Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2022: Week 21
Angel in the Dark is a 144-page slash Professionals Bodie/Doyle novel by Thomas. The novel is well known for its dark themes, lyrical writing and innovative combination of art and text together at a time when more and more fanzines were eliminating interior art due to the advent of personal desktop word processing.
The cover artwork won a 1997 Huggy Award for Best Zine Illo or Cover.
In the early 2010s, the zine was scanned into PDF format, and with Thomas' permission, offered to readers on Archive of Our Own without the art, which is by Suzan Lovett. However, in 2017 the work was removed by AO3's Policy & Abuse team as a "non-fanwork" due to not containing the text of the work itself but rather an external link to a PDF file. This led to substaintial wider discussion about preservation of zine fiction, AO3's mission to preserve fanworks, and the barriers that surround the documentation of paper zines and fanworks.
Angel in the Dark was later restored to AO3 in HTML format.