The Conspiracy

Zine
Title:	The Conspiracy
Publisher:	Cheryl Maier & Lucy Cribb
Editor(s):
Date(s):	1981
Series?:
Medium:	print
Size:	151 pages
Genre:	gen
Fandom:	Starsky and Hutch
Language:	English
External Links:
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cover by Ruth Kurz

flyer

The Conspiracy is a gen Starsky and Hutch 151-page anthology with two stories and a poem by Cheryl Maier and Lucy Cribb. All three stories revolve a "conspiracy" involving Starsky and Hutch.

The interior art is by Ruth Kurz and Cheryl Newsome.

Contents

Summaries are from Black Bean Soup:

• Table of Contents (i)
• Thank Yous (11)
• Hail, Hail the Gang’s All Dead, fiction by Cheryl Maier and Lucy Cribb (Involves Starsky's high school crowd who seem to be dying one by one. Lots of insight into Starsky's teen years, friends, girls and wild times.) (1)
• Synthesis, poem by Lucy Cribb (A poem from Starsky's perspective depicting what goes through his mind when he and Hutch are in a shootout.) (65)
• Vendetta, fiction by Cheryl Maier and Lucy Cribb (A story of a girl Hutch is dating, who, secretly wanting revenge on the blond, uses subliminal mind control to inflict severe pain whenever he attempts to use his gun. The doctors are unable to explain it. Will Starsky figure out the problem before Hutch ends up dead because he can't protect himself?) (69)

Gallery

• 

  Cheryl Newsome

• 

  Ruth Kurz

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  interior, sample text

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  interior, Cheryl Newsome

• 

  interior, Cheryl Newsome

• 

  interior, Cheryl Newsome

• 

  interior, Ruth Kurz

• 

  interior, Ruth Kurz

Reactions and Reviews

I am tempted to say that THE CONSPIRACY is an excellent example of how not to do a zine… I'm getting old and bitchy — but I really do feel that there should be a little more inside this hefty volume than further refinements on the above writing style- and numerous other transgressions against the English Language and the reading public's pocketbook. Actually, there is a bit more — some lovely illos here and there by Ruth Kurz, who richly deserved every ribbon awarded her at ZCon. Not all are up to the quality of the page 129 Hutch or the page 133 Starsky, but there are some nice things to look at in this zine. There is also enough white space to make a first down — with yardage to spare. Production values aside, the writing ranges from miserable to woeful. The three items above for examples of the prose in the first story herein, HAIL, HAIL. THE GANG'S ALL DEAD. Selections from THE VENDETTA read a little better, by someone ought to have gone over the manuscript and Inserted a comma here and there. The writers should also lose their exclamation key), and learn the difference between "like" and "as". The ideas behind the plots of both these stories are pretty good — members of Starsky's old street gang are being knocked off in HAIL, HAIL; in VENDETTA, a lady hypnotist managed to give Hutch violent headaches every time he tries to use his gun (Freudian, but workable). As a matter of fact, there's a very neat little twist in the latter story, worthy of a thinking scriptwriter. And the script form is what both of these stories most closely resemble in intent and pacing, even down to the delicate fade-(with their girls! With their girls!). However. A friend commented on the "amazement" in HAIL, HAIL which has the bad guy waiting for four hours between several injections of water (the idea was to give Starsky a fine collection of tracks to corroborate an eventual OD). "Clearly", quoth my friend, this device was used "in order to waste enough time for Hutch to come galumphing in with the cavalry." Why not give him the injections one after the other in rapid succession, then shoot him full of smack and have done with it? I also have a great deal of trouble with the idea of someone as nasty as the central bad guy having achieved the position of Police Commissioner, especially if he's roughly the same age as Starsky. From VENDETTA: since we all/knew all along what the Bad Lady is doing to Hutch and why she's doing it, there is no suspense in this piece at all. Instead we sit around wondering ("yawn") when S&H are going to tumble to what's obvious to us. The solution to this might have been to hide certain things from the reader, just as they are hidden from S&H. That's how detective fiction works — we get to unravel the plot along with the main characters. In VENDETTA, all the work has been done for us; there's no mystery here, and ultimately no interest. This could have been a tidy little, story if the writers had approached it differently. In sum, at nine bucks a crack (in person I God only knows what the postage is), I not only cannot recommend the zine, but I could not have recommended it at three dollars either. These stories needed to go through the typewriter at least twice more, and then be rigorously edited by someone who knows grammar. I would suggest also that the publishers take a good long look at some of the other zines in print (most notably, Zebra Three (Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4), Casa Cabrillo, One Shot, L.A. Vespers) for ways of putting together a product which will not leave the buyers gasping with indignation at the cost/money's worth ratio. Try harder next time, ladies.

