A fanzine (blend of fan and magazine or zine) is a non-professional and non-official publication produced by enthusiasts of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest.
The term was coined in an October 1940 science-fiction fanzine by Russ Chauvenet and first popularized within science fiction fandom, and from there the term was adopted by other communities.
Typically, publishers, editors, writers and other contributors of articles or illustrations to fanzines are not paid. Fanzines are traditionally circulated free of charge, or for a nominal cost to defray postage or production expenses. Copies are often offered in exchange for similar publications, or for contributions of art, articles, or letters of comment (LoCs), which are then published.
Some fanzines are typed and photocopied by amateurs using standard home office equipment. A few fanzines have developed into professional publications (sometimes known as "prozines"), and many professional writers were first published in fanzines; some continue to contribute to them after establishing a professional reputation. The term fanzine is sometimes confused with "fan magazine", but the latter term most often refers to commercially produced publications for (rather than by) fans.
Origin The origins of amateur fanac "fan" publications are obscure, but can be traced at least back to 19th century literary groups in the United States which formed amateur press associations to publish collections of amateur fiction, poetry, and commentary, such as H. P. Lovecraft's United Amateur.
As professional printing technology progressed, so did the technology of fanzines. Early fanzines were hand-drafted or typed on a manual typewriter and printed using primitive reproduction techniques (e.g., the spirit duplicator or even the hectograph). Only a very small number of copies could be made at a time, so circulation was extremely limited. The use of mimeograph machines enabled greater press runs, and the photocopier increased the speed and ease of publishing once more. Today, thanks to the advent of desktop publishing and self-publication, there is often little difference between the appearance of a fanzine and a professional magazine.
Genres
Science fiction
When Hugo Gernsback published the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories in 1926, he allowed for a large letter column which printed reader's addresses. By 1927 readers, often young adults, would write to each other, bypassing the magazine. Science fiction fanzines had their beginnings in Serious & Constructive (later shortened to sercon) correspondence. The fans would start up clubs to ease finding others with their same interests. Gernsback founded the Science Fiction League in 1934, where these clubs could advertise for more users.
The first science fiction fanzine, The Comet, was published in 1930 by the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago and edited by Raymond A. Palmer and Walter Dennis. The term "fanzine" was coined by Russ Chauvenet in the October 1940 edition of his fanzine Detours. "Fanzines" were distinguished from "prozines" (a term Chauvenet also invented), that is, all professional magazines. Prior to that, the fan publications were known as "fanmags".
Science fiction fanzines used a variety of printing methods. Typewriters, school dittos, church mimeos and (if they could afford it) multi-color letterpress or other mid-to-high level printing. Some fans wanted their news spread, others reveled in the artistry and beauty of fine printing. The hectograph, introduced around 1876, was so named because it could produce (in theory) up to a hundred copies. Hecto used an aniline dye, transferred to a tray of gelatin, and paper would be placed on the gel, one sheet at a time, for transfer. Messy and smelly, the process could create vibrant colors for the few copies produced, the easiest aniline dye to make being purple (technically indigo). The next small but significant technological step after hectography is the spirit duplicator, essentially the hectography process using a drum instead of the gelatin. Introduced by Ditto Corporation in 1923, these machines were known for the next six decades as Ditto Machines and used by fans because they were cheap to use and could (with a little effort) print in color.
The mimeograph machine, which forced ink through a wax paper stencil cut by the keys of a typewriter, was the standard for many decades. A second-hand mimeo could print hundreds of copies and (with more than a little effort) print in color. The electronic stencil cutter (shortened to "electrostencil" by most) could add photographs and illustrations to a mimeo stencil. A mimeo'd zine could look terrible or look beautiful, depending more on the skill of the mimeo operator than the quality of the equipment. Only a few fans could afford more professional printers, or the time it took them to print, until photocopying became cheap and ubiquitous in the 1970s. With the advent of computer printers and desktop publishing in the 1980s, fanzines began to look far more professional. The rise of the internet made correspondence cheaper and much faster, and the World Wide Web has made publishing a fanzine as simple as coding a web page.
