The Fanzine Book (Alistair McGown) Telos Publishing
01/08/2023 Telos Publishing UK
Product Description:
Long before social media – a time before YouTube channels, podcasts and Twitter – the only way a generation of Doctor Who fans could find their voice was to produce a fanzine. Following in the slipstream of mid-1970s punk rock music fanzines, for a decade or two it seemed anyone with a shaky old typewriter and buckets of enthusiasm was putting together their own amateur magazines filled with news, reviews, interviews, convention reports, fan fiction, artwork and comic strips. Schoolkids and students alike manfully struggled with sheets of rub-down Letraset, correction fluid, cow gum, hand-cranked duplicators and overheating photocopiers to try their luck at becoming fan publishing press barons. Some sold dozens of copies, others sold thousands.
This was the only platform fans of the time had to praise, criticise and share opinions on their favourite show, largely uncensored and unbound, sometimes controversially so and running into trouble with the BBC and the Doctor Who producers of the era; Philip Hinchcliffe, Graham Williams and John Nathan-Turner.
Covering UK fandom’s earliest beginnings in the 1960s, through to the ‘golden age’ of the 1970s and 1980s, several hundred different fanzine titles are documented, discussed and displayed in this fully-illustrated coffee-table hardback, from hand-stapled newsletters to full colour, professionally-printed magazines. It includes everything from Aggedor, The Animus and Ark in Space to Zygon, Zodin and Zeiton-7 and covers fondly-remembered classics including Celestial Toyroom, TARDIS, The Doctor Who Review, Gallifrey, Matrix, Skaro, Shada, Frontier Worlds, The Frame, Private Who and the best-selling but outspoken Doctor Who Bulletin.
From tiny acorns do mighty oaks grow and these fanzines included the first published work by many Doctor Who writers and artists of the future – many of them going onto comic strips, books, audios, Doctor Who Magazine and even the revived TV show itself, with at least one future showrunner helping run a local group newsletter of the 1980s!
With an Afterword by Doctor Who showrunner and writer Chris Chibnall, and a Foreword by the Master of fanzine writing Martin Wiggins, plus contributions and comment from many of the editors, publishers and writers who were there, this is the definitive look at the UK Doctor Who fanzine phenomenon and how it chronicled everything from the highs of the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker years, to 1983’s Longleat 20th anniversary event, to 1985’s cancellation crisis, to the show’s quiet demise in 1989.
Writer and researcher Alistair McGown – whose own first published work appeared in The Highlander fanzine in 1985, aged 13 – celebrates the fascinating story of the underground Doctor Who press in this latest slice of publishing history from Telos.
REF: ISBN 978-1-84583-220-9OP: £39.99 pb