TV21 (comic UK) – SF Universe

Andersonic 20 Is Out Now!

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The good news is that Issue 20 of my favourite Gerry Anderson fanzine, Andersonic, has just been released, so it\’s time for my usual plug. So, what\’s on the menu this issue?

The current issue features:

Brian Johnson interview – a new interview with Space 1999\’s FX director. Brian also talks about his work on Stingray, Thunderbirds, 2001 and Alien/Aliens amongst other things.
Mark Harrison interview – CG director on New Captain Scarlet and leader of the Scarlet Team, Mark discusses his work on Gerry\’s last series.
Thunderbirds 1965 – We take a trip to Slough and visit the set during the filming of \’The Abominable Snowman\’, the first of the three episodes being made there.
Anderson Dream Episodes – Are they clever lateral thinking or a feeble cop-out?
Space: 1999/ Another Time, Another Place – Mark Braxton reviews one of the first series\’ weirder episodes.
Reviews – We review Alan Shubrook\’s new book, the CD21 interview CDs and \’The Lost Worlds of Gerry Anderson\’ DVD.
Strip Story – the Andersonic time machine goes back to 1965 to dissect the first issue of TV Century 21.
Thunderbirds Are Go – our \’episode guide\’ for the first 13 instalments of this new series.
… plus a few other things we\’ve managed to shoehorn in. The issue also has new art by Richard Smith.

Issue 20 of Andersonic is 44 pages, black & white interiors, and colour front and back covers, both inside and out. There\’s lots of lovely photos and artwork to go with the great articles and reviews, and all of this costs a measly £2.75, including p&p within the UK. Check out the website at www.andersonic.co.uk for details on how to purchase the current issue and back issues, most of which are still in print.

Andersonic is, by far, my favourite Gerry Anderson fanzine. It\’s a genuine, classic, traditional, \”real\” paper/print high quality A5 zine, which is a huge plus in my book. There are very few traditional print zines around these days (almost everyone has gone digital) compared to their classic heyday back in the 1970s-1990s. They\’re a bit of an endangered species, in fact. So a good one like Andersonic is something truly special. Add to that the sheer quality of this zine, consistently, issue after issue, and I can only applaud Richard Farrell and his talented team for producing this great zine .

The zine has been going for ten years now, which is roughly a six-monthly publishing schedule, although that has slowed down in recent years to an almost annual schedule, alternating roughly every six months with its equally high-quality sister Doctor Who publication, Plaything of Sutekh. We still get a zine every six months or so, but it\’s two different zines rather than just the one. It takes a lot of time and effort to put quality zines like this together. I\’d rather have a lengthy wait between issues and get a zine of higher quality, than a more frequent release at a lower quality, or, worse still, Richard giving up altogether because of a far too punishing zine release schedule.

I cannot recommend this fanzine highly enough. It deserves as much support as it can get. Buy it. Now.

Andersonic Issue 19 Is Out Now!

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[T]he latest issue of one of my favourite fanzines, Andersonic Issue 19, has been out for a while now, so I reckon that it\’s long past time that I gave it a plug. So, what has Richard Farrell and his Merry Crew dished up for us this time?

As per the details on the Andersonic website, the current issue features:

Mary Turner interview – a new interview with Century 21\’s sculptor/puppetry supervisor in which she discusses her work at Century 21 and the later Cinemation series.
Ken Holt interview – Ken talks of his time working at Century 21 on the later puppet series, UFO and The Investigator. What links a bi-plane, green paint and a very unfortunate ram?
Space:1999/ The Black Sun – a look at David Weir\’s first draft script for this popular episode.
Thunderbirds at 50/ Still Flying High – our writers look at why Thunderbirds has endured to become Gerry and Sylvia Anderson\’s most popular series.
UFO/The Cat With Ten Lives – Alexis Kanner has a strange feline all over him. We look at one of UFO\’s finest episodes.
Strip Story – a look at the Fireball XL5 strip \’Electrode 909\’ from the heyday of TV Century 21.
Reviews – we review \’Filmed in Supermarionation, the Network box set and Bringers of Wonder on bluray. Plus back cover art by Richard Smith.

