousands of words of social history here (and some critical material assessing the art, design and production), so the use of cover images to illustrate that history seems reasonable. If you start reproducing people’s articles and artwork from inside the fanzines, there’s no way you can claim fair use and reproduce that stuff without permission from the authors/artists. So that’s the prosaic reasoning there.”
I will include a few insights such as this from McGown as I asked him to preview this article to pick me up on any factual errors and to verify or refute certain assumptions I had made, which he has kindly done.
McGown’s text is cogent and readable, although the abundance of exclamation marks in the first chapter is mildly irksome. Happily, this epidemic soon passes. After a chapter covering the years 1965-75, in which fanzine activity was limited, each chapter is devoted to a single year. Whilst tidy and logical, this does mean that the early chapters make for brisk reading whereas later ones, covering the busiest periods in fanzine history, become a little unwieldy. Perhaps some of these would have benefited from division. However, good use is made of subheadings within chapters to break up long blocks of text and provide convenient stopping points mid-chapter. Box-outs covering such tangents or apocrypha as the official Doctor Who Magazine and the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS)’s annual fanzine poll results, also help keep things lively.
I found this a slow read in places as McGown’s references to certain fanzines caused me to put down the book to dig out my copy of the relevant issues to reacquaint myself with them. On that count, the book has been a great success in reigniting my own passion for fanzines, which had diminished somewhat after my own bruising attempt at running one a decade or so ago (too little, too late). I rather regret having parted with so many old fanzines from my collection when funds were tight some years ago, as I’d love to peruse them again now.
The text does get a little catalogue-y at times; whilst it was great to be reminded, or informed for the first time, of certain articles, I don’t think it was necessary to list quite so much of the contents of the fanzines covered. Articles giving new perspectives or interviews with rare subjects are worthy of mention, but we don’t need to know about every review of then-recent stories, for example, information which quickly becomes repetitive given that such reviews filled a large portion of many 1980s fanzines.
McGown has clearly undertaken extensive research – and over many years, man and boy. He has been immersed in the world of fanzines since the age of 12, he explains, with his contributions to the scene starting at 13, and that experience informs his writing. He has also amassed his own vast collection of fanzines and consulted those of other collectors. But perhaps most impressive is the wealth of historic information he has derived from his new interviews with the editors of a variety of fanzines from the period in question. Sadly, some editors have died and some are uncontactable, but McGown has managed to track down and speak to a good number of pivotal figures from this period of fan activity. This is a particular highlight of the book.
Yet, on that point, there is one thing missing for me. The text can be dry, concentrating on the what, when and how of fanzine production (though I found the how – the often-antiquated methods of duplication – particularly fascinating), to the partial neglect of the why. Some fanzine editors and contributors interviewed do comment on their motivations, but I would have liked to hear more about this – particularly in the peak period of fanzine activity when it seemed every fan was making their own fanzine. Why start a new fanzine rather than contribute to an existing one? What did the editors think they could bring to the scene that others were not doing? What did they expect to achieve with their fanzines – and did they? At times we do get some of these insights but I would have liked more of them to illuminate the (presumably) diverse human stories behind the diversity of fanzines.
At times I felt that McGown lent too heavily into the history and internal politics of the DWAS. However, I must acknowledge that the DWAS was a major producer of fanzines for many years and the Society’s organisation and personnel were key to the changing directions of their work in this field, so it did form an important part of the overall story. To provide context, McGown quotes the changing membership numbers of the Society (peaking well above 3,000 in the mid-1980s) which serves to illustrate that – until DWB hit its stride towards the end of the decade – they had a reach vastly greater than that of any other fanzine publisher. Nevertheless, I feel the more exciting fanzine stories came from the independent fringes of fan activity where there was no need to placate the BBC, even if these titles typically had little impact on wider fandom due to their usually small circulations.
