Adzine
| Synonyms: | |
| See also: | zine, letterzine |
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An Adzine was a specific kind of non-fiction zine that listed upcoming zines, and zines for sale. The line between reviewzine, letterzine, indexzine and adzine wasn't always fixed: many issues of adzines ran reviews, and some ran letters as well.
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Early Trek adzines
Probably the first letterzine was Scuttlebutt. It considered itself the "bulletin board of Trek." According to Verba, in Boldly Writing, issues ran 15-19 pages, and the copy count varied from 300 to 330 copies. It started out a Trek zine, but even in the first issue, it had a listing for a Starsky & Hutch zine. After 16 issues, in late 1979, Scuttlebutt announced it was quitting, which encouraged two new mm adzines to start up in 1980: Universal Translator and Forum.
Multimedia adzines
Of the two, Universal Translator was definitely a nicer looking zine, with clean layout and professional printing, started by Susan J. Bridges and Rose Marie Jakubjansky, then Linda Deneroff, and Joy Louise, Jeanne Webster, and Mindy Glazer. Issues included current and planned fanzines, announcements, a list of conventions, and fanzine reviews (by its own in-house reviewer, T'Yenta, named after a character in Mindy Glazer's novel Tales of Feldman. UT circulation rose to 700 from an initial run of 300. Carolyn Cooper campaigned and got Universal Translator on the Hugo ballot, though it did not win. Some years it came out more reliably than other years.
The Forum, later renamed Datazine, was published by KathE Donnelly and Joyce Thompson initially, then with the help of Debi Barbich, Susan Crites, and Caro Hedge. It came out reliably, but was less pretty, mostly because it was printed on an early dot-matrix printer. Though it was even more useful than UT, it never got quite the kudos UT did.
Initially, adzines didn't list zines by genre, nor were the K/S fanzines uniquely identified as they were, later, in similar publications. Most of the fanzines listed in both publications were still Star Trek, and most of those were still for a general audience. In late '86, UT and Datazine started using "ST" for non-K/S Star Trel fanzines, and "K/S" for that genre.
By the early '80s, the international section in adzines listed quite a few fanzines from Great Britain, as well as a handful from Australia and Canada. The list of out-of-print fanzines was quite large; this was normal since fanzines often went out of print as fast as editors could publish them.
In 1987, ads for fanzines that year included Star Trek, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Starsky & Hutch, Space: 1999, Blake's Seven, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and M*A*S*H. Many of the announcements of the year included fans selling their old fanzines directly or through auction; out-of-print fanzines in great demand could bring in ten times their original price.
Adzines also carried fannish announcements, including notices when fan writers had professional sales. (One example from UT, issue 15: "Claire Bell is now a professional writer: she has sold her first novel to Atheneum. The novel is called Katha's Creature..." .[1] Editors also wrote in from time to time to explain why they were late in filling orders.
Interstat, one of the longest running Trek zines , started carrying fanzine listings, but dropped them after the first few issues, and became a straight letterzine.[2]
Very few adzines were published into the late 1990s - this had primarily to do with the growing use of the Internet and e-mail as means of fannish communication. The notable exception was the Media Monitor published by Ann T and Darlene F. Media Monitor was a subscription/pay adzine that published from 1993 through 1997. Like many other adzines it contained fanzine listings for multiple fandoms and all genres (slash and gen), along with wanted ads and notifications of fannish events such as conventions. It took a 2 year hiatus in the mid 1990s and returned in 1996, this time including Internet listings such as the first Due South FTP fan fiction site Hexwood, along with information about mailing lists, newsgroups and websites. It also began offering the adzine in electronic format which helped overseas fans who had to pay extra postage. It ceased publication in 1997.
Rise of Agent adzines
When an agent started carrying tens, or even hundreds of different zines, a simple listing of their available zines worked as a adzine. At some point, Bill Hupe and others stopped advertizing in adzines, and just started publishing a list of the zines he was selling. Even now (in 2008), two of the largest listings of available zines on the web are Mysti Frank's Agent With Style listing, and Kathleen Resch's Trek and MM zine listings.
Notable Adzines
- Scuttlebutt (1977)
- Universal Translator (1981)
- Forum 1981
- Datazine 1983
- Not Tonight, Spock had a lot of fanzine listings, though it was really more a letterzine.
- On the Double was a K/S-only adzine/letterzine starting in 1986
- Communications Console started in 1987 by Marion McChesney and Sandy Zier
- Media Monitor by Ann T and Darlene F, multiple fandoms both slash and gen (1992-1997)
References
Categories: Glossary | Fanworks | Zines