Andersonic is, by far, my favourite fanzine focusing on all things Gerry Anderson, from puppet shows, to the live TV series, to films, to the modern CGI series. These days, most fanzines are usually some kind of electronic publication – PDFs/ebooks or websites. Andersonic bucks that trend. It\’s a genuine, traditional, \”real\” paper/print, high quality A5 zine that you can hold in your hand and collect, just like the classic zines of yore. These days, when the classic print zine is a bit of an endangered species, zines like Andersonic are rare, precious gems.

It contains 44 pages of gorgeous articles, reviews and artwork, and has black & white interiors, and colour covers, front and back (both interior and exterior). And at only £2.75 (not even the price of a pint of beer), and with postage free (within the UK only), it\’s an absolute steal.

All self-respecting fans of Gerry Anderson and the series he has produced over the years really should be reading every single issue of this zine. Go get yourselves over to the Andersonic website and buy a copy, right now!

Andersonic Issue 19 Is Out Now!

$\"Andersonic$

The latest issue of one of my favourite fanzines, Andersonic Issue 19, has been out for a while now, so I reckon that it\’s long past time that I gave it a plug. So, what has Richard Farrell and his Merry Crew dished up for us this time?

As per the details on the Andersonic website, the current issue features:

Mary Turner interview – a new interview with Century 21\’s sculptor/puppetry supervisor in which she discusses her work at Century 21 and the later Cinemation series.
Ken Holt interview – Ken talks of his time working at Century 21 on the later puppet series, UFO and The Investigator. What links a bi-plane, green paint and a very unfortunate ram?
Space:1999/ The Black Sun – a look at David Weir\’s first draft script for this popular episode.
Thunderbirds at 50/ Still Flying High – our writers look at why Thunderbirds has endured to become Gerry and Sylvia Anderson\’s most popular series.
UFO/The Cat With Ten Lives – Alexis Kanner has a strange feline all over him. We look at one of UFO\’s finest episodes.
Strip Story – a look at the Fireball XL5 strip \’Electrode 909\’ from the heyday of TV Century 21.
Reviews – we review \’Filmed in Supermarionation, the Network box set and Bringers of Wonder on bluray. Plus back cover art by Richard Smith.

Andersonic is, by far, my favourite fanzine focusing on all things Gerry Anderson, from puppet shows, to the live TV series, to films, to the modern CGI series. These days, most fanzines are usually some kind of electronic publication – PDFs/ebooks or websites. Andersonic bucks that trend. It\’s a genuine, traditional, \”real\” paper/print, high-quality A5 zine that you can hold in your hand and collect, just like the classic zines of yore. These days, when the classic print zine is a bit of an endangered species, zines like Andersonic are rare, precious gems.

Nostalgia Collecting – Old UK Comics and Annuals

[T]hey say that nostalgia is the narcotic of the over-forties. I\’m almost fifty-three, and I can definitely admit that it\’s particularly true of me. I\’ve always been a very nostalgic person, always fascinated by the past, even back when I was a kid. So pretty much my entire life, I\’ve been on a quest to collect old stuff, particularly stuff that has some meaning for me, or which connects me to the \”Golden Age\” of my youth.

In recent years, I\’ve spent a lot of time and money on Ebay, picking up many of the rare relics of my childhood and early-to-mid teenage years. One of the things that I like most is to grab the occasional old (and by old, I mean 1950s-1970s) British comic, as opposed to the US Marvel comics (which I also enjoy collecting) that I became a fan of from my mid-teens onwards. Way back in the day, before I ever encountered my first superhero comics, I was an obsessive collector of several of the traditional British weeklies. But that was before Marvel UK exploded onto the UK comics scene with The Mighty World of Marvel and its offspring from late 1972 onwards, and changed everything.

Over the years I\’ve bought a lot of old issues of my favourite pre-Marvel UK British comics from the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, mainly Lion, Valiant, Eagle and Thunder. I would also dearly love to be able to buy a whole bunch of Countdown and TV21 (otherwise known as TV Century 21), but these seem to be harder to find on Ebay and when you can find them, they are invariably a heckuva lot more expensive than the likes of the Lion, Valiant and Thunder. Maybe someday, when I\’m rich. 🙂

Another particular focus of my collecting has been those old UK annuals, the hardback, once-yearly collections of strips and other goodies from our favourite comics. I remember these annuals very fondly from when I was a kid. They were the \”Holy Grail\” for me back then, something that I eyed up enviously in the shops, and which I really, really wanted to get my hands on, but which were way, way out of my price bracket. We were from a poor family, and I didn\’t have a lot of pocket money back in those days (the late 60s and early 70s). And annuals unfortunately did cost on average ten times the price of those weekly comics which were already stretching my meagre resources to the limit. Back then, annuals were simply far too expensive for me to buy on a regular basis, and so were usually only acquired when I got them as occasional Christmas presents from my Dad or other relatives.

