When I set out to interview all of the folks that were doing work that I respected back in the ‘90s, during the golden age of zines, there was one person I knew I wouldn’t be able to speak with. I’d been told by multiple people that Doug Holland, the man behind the legendary zine […]
Category Archives: Special Projects
The Untold History of Zines… Christopher Becker: The Man Who Killed Factsheet Five
When I interview people for this series, I invariably ask them how they came to know about the existence of the underground press — how they came to discover that there were actually brilliant, obsessed people out there in the world who weren’t waiting to get professional writing jobs, but instead just doing it themselves, […]
Ypsi/Arbor Exit Interview: Merritt Bankes
What follows is our official exit interview with Merritt Bankes, who just recently left Ypsilanti, headed for Tecumseh. MARK: Can you please state your full name for the record? MERRITT: Merritt Bankes. MARK: OK, let’s start at the beginning… What kind of kid were you? MERRITT: Feral! A free-range chicken! [Laughs.] I didn’t even wear […]
The Untold History of Zines… Sean Tejaratchi on Crap Hound
When I first started my “History of Zines” oral history project back in 2013, one of the first people I reached out to was Sean Tejaratchi, the man behind the incredibly ambitious clip art zine Crap Hound. [As someone with OCD, the obsessiveness of Crap Hound really resonated with me, and I wanted to find […]
Looking for the Mark III
I rarely share them here, but I’m known to go off on wild goose chases every now and then, trying my best to track down useless historical facts and obscure items that, for whatever reason, I’ve become obsessed by. A few years back, as you may recall, I decided that I needed to know what […]