Fanzines: How to communicate your pleasures to other people

News Media Commentary
Title:	Fanzines: How to communicate your pleasures to other people
Commentator:	Robert Fulford
Date(s):	February 17, 1973
Venue:	Toronto Star
Fandom:	Zine Fandom
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Fanzines: How to communicate your pleasures to other people was a article in the Toronto Star about fanzines. It talks a little about what a fanzine is, the history of the fanzine, comics zine fandom, and mentions a few Canadian fanzines that were available at the time, including Le Beaver from Montreal, Osfic of Toronto, and Melting Pot of Calgary.

Excerpts

Fanzines are a phenomenon of modern culture, a kind of folk art of mass man. Fanzines started, so far as I can learn, in the 1950s. "Fanzine" is a word compounded of "fan" and "magazine," but a fanzine is definitely not a fan mag- azine. A fan magazine is written for fans while a fanzine is written by fans. The writers of fan magazines are usually hacks, working for mon- ey. The writers of fanzines are usually true believers, working for love.

In the old days sci-fi was an esoteric art form, scorned by the establishment and the mass media alike: To admit you took it serious- ly was to brand yourself some kind of nut. Devotees, therefore, found it necessary to cling together for mor- al support. The fanzine was their method of doing so.

But, two things did come through:

(1) Cultural ambition. Like jazz fans, figure skaters and devil-wor- shippers, the editors of fanzines want it known that their hobby is just as important as anybody's and is to be taken seriously at all times.

(2) A sense of community. Fan- zine people, like many of us, find that the ordinary community around them doesn't sufficiently satisfy their needs. So they create, as many others do, a national and international community of scholars and devotees and would-be artists, through which they can develop a system of energy-exchange which gives them pleasure. That's why I call it a folk art.

A certain privacy, of course, is central to the whole thing-and per- haps I've violated this simply by saying they exist. Certainly enthu- siasts of this kind depend heavily on the fact that only a few people know what they know. One special- ized fanzine, the Tolkien Journal, published at Belknap College in New Hampshire, recently comment- ed on Tolkien's now broad populari- ty in these words: "Middle-earth is not our private preserve any more. It has become too visible, and some people are as dismayed by the fact as they would be by an invasion of orcs."