So, in adult life, I\’ve been trying to rectify things a bit by picking up a lot of these old annuals, and I\’ve developed a real knack for snapping them up dirt cheap, or, at least, relatively cheaply. I\’ve managed to get my hands on most of the Valiant, Lion, and Thunder annuals, and a whole bunch of assorted other UK comics-based annuals including Hotspur, Battle, 2000AD, Starlord, Eagle, Dan Dare, Countdown, The Trigan Empire and a few others. Add to those the various 1970s annuals put out by Marvel UK, and that\’s a lot of annuals.

And just to add quite a few more to the already huge pile, I\’ve also built up quite a collection of annuals based on various television sci-fi series, including pretty much all of the Doctor Who Annuals right from the very first one in 1964 up until the late-1970s, plus a bunch of Star Trek, Space: 1999, Blake\’s 7, UFO and other assorted television-based annuals.

I often look at these ever-growing stacks of old annuals and comics in my spare room, and wonder \”Am I going mental? Why am I collecting all of this old stuff? What the hell am I going to do with them?\” Then I open one of them and feel the tidal wave of nostagia wash over me, all the old memories boring up from the depths of my moth-eaten excuse for a brain. And I feel good. Really good. Maybe nostalgia is the narcotic of the over-forties after all, and if it is, I hold up my hands and proudly proclaim that I\’m a complete addict.

At least nostalgia is a much safer and more productive addiction than cigarettes, booze and drugs. And we all need our little hobbies to spend our money on, or life would be unbearable, all bills and shopping and crappy Real Life nonsense. The thought of that being all there is to life makes me shudder…

Fanzines – Creative Genius at the Grass Roots (Part Three)

In my previous two posts, I\’ve talked about my general experiences with, and thoughts on, fanzines. Now I\’ll share a few more specific thoughts about the actual zines that I\’ve come across over the years.

The earliest zines that I collected date from the 1970s and early 1980s, and were mostly based around SF literature and comics. But these were sporadic, one-off zine purchases, and I didn\’t really become a hardcore zine collector until well into the 1980s. The pattern of zine purchases in that latter period was also different to what it had been before, in that most of the zines that I collected from the mid-80s onwards were deliberate, regular purchases of individual titles, in order to have a complete collection of each of my favourite zines. The pattern was also different in that the vast majority of these newer zines were based around my favourite sci-fi television series, rather than SF literature and comics.

My first regular fanzine (which I have every issue of, more than twenty of them) was published in the mid-80s, the excellent Flickers \’n\’ Frames, a reviewzine, which now has its direct descendant on the internet in the form of The Borderland website. Flickers \’n\’ Frames ran the gamut of pretty much everything, publishing reviews of sci-fi films, TV series, books, graphic novels, music, and the occasional piece of fiction. This one zine pretty much kick-started my current obsession with collecting zines, and I immediately moved on to collecting other fanzines, mostly based around telefantasy and SF.

My main fanzine collecting years coincided with what is known as the \”Golden Age\” of Doctor Who fanzines, circa 1985-1995. And so most of the zines in my collection are therefore based on Doctor Who, which just happens also to be my favourite ever TV sci-fi series. Although I\’ve got quite a few non-Doctor Who zines in my collection, such as the previously mentioned Flickers \’n\’ Frames, and a large number of other zines covering various cult television shows ranging from Star Trek, to Blake\’s 7 and the various Gerry Anderson TV shows, the bulk of my collection is made up of Doctor Who zines. That love of Doctor Who zines continues right up until the present day, and I still collect as many of the current batch of zines as I can.

The hoard of zines that I collected over the years covered many different themes and types, but most of them tended to fall into several different categories.

