Duplicator Days: zines, Steve Moore and Dane Jerrus

Excerpt from Duplicator Days, an article written by Moore celebrating the glory days of UK fanzine scene and the key role of his friend Steve Moore, published in 2018 in Fanscene n.1. You can read the complete article downloading the fanzine HERE, page 6-8.

 

You can enjoy the whole Fanscene archive HERE. 

Also check the amazing project by editor David Hathaway-Price HERE: a digital repository of the Comics Fanzines published in the UK! Fantastico!

Alan Moore: I sometimes think that fanzines, blotchy and haphazard and ephemeral, are no less than the distilled breath of their various moments. All the memory-prompts and tangles of association that we have embedded in these frail, stab-stapled publications make them into crumbling paper repositories for fleeting and elusive atmospherics from a time when we were at our most enthusiastic; when we were indelibly imprinting all our strongest recollections. [...]

With the proviso that much of this brief essay may be entirely a product of my own disintegrating memory, I recall that it was here that I first learned of the existence of Frank Dobson’s Fantasy Advertiser, Tony Roche's Heroes Unlimited and Steve Moore’s KA-POW, and dutifully sent off postal orders for the requisite amounts. At this time I was setting out to walk the mile or two to school each day before the first post had arrived, and can remember the excitement on returning home if there was a manila envelope addressed to me, propped up behind the recycled brass shell-case ornament from World War I that stood upon the mantelpiece above the hearth. [...]

For my part, l was perhaps most struck by the last-minute inclusion of a Ken Simpson page illustrating a quartet of obscure British comic characters from the l940s or l950s. Amongst these was the memorably-named Dane Jerrus, who by a remote coincidence I'd just referred to in my script for issue three of the last volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It isn't an earth-shattering unlikelihood as coincidences go, but I was personally pleased by this absurd connection between my oldest friend's first work in the comic field and my own last work in that medium. And it is perhaps reassuring that even after almost fifty years, the basic materials that we are working with are still unchanged, even if the way in which we work with them has changed almost beyond recognition.

Without this tattered remnant, electronically resurrected, we would all, I think, be living in a very different cultural environment. Long may it abide, along with the memories of those times and people that it represents.

Check David Hathaway-Price's project HERE