Once, There Was a Fanzine ....

 My friend "The Kizer" and I were deeply into comics back in the late 1960s. So much so, that I proposed we make our own "fanzine." At the time, fanzine meant a certain kind of amateur publication made by and for fans. The idea of this type of fanzine started in the science fiction fan community, but as far as I've been able to document, sometime in the early 1960s, comic book fanzines started to appear as well. 

Excelsior #1 cover, drawn by my
pal, The Kizer. 

For my pal and me, it's unclear exactly when we found out about fanzines. I think we might have attended Phil Seuling's Comic Art Convention in New York City in 1967 or 1968, and that could have been where the door opened for us. 

I know I got onto the mailing list of something called the DallasCon Bulletin, which I probably first saw at the Comic Art Convention. It was published by a group of fans who intended to put on a science fiction fan convention in Dallas. The bulletin was their vehicle to build up excitement for their convention. It was through the bulletin, I think, that I first heard of Fantasy Illustrated. This was a fanzine that combined original comic stories with reviews, history and news about comic books. 

Fantasy Illustrated's publisher was Bill Spicer, and he had high hopes for extending the form of the comics. So much so, that as I subscribed to Fantasy Illustrated, Spicer decided to change its name to Graphic Story Magazine. He was a proponent of the form and felt that if there would ever be comic books aimed at something other than "the bubblegum brigade" (i.e., young kids), then the form would have to be called something other than comic books. After all, the name "comic book" was based on the idea that these were "funnies," but the kinds of storytelling possibilities that Spicer saw were maybe akin to the French art films that were making noise at the time. It was in the pages of Graphic Story Magazine that I first heard of a "graphic novel." Nowadays, that's a commonplace. 

It may be hard to understand today - when some of the biggest film franchises of all time are based on comic book superheroes and comic book-like space operas - that the nerd culture we see on "Big Bang Theory" was very much a clandestine thing. Oh, how you'd be ridiculed if you told outsiders that you were a fan. 

I have to believe that the impulse to create something - whether it's a comic book, a song, a drawing or something else - comes from the pleasure one received from experiencing someone else's work, and then a corresponding reflex to try to create a similar pleasure for someone else. More confounding, when you try to analyze that process is that this act of creating in response to creations one has enjoyed is in itself a pleasure, even if there is no audience for that secondary creation.  

Below, I present the cover of our fanzine, Excelsior, pretty much as it was published in the fall of 1968. This is a teaser to a new blog where I will be writing a series of posts about the context of each of  Excelsior's stories and features, and then a re-do of it for 2022. That'll be followed by continuations and conclusions, what probably would have been the second issue of Excelsior, because I've always felt bad that we left these stories hanging, even though nobody really noticed us. 

I don't know how long this will take, but come along, I promise we'll both learn something.