The first, and largest, category was the general review and article-based zines, which covered not only Doctor Who and other telefantasy series, but often other completely unrelated topics as well. They usually also included the occasional piece of fan fiction. These were mostly traditional A5 zines, and included (off the top of my head):

Circus (which also went A4 for several issues out of the eight-issue run).
Star-Begotten.
Soft Targets (A6).
625.
Brave New World.
Purple Haze.
Peladon.
Cygnus Alpha.
Auton.
Game of Rassilon.
Club Tropicana.
Burning the Ground.
the original Skaro.
Rumours.
Apocrypha.
Shockeye\’s Kitchen.
Timelines (the fanzine of the Grand Order of the Time Lords).
Frontios.
Cybermag.
Sonic Screwdriver.
Queen Bat/Space Rat.
Eye of Harmony.
Vipod Mor.
Drake\’s Drum (an A5 Star Trek zine).

and a few others that I can\’t recall right now. But occasionally the zines were A4 and glossy (or sometimes not), such as:

Celestial Toyroom (the news/reviewzine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society).
Second Dimension.
Matrix.
Skaro.
Antoinine Killer.
Metamorph.
Metamorph II.
Shadowsphere.
Neutron Flow.
The Tomb.

and a few others that I can\’t remember off the top of my head.

The second category was fictionzines, mostly A5 but sometimes A4, zines composed almost totally of fan fiction based on Doctor Who, Star Trek or other telefantasy series. I\’ve always had a soft spot for good quality fan fiction, so I have a LOT of fictionzines in my collection, including:

A5:
Mandria.
Silver Carrier and many other one-off fictionzine \”novels\” by the excellent Seventh Door Fanzines.
Chronicle.
Cosmic Masque (the fictionzine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society).
Inner Door.
The Key and The Key Presents.
the various Gallifreyan Presses publications.

A4:
Inferno Fiction.
Fan Aid – The Storytellers.
Wondrous Stories.
Black Pyramid.
Universal Dreamer.
Vortex.
Trenchcoat (US Letter).
Myth Makers (US Letter).

and, again, quite a few others that I can\’t recall right now. Again, mostly Doctor Who zines.

The third category was the larger A4, glossy (and often more colourful) semiprozines such as:

The Frame, which contained an enormous amount of photographs and background information on Doctor Who.
DWB, which started off as a semi-prozine dedicated to Doctor Who, but then morphed into Dreamwatch Bulletin and finally the professional newsstand magazine Dreamwatch, which covered telefantasy and sci-fi cinema of all shades.
Century 21 (based, obviously, around Gerry Anderson shows).
Portal 31 (a tribute to the classic TV21 comic).

There are quite a few other zines that I haven\’t mentioned, as this is all from memory, but this is a good sub-section of them, all falling into the three categories which cover most of the zines in my collection.

To Be Continued…

Collecting Old Comics Stuff

I\’ve been going through a bit of a crazy phase recently. Almost a reversion to my youth, or, at least, my youthful collecting habits. I\’ve been spending a lot of money on Ebay, trying to pick up some of the rare relics of my early-to-mid teenage years, when I was an obsessive collector of British comics, as opposed to the more easily found US comics that I became a collector of from my later teens onwards.

Over the last couple of weeks I\’ve been buying a lot of old issues of my favourite British comics from the 1960s and 1970s, mainly Lion, Valiant and Thunder. I would dearly love to be able to buy a whole bunch of Countdown and TV Century 21 (aka TV21), but these are a lot harder to find and a heckuva lot more expensive than the Lion, Valiant and Thunder. Maybe someday, when I\’m rich.

I\’ve also started collecting old annuals, those hardback, once-yearly collections of strips and other goodies from our favourite comics. Again, mainly Valiant, Lion and Thunder, although I did also pick up a nice Countdown Annual from 1972. I remember from when I was a kid – these were the Holy Grail, usually too expensive for me to buy (I didn\’t have a lot of pocket money back in the \’60s and \’70s, and annuals cost on average ten times the price of the weekly comic), and usually confined to Christmas presents from my Dad or other relatives.

Well, I\’ve made a really good start on picking up many annuals from the \’60s and \’70s period, and I\’m starting to develop a real knack for picking them up dirt cheap, or, at least, relatively cheap. (I\’ve just won two more as I\’m typing – Lion Annual 1973 and Thunder Annual 1973). I often look at this ever-growing stack of annuals beside me, and wonder \”Am I going mental? Why am I collecting all of this old stuff? What the hell am I going to do with it?\” And then I open an annual and feel the tidal wave of nostagia wash over me, all the old memories boring up from the depths of my moth-eaten excuse for a brain. And I feel good. Really good. Maybe nostalgia is the narcotic of the 40-somethings (I\’m 46). If it is, I\’m a complete addict. Since my son died in April 2006, I have little else left in my life.