intrigueing

A few weeks ago, I ordered a zine. Well, two zines, actually.  Issue #1 and Issue #3 of the Starsky & Hutch zine Zebra Three. They were published way back in 1977 and 1979 and issue #1 was the first Starsky & Hutch zine to ever be published. I guess I'm a huge nerd, because I was like OMG HISTORY and think this stuff is cool.

If you don't know what a zine is, just go here or here, because this post is already too long, tbh. And if you don't know much about Starsky & Hutch (hey that rhymes!), skim this, because the info there is a hell of a lot more relevant to the interests of someone reading about fandom than stuff like wikipedia.

See, for the past year or so, I've been on a huge fandom history kick, waxing and waning depending on how busy I was. I re-read the MsScribe Story for the ninth or so time of course, but I started reading up on a lot of older stuff too -- information about the history of certain fandom/fanfic tropes, and of old fandoms I was in. (You can’t grasp the sheer awesome that is X-Files fandom without understanding Usenet.) Out of the fandoms I'm in (not counting Sherlock Holmes, whose fandom was just...different) the oldest ones are Star Trek TOS, M*A*S*H, Star Wars, and Starsky & Hutch. And the goldmine of info about these is fanlore.org It has been my new addiction, the past few months.

I got particularly fascinated by the fanlore pages that had loads of excerpts from various old Starsky & Hutch letterzines, which were the discussion forums of the time, arguing about analyzing the show and the characters and the fandom and sending in envy-inducingly long and detailed reviews of then-current popular/good fanfics. The biggest takeaway I got from all this nerdy research was that a) seriously, zines were fascinating things, and b) the text of lots of fanfic in those zines has never made it to the internet and that is the saddest thing. Obviously, I just had to get my hands on one. So I did, and read it.

There were a whole bunch of different aspects to this, uh, experience, I guess. So I separated them out by category so you don't have to read the whole thing if you're not interested. But really -- no matter how long it's been since posting when you stumble across this review, I just wanna say that if anyone who reads this has read this zine or the stories in it before, I would be delighted to have your input and opinions in the comments :) There's just not enough of it online!