Friday, November 2, 2012

My blog as an 80s fanzine

Totally late to the party on this one, but I love the concept so much...


"Your last 5 blogposts are the contents of a gaming zine you wrote single-handedly in the 1980s, photocopied on the local library photocopier or via indulgence of an office-working parent and sold on to around a dozen people at a loss. This zine has the same title as your blog. Invent an issue number and cover price."


Here is an issue of Codex Apocrypha, found in a shoe box after a tire fire in Oakland, California.

Okay, so I went a little overboard. I went with a more classical "Arduin" look and as someone who worked in a copy shop many years ago, I saw many a fanzine get wrapped up in that heavy parchment cardstock. It was a bitch to fold and staple on the spine.

Before I read all the stipulations, I banged this out - 
Because, a zine with a free cassette or flexi (remember those?) AND an 8 page mini-dungeon would have blown my 12 year old mind.

There's a scene toward the end of the great film "SLC Punk" where the two protagonists are shown, in flashback, as D&D playing, 2112 listening, basement-dwelling nerds. I always bristled at that. D&D and punk rock could live happily together, but I was just as guilty. When, I discovered punk rock and girls (and punk rock girls especially) I found myself drifting away from graph paper and d20s and towards 7" records and demo tapes. 

I actually did a couple fanzines in my younger days - "Splatterpunk Diary", "Dashi No Gondo", "Plastic Persimmon Journal of Poetry and Thai Kickboxing", etc. But most of them were the sort of Aaron Cometbus, self-confessional zines that kids did before we had Livejournal - lots of blurry, high contrast photos of people, poetry written in markers, stick figure obscenity, etc, just like tumblr is now.

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