Showing posts with label punk rock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label punk rock. Show all posts

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.