On that note, one of the most fascinating areas into which McGown shines a light concerns the various attempts the Doctor Who production office or other parts of the BBC made to suppress certain fanzines, or at least certain fanzine practices. I had heard this obliquely referred to before but it was always somewhat mysterious what power they had to suppress independent publications. They could have pursued legal action on the basis of copyright infringement against most fanzines, if they had wished to do so, as fanzines more often honoured copyright law in the breach than in the observance, but strictly speaking that was the limit of their legal power.
This nuclear option never came to pass and McGown explains that other, more underhand, tactics were used. Primarily this was applying pressure on comics shops that stocked fanzines to refuse shelf space to the offending titles, creating an inevitable (and massive) dent in their sales, or prohibiting the DWAS from printing the proscribed fanzines’ adverts. As the official fan club, the DWAS could not refuse such a direct instruction, and – as the book makes clear – for the majority of fanzines, adverts in the DWAS’s Celestial Toyroom newsletter were a primary conduit for sales.
On a related note, I was fascinated by the explanation of the economics of the big name A4 ‘glossies’ at the end of the 1980s and how reliant they were on comics shop sales to support the high outlay involved in their production – hence the death of Proteus when shop interest dropped following the cancellation of the series. To those of us who primarily purchased our fanzines by mail order, such a sudden disappearance of a successful title seemed inexplicable, but once the role of the comics shop is explained, it suddenly makes sense.
The book concludes with a listing of all fanzines from the period in question. This is a work of true diligence and determination. Fanzines must be one of the hardest of beasts to catalogue as they would often change their names or merge with, or split from, other fanzines, or cease publication and restart years later, and there were several instances of duplicate fanzine and editor names within fandom. It takes a brave soul to try to untangle and codify such a mess. I picture McGown like Ghost Light’s Light, losing his mind over the constant evolution of the subjects he attempts to pin down in a single immutable state. Such an exercise is surely impossible, and to his credit McGown does not claim it to be a complete listing, which would make him a hostage to fortune. He estimates it is around 97% complete but, even so, there will surely be few people who could prove an omission.
The point I would dispute with McGown is his conception of a ‘golden age’ of fanzines. He defines this loosely as the 1970s and ‘80s. In terms of the critical period for fanzine development, the importance of this time period cannot be denied. It also encompasses the period of the greatest abundance of fanzines, with fanzine production reaching its peak around the mid-1980s, having been spurred on by celebrations of Doctor Who’s twentieth anniversary in 1983. However, this makes no allowance for quality. If I had to name a ‘golden age’ of fanzines, it would be the 1990s, when I started reading them. This period falls outside the scope of McGown’s text, but he does give it brief but fascinating coverage in an epilogue.
Although my position is influenced by nostalgia, I also feel that the 1990s saw a significant increase in quality, even as the actual numbers of fanzines reduced. Although some fans drifted away from Doctor Who in these ‘wilderness years’ after the original series had ended, the fanzine scene became more creative and fervent in the absence of new episodes. McGown’s text well illustrates that throughout the life of the original series, fanzines were filled with reviews of new episodes, interviews (often brief) with those who regularly worked on the show, and, in some cases at least, reports of studio visits. With these avenues cut off, fanzines filled the void with in-depth analysis of older episodes and more esoteric (to my mind, more interesting) content.
For most fans for much of McGown’s ‘golden age’, access to Doctor Who was quite limited, even as new episodes were regularly screened. Most episodes could be viewed only once on transmission. There were audio recordings and later, in the 1980s, video recordings, and some lucky fans had access to bootleg copies of old episodes, but this was far from universal. This meant that coverage of older stories in fanzines had limited sources to draw upon. Half-memory, nostalgia and the Target book retellings filled the knowledge gap, creating myths and misunderstandings along the way; arguably, that was part of the fun.
Across the 1990s, the BBC’s official video releases put nearly every existing episode into the public domain, and other avenues of research opened up – from reliable sources for soundtracks of all missing episodes to BBC archive paperwork. Meanwhile, the advance of technology, particularly early image manipulation and desktop publishing software, made amateur publishing easier and slicker. All this meant that whilst fandom may have shrunk with the series off-air, it had a greater ability to re-view and critique older episodes and respond to them in creative ways both written and visual.
