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2.4 Punk fanzines
The Punk explosion in the United Kingdom led to a massive upsurge of interest in fanzines as an alternative to the mainstream media that was felt to be too exploitative, capitalist, and essentially uninterested in the Punk Movement and the concerns of disaffected youth. The first and perhaps still best known UK ' punkzine' was Sniffin' Glue, produced by Deptford punk fan Mark Perry , which ran for 12 issues between 1976 to 1977. Other UK fanzines included Blam! , Vague fanzine , Juniper beri-beri and Coolnotes .
In the US, Maximum RocknRoll is a major punk zine, with over 250 issues published. Since the explosion of 1994 (when Green Day and Offspring made punk commercial again) a number of other punk zines have appeared, such as Punk Planet, Razorcake and Slug and Lettuce.
In the UK Fracture (fanzine) and Reason To Believe (fanzine) have been the main fanzines in the recent past, but both closed their doors in late 2003. Though not technically a 'national' fanzine Rancid News has to a limited degree filled the gap left by these two zines.
2.5 Role-playing fanzines
Another sizable group of fanzines arose in role-playing games (RPGs) fandom, where fanzines allowed people to publish their ideas and views on specific games and their role-playing campaigns. Role-playing fanzines allowed people to communicate in the 1970s and 1980s with complete editorial control in the hands of the players, as opposed to the game publishers. These early RPG fanzines were generally typed, sold in an A5 format (in the UK) and were often illustrated with abysmal or indifferent artwork. A fanzine community developed and was based on sale to a reading public and exchanges by editor/ publishers. Many of the pioneers of RPG zinedom got their start in, or remain part of, science fiction fandom. This is also true of the small but still active board game fandom scene, the most prolific subset of which is centered around play by mail Diplomacy games.
3 Quality
The appearance of the photocopier allowed fanzines to be easily reproduced and thus more widely distributed. The Punk influence of depreciating aesthetic or intellectual qualities and instead placing great emphasis on the importance of enthusiasm and the rejection of apathy by "doing" something has endured in the decades after the substantial decline of Punk. The influence of Punk zines on traditional science fiction fanzines has been minimal, although some cross-fertilization has occurred. The aesthetic qualities of fanzines arguably have improved with the introduction of the computer - and traditional science fiction fanzines have tended to emphasize intellectualism. Fine writing in science fiction fanzines remains their most important attribute, with science fiction fans valuing the written content of a fanzine as its most important attribute, although many of them have been known to feature art ranging from amateurish to highly professional.
4 Recent developments
In recent years the traditional paper zine has begun to give way to the webzine (or "e-zine") that is easier to produce and uses the potential of the Internet to reach an ever larger, possibly global, audience. Nonetheless, many people are still producing paper fanzines, either out of preference or to reach people who don't have convenient Web access. One example of a zine is The Inner Swine. Online versions of approximately 200 science fiction fanzines will be found at the eFanzines site, along with links to other SF fanzine sites.
5 See also
desktop publishing, literature, printing, publishing, science fiction fandom, weblog, writing, Alt.zines
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