New technology brought various print style innovations. For example, there were alphanumeric contractions which are actually precursors to "leetspeak' (a well-known example is the "initials" used by Forrest J. Ackerman in his fanzines from the 1930s and 1940s, namely "4sj". Fans around the world knew Ackerman by three letters "4sj" or even two: "4e" for "Forry"). Fanspeak is rich with abbreviations and concatenations. Where teenagers labored to save typing on ditto masters, they now save keystrokes when text messaging. Ackerman invented nonstoparagraphing as a space-saving measure. When the typist comes to the end of a paragraph, they simply moved the platen down one line.
Never commercial enterprises, most science fiction fanzines were (and many still are) available for "the usual", a sample issue will be mailed on request. To receive further issues, a reader sends a "letter of comment" (LoC) about the fanzine to the editor. The LoC might be published in the next issue; some fanzines consisted almost exclusively of letter columns, where discussions were conducted in much the same way as they are in internet newsgroups and mailing lists today, though at a relatively glacial pace. Often fanzine editors ("faneds") would simply swap issues with each other, not worrying too much about matching trade for trade, somewhat like being on one another's friends list. Without being closely connected with the rest of fandom, a budding faned could read fanzine reviews in prozines, and fanzines reviewed other fanzines. Recent technology has changed the speed of communication between fans and the technology available, but the basic concepts developed by science fiction fanzines in the 1930s can be seen online today. Blogs—with their threaded comments, personalized illustrations, shorthand in-jokes, wide variety in quality and wider variety of content—follow the structure developed in science fiction fanzines, without (usually) realizing the antecedent.
Since 1937, science fiction fans have formed amateur press associations (APAs); the members contribute to a collective assemblage or bundle that contains contributions from all of them, called apazines and often containing mailing comments. Some APAs are still active, and some are published as virtual "e-zines", distributed on the Internet. Specific Hugo Awards are given for fanzines, fan writing and fanart.
Media Media fanzines were originally merely a subgenre of SF fanzines, written by science fiction fans already familiar with apazines. The first media fanzine was a Star Trek fan publication called Spockanalia, published in September 1967 by members of the Lunarians. They hoped that fanzines such as Spockanalia would be recognized by the broader science-fiction fan community in traditional ways, such as a Hugo Award for Best Fanzine. All five of its issues were published while the show was still on the air, and included letters from D. C. Fontana, Gene Roddenberry, and most of the cast members, and an article by future Hugo and Nebula winner Lois McMaster Bujold.
Many other Star Trek 'zines followed, then slowly zines appeared for other media sources, such as Starsky and Hutch, Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Blake's 7. By the mid-1970s, there were enough media zines being published that adzines existed just to advertise all of the other zines available. Although Spockanalia contained a mixture of fiction, essays, artwork, and letters, fan fiction became the dominant content of many later media fanzines. Like SF fanzines, these media zines spanned the gamut of publishing quality from digest-sized mimeos to offset printed masterpieces with four-color covers.
Men wrote and edited most previous science fiction fanzines, which typically published articles reporting on trips to conventions, and reviews of books and other fanzines. Camille Bacon-Smith later stated that "One thing you almost never find in a science fiction fanzine is science fiction. Rather ... fanzines were the social glue that created a community out of a worldwide scattering of readers." Women published most media fanzines, which by contrast also included fan fiction. By doing so, they "fill the need of a mostly female audience for fictional narratives that expand the boundary of the official source products offered on the television and movie screen." In addition to long and short stories, as well as poetry, many media fanzines included illustrated stories, as well as stand alone art, often featuring portraits of the show or film's principal characters. The art could range from simple sketches, to reproductions of large elaborate works painted in oil or acrylic, though most are created in ink.
In the late 1970s, fiction that included a sexual relationship between two of the male characters of the media source (first Kirk/Spock, then later Starsky/Hutch, Napoleon/Illya, and many others) started to appear in zines. These became known as slash fiction from the '/' mark used in adzines. The slash help to differentiate a K&S story (which would have been a Kirk and Spock friendship story) from a K/S story, which would have been one with a romantic or sexual bent between the characters. Slash zines eventually had their own subgenres, such as Femslash. By 2000, when web publishing of stories became more popular than zine publishing, thousands of media fanzines had been published; over 500 of them were k/s zines.
Another popular franchise for fanzines was the "Star Wars" saga. By the time the film The Empire Strikes Back was released in 1980, Star Wars fanzines had surpassed Star Trek zines in sales. An unfortunate episode in fanzine history occurred in 1981 when Star Wars director George Lucas threatened to sue fanzine publishers who distributed zines featuring the Star Wars characters in sexually explicit stories or art.