This was seen in the fanzines of the time, such Skaro (vol. 5) and the later issues of Matrix. Even fanzines which did not embrace new technology were able to explore the series in freewheeling style, unfettered by any worries of what the production office might say or any obligation to concentrate on new episodes. See, for example, prolific editor John Connors’ Faze, which maintained an anarchic photocopied A5 rough-and-ready quality with a fun mix of the serious and the very, very silly. Inevitably, this is where I came in as a 16-year-old schoolboy, keen to contribute to fanzines. For several years I submitted, and sometimes even had printed, my terrible writing.
The internet took over as the home of fandom around the late 1990s and consequently most fanzines faded away, although a few (atypical) examples have clung on. This leaves us with a conveniently decade-sized slice of exciting, invigorating fanzine history spanning the 1990s before the terminal phase was truly reached. The 1990s were a ‘golden age’ of fanzines – for some of us at least. The apparent death of the series in 1989 didn’t deter us but only made us more creative and more invested in the subject, and compared with the 1980s (and earlier) we had much greater resources with which to explore the show and to express ourselves in print.
A handful of 1990s fanzines, including Matrix, Circus and the aforementioned final volume of Skaro, build upon and bettered anything published in the previous decades in terms of the quality of writing, analysis and general creativity. And then there were the boundary-pushing adult-orientated zines, like Auton, Pickled in Time and Shaven Stunners, which went places no fanzine would have dared to go when the BBC was keeping an eye on the market. McGown covers these titles in his epilogue but relegates them to what he calls the ‘silver age’.
I put this argument to McGown and it transpires that my initial assumption that his classification of the ‘golden age’ was motivated in part by nostalgia was inaccurate. He is just as much a fan of 1990s fanzines as I am and his reason for excluding them from his ‘golden age’ is largely pragmatic. He explains:
“I’d probably agree the ‘90s fanzines are the best and most interesting but I’d suggest not interesting to write about at length/depth unless you interrogate every feature – and that would make for a book even more niche than this one! That is why my ‘golden age’ sticks to the pioneering time the show was originally on air - you can tell the story in parallel with the fanzines’ reaction to the times.”
Regards his ‘golden age’, he adds:
“It’s not meant to be a value judgment. Really it’s another way of saying ‘Never mind the quality, feel the width.’ In 1984/85 you had around 70-80 different titles produced a year. By the mid-1990s you had a handful of (maybe a dozen?) absorbing, interesting and iconoclastic titles in a year. Yes, their contents were probably more clever and original and exciting than the lists and reviews of the ‘70s and early ‘80s but there was less of a scene around and, as I said, no TV show to tie in current events to and give you a handy background narrative. That amorphous period is better covered in [Paul] Cornell’s [1997 book] Licence Denied and I had little interest in going over that ground again.”
McGown leaves me with only one argument, and that is that his use of the terms ‘golden age’ and ‘silver age’ implies a hierarchy of quality or interest that he doesn’t intend. McGown points out to me that his terms are borrowed from the comic books community, in which they refer to time periods, not quality, but that reference was not clear from the book’s text. I understand McGown’s explanation was cut from the book for space reasons, which is a shame. Finally, McGown makes the perfectly reasonable observation that a book needs a “headline title” and his ‘golden age’ reference certainly functions well in that respect.
For all my nit-picking above, and misunderstanding around the intent behind the term ‘golden age’, I do want to emphasise how much I enjoyed The Fanzine Book and will surely enjoy revisiting it time and again. It’s an astonishing feat of research, diligence, dedication and – I don’t think I’m overselling it – love for the subject on the part of Dr McGown. It won’t appeal to all fans; I can see some newer fans with little interest in those dark pre-internet days of fandom, or the longer-in-the-tooth set who found fanzines too grungy and obscure for their tastes, finding little to tempt them. But if you were ever part of the fanzine scene, or have merely heard about it and want to explore those long-ago dark ages of fandom, this should be an essential purchase.
The Fanzine Book can be purchased from its publisher, Telos, here.