THE GREAT GADFLY:

...And So Are The Daze of our 'Zines



The first time I made a 'zine was when I was in grade school. Yup, grade school. I was quite the little snot-nosed Conde Nast, let me tell you. It started off with crudely-drawn little comic books about a talking dragon and his bespectacled-gopher best friend and their anthropomorphic neighbors - the slightly-slutty zaftig fish, the mildly sadistic pig, the bitchy-queen cat. My mom would copy these masterpieces and I'd staple them together and sell them at recess for fifteen cents a copy. For some reason, I was allowed to do this without ever getting caught by the playground IRS. I muddled through three or four issues of the comic, then got distracted and started drawing superheroes, at which point I realized I sucked really bad at drawing muscle people but I drew 'em anyway - I just didn't sell them.

Not too long after that, I'd say around fifth grade, I made a little pamphlet-y thing called "Stuff", the logo of which was in a crude pencil-drawn Star Wars font. There was no real focus to "Stuff"; that's why I called it "Stuff", you see. Oh, I drew, I wrote about Mork and how cool Tattoo was on "Fantasy Island" and whatever else was in Dynamite! or Pizzazz! magazine and had me all excited. I think I might have even written about how Pablo Cruise was the greatest band in the world. I didn't charge a penny for this playground tabloid - I wanted it to be accessible to the common man, you see. And anyway, all I had to do was scribble on a couple of pieces of paper, xerox the suckers, fold 'em in half, and VOILA! My publishing empire awaits.

I didn't get the 'zine bug again till college, when I started getting whiffs that other people were doing what I did in grade school and there was a name for it and a movement and perhaps even a COMMUNITY of self-published insane geniuses, ranting about everything from murder to conspicuous consumption to the lead singer of Afgan Whigs' weight gain.

It was the middle of the first Bush Administration. I was a college student. It was clearly time to make a new 'zine. So I did. I called this one "Stupid" and made a big, blocky logo with a Sharpie, and I cut and pasted my caffeinated little heart out and spent all my money at Kinko's to spit out 100 copies, which I distributed all across campus and even snuck into copies of the college newspaper. By the third issue, I had a couple of friends writing and illustrating for my guerilla publication. By that point, however, I'd been approached by the campus newspaper and had sold out to the man...I soon became arts editor for the campus rag. Score one for the Outsider Artist, I 'spose.

'Zine fever hit again not long after college, when I first moved to New York and got a wild hair up my booty to collect all my friends' most traumatic public school horror stories and make a new cut-and-paste monstrosity out of these tales of woe. The result was "Big Pain", which I'm actually still pretty proud of to this day, if for no other reason because it got blurbed in Folio and Paper magazines, complete with a pullquote of me saying, "I want this 'zine to be a big marble tablet falling from the heavens, with tales of bullies and incontinence."

"Big Pain" only stuck around for one issue, though fortunately the subject matter is timeless enough that I could pick up that idea whenever I wanted and run with it again. I still have a bunch of copies sitting around in my closet - if you really want one, send my lazy ass a SASE and I'd be happy to share.

After "Big Pain" I wrote for a friend who was a 'zine FIEND - I wrote for his unofficial "Who's The Boss?" fanzine, Bossanova. I wrote about menopausal television personalities for his faux tabloid masterpiece O.C. (and even *I* am not filthy enough to tell you what those letters stood for - let's just say it was brutal). I even contributed to his over-the-top stream-of-consciousness random gossip 'zine - I forget what I ranted about, though surely it was something damning about my co-workers at the time.

I felt like kind of a 'zinester Jaye P. Morgan in my friend's cut-and-paste Gong Show universe. I didn't have my own thing going on per se, but I showed up to keep the party going. It was fun times - a veritable hoot and a half.

And so here I am now, a few years and a few projects later, kinda back at square one, with a whole heap of Big Painful Stupid Stuff chronicling the Desperate Living of my existence, and no idea really what to do with it all.

So I've decided to play with self-publishing again. As you're reading this, I'm in the throes of slapping together a mini-reader of essays and stories written over the past few years. I want it to be a little bit more polished than some of the ranty gems I've cranked out over the past decade or three, but there's something about the seams of a cut-and-pasted publication that still guns my motors in a way a crisp little desktop-formulated 'zine just can't come near.

It's not gonna be a 'zine ("chapbook" might be a better description), though this isn't to say that it's going to be a one-off, self-contained project. If it's well-recieved, I might be forced to tweak out a second printing with more content, better layout, a snappier cover, blah blah blah. I'm not really sure where this project's gonna take me.

Right now, I'm just getting ready to throw my shit out there and see what happens - after all, it'll do me a lot more good circulating out in the whereverness of the outside world than mildewing away in my hard drive and notebooks.

And that's the troof.




2003-10-14 - Last Haiku
2003-10-09 - Don't Cry Out Loud
2003-10-09 - Sit Down, You're Making Me Nervous
2003-10-08 - I'm Sure Miss Thing, I'm Sure
2003-10-07 - Carbonated Water, Caramel Color, Aspartame

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