It takes an amount of courage to publish a zine for the first time. There's a lot to do, a lot to learn, and a lot of ways you can get burned Just because you don't know better. Cribb and Maier have made a number of mistakes in their first zine, THE CONSPIRACY, many of which could have been avoided, but let us nt least acknowledge that they had the guts to try. different story. I want to read them all. Maybe my friend is right; maybe all fanfiction is plagiarism. Some pf the avoidable mistakes occurred in production. In a zine there is really no need for a space and a half between each line, three spaces between paragraphs, and inch and a half margins. That's fine for a manuscript, where the editor needs the blank space to comment and correct, but at the price of paper and print these days, such a format in a zine only cheats the buyer. Another problem, easily fixed, was the huge number of misspellings and typos (including one character calling another character by the first character's name); one advantage of offset is easy proofreading. Once the master is typed, it's simple to read them over, locate, and correct errors with white-out and a finetip pen. Finally, I understand the zine was printed with metal offset plates. Now, metal plates give higher clarity and resolution in the print process than paper or vinyl plates, but they are much more expensive. For detailed or halftone (pencilled) art, or if several thousand copies are wanted, metal plates are the way to go, but in general, paper plates give all the quality needed. If one must use metal plates, it only makes sense to use the cleanest, sharpest type when preparing the masters -- a Selectric with a carbon ribbon, or a typesetting machine, say. Not a manual typewriter with a cloth ribbon; it makes the text copy smudgy and uneven in darkness, every bit of which the metal plates will pick up. Not every writer needs an editor, but new writers almost invariably do, simply because they are not familiar with the editorial process and are less able to do it themselves. Two of an editor's jobs are story editing and copy editing. I don't believe "Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Dead" or "The Vendetta" underwent a copy edit, that is, that someone not the authors read the stories carefully and critically, for they are replete with drawn-out or pointless scenes (six pages of Hutch getting a spinal tap; a patrol cop trying to tow away Starsky's car) and missing scenes (in Vendetta, Starsky leaves Hutch at the Pits, goes to entrap the woman who hypnotized Hutch into a Magnum-phobia, and the very next — and final —scene has Hutch and Starsky out on the streets again; no mention of how they cured Hutch or made Starsky's illegal arrest stick). A story editor is supposed to catch impossibilities and implausibilities, such as Starsky taking ten minutes to zone out on a known overdose of heroin, or the bad guy injecting Starsky with five separate syringes full of water at intervals of several hours (instead of just jabbing him with one syringe 20 or 30 times and waiting half an hour if he really wanted partially healed scars), or the bad lady being about to zero in on Hutch's fears and link them to the use of his gun all in a single, five-minute hypnotic session. A good story editor would have caught the characters saying or acting on things they couldn't possibly know, such as Hutch calling for an ID on a "Mike Jensen" that he (and we) knew throughout the story only as "Mike", and Starsky's thoughts replying to Hutch's thoughts. A story editor would have tamed the hyperactive point of view, and squashed the excessive internal monologues. Internalization should be in short doses, and should be used only to advance the story; it is not necessary for comment internally on everything that occurs around him…. There are problems not so easily fixed. The stories’ plots are not particularly original… The characteriszation is Max Franklinesque a "street educated" Starsky and an "Ivy League" Hutch, as well as a strange collection of names for a New York City street gang — Tom Barkfield, Tommy Simmons, Jimmy Huskins, Al Stevens, and Dave Starsky (as the token Jew perhaps). There are a few good moments, as, when Hutch feels a strange new pain, he visualizes an uncle who wasted away from cancer. This is good because it is real; the timing was right and it presented a hitherto unknown but plausible side of Hutch, who may be able to deal with the ghosts of sudden death on the streets, but what about the silent, internal betrayal of cancer? Cribb and Maier don't lack insight, but the characterization in general is leaden, as if they saw but did not observe the show. Again, they needed a good editor, to urge their best writing from them. Ruth Kurz' art is the only unadulterated joy in the zine. Her work has far surpassed the old Russian yogurt-eater days of super-lined faces; the illos are clean and powerful. By contrast Cheryl Newsome's are static and primitive. Using two different artists in the zine placed Newsome at a severe disadvantage. As a whole, THE CONSPIRACY is far too expensive for what it delivers, and does not deliver much. Still, I hope that the courage that made Cribb and Maier try in the first place makes them try again—and that they learn from their mistakes.

A year ago, Lucy Cribb and Cheryl Maier published "Conspiracy", perhaps one of the worse (sic) zines in this or any other fandom. They took negative reviews, private and public ridicule, and financial loss.

I would like to congratulate Lucy and Cheryl for having the guts to put out a second zine, after the problems with "Conspiracy."

Three-tale zine of stories which involve conspiracies against Starsky & Hutch. “Hail, Hail, the Gang's all Dead” involves Starsky's high school crowd, who seem to be dying one by one. Lots of insight into Starsky's teen years, friends, girls, and wild times. “Synthesis” is a nicely written poem from Starsky's perspective, depicting what goes through his mind when he and Hutch are in a shootout. “The Vendetta” is a very intense story of a girl Hutch is dating who, secretly wanting revenge on the blond, uses subliminal mind control to inflict severe pain whenever he attempts to use his gun. The doctors are unable to explain it. Will Starsky figure out the problem before Hutch ends up dead because he can't protect himself?