NEW ZINES LAUNCH.

 Dear friends, followers and anyone else who is still reading this blog after many months of inactivity -

I am writing today to let you know that, after an eternity of faffing about, I have finally printed up the first issues of two new paper fanzines - the current plan being that they will replace / supersede this blog going forward.

There are several reasons for making the move back to paper at this point.

Firstly, I need to face the fact that I’ve reached a point in life where I no longer have sufficient free time to produce regular, quality writing, as demanded by the weblog format.

As such, the zines I have put together contain about a 50/50 mixture of new writing, and stuff which I have previously published here (all substantially revised, or entirely re-written in some cases).

This is a balance I intend to maintain going forward, allowing me to draw upon the huge volume of stuff I’ve published here over the years, revisiting some highlights and hopefully presenting them to a new audience along the way. Combined with the possibility of publishing work from other contributors (submissions/ideas are very welcome), I hope that this will help me to put new issues together at a slightly quicker speed than would otherwise be the case - assuming that there are future issues that is (let’s see how these first ones go).

Secondly - let’s face it, the internet in the 2020s sucks. As anyone who has ploughed through the various warning screens and cookie pop-ups necessary to access these words will be aware, the blogger platform in particular has become increasingly obstructive and dysfunctional, and after trawling through the various aggressively monetized / homogenous sites which may have offered an alternative home for BITR… well, long story short, making stuff online is just no fun anymore, at least for a social media-eschewing refusenik like myself.

And, thirdly, from the POV of where I live at least, the world of DIY paper publications is actually thriving, counter-intuitive as that may seem. Zine fairs and such-like are regular occurrences, and whilst the personal & art-based zines which dominate them are generally not my thing, there have still been a number of great music / film / culture-based efforts popping up here in the UK in recent years, providing me with a blueprint for how this kind of thing can still be made to work, on a creative level at least.

So, to finally get the point -

The Beast with Two Paperbacks is a new zine about reading second-hand books.

 The first issue features writing on Simon Raven, Martin Cruz Smith’s ‘Inquisitor’ books (both re-dos of BITR blog-posts), along with a Pulp Non-Fiction piece on the Pelican punk rock classic ‘Knuckle Sandwich: Growing Up in a Working-Class City’ (new) and a compare/contrast between two novels by Ramsey Campbell and Doris Lessing (also new).

It also contains some badly structured sentences and a couple of glaring typos. I really should have done a final proof-read of the text before sending to print. But if you’ve persisted with this blog over the years, you’ll be familiar with all that I suspect.

Skull Time Movie Journal is a new zine covering fringe movies, genre movies, WEIRD movies - you know the score.

The first issue contains a re-do of my post on the Indonesian erotic horror ‘Cinta Terlarang’ (1995), a brand new review of the Johnny Cash scum-noir disasterpiece ‘Five Minutes To Live’ aka ‘Door-To-Door Maniac’ (1961/66), a round-up of ’50s/‘60s Japanese horror films with contemporary settings (largely re-written, although I’ve reviewed all of the films here in the past), and a lengthy chat with my partner about the career of Cynthia Rothrock (also brand new).

This one also has - I believe - fewer typos and better sentence construction, because I sent it to print after the other one, and hey, you live and learn.

Paper copies of both of these zines can be purchased here.

Or alternatively, PDF copies can be read or downloaded for free via Archive.org. (Which is totally cool with me btw - please don’t feel obliged to buy the paper versions just to show support or whatever.)

Also, I’ve put together a new Linktree to unite my various online projects / pages, so please do give that a look too.

If you hit the ‘FOLLOW’ button on the Ko-fi site linked above, I will send you occasional updates on activities related to these zines, but I will also hopefully continue to plug any new issues etc here too.

And finally, I’m also planning to start doing another mailing list, mainly just to keep in touch with friends and chat about music and stuff - very much TBC at this stage, but you’d be welcome to sign up if you’re interested, link on the Linktree page above.

And… that’s about it for now I think! Hope you’re all doing well, and as ever, thoughts and feedback are welcome.

Lovecraft on Film Appendum: Cthulhu Sex Magazine.

In the past, I’ve tried to follow up each of my Lovecraft on Film post with a brief supplementary post, either highlighting some ephemera related to the recently reviewed film or showing off some scans of relevant artefact from my collection. When it came to finding something to compliment the lascivious themes discussed in last week’s discussion of From Beyond however, I’m afraid I drew a blank. Instead therefore, I thought I’d share a few tantalising images and scraps of info concerning a publication whose issues are sadly entirely absent from my modest archives.

Published in New York City from some point in the 1990s up to 2007, the blunty titled ‘Cthulhu Sex’ is notable for the sheer lack of information about its contents and creators which has made its way online.

The image above is taken from an ebay auction archived on the valuation site WorthPoint, whilst all other images and information in this post have been sourced from a series of entries on the zine on the SF/fantasy fanzine database site Galactic Central. Between them, these two links seem to provide pretty much the sum total of extant evidence concerning this publication’s existence.

The earliest issue which I can find a cover image for is Vol. 1, No. 13, published in 1998. This and a few subsequent issues seem to exhibit a raw, photocopied aesthetic, with splattery / grindcore style artwork that certainly doesn't hold back.

(Vol. 1, No. 13 - cover artist unknown.)

(Vol. 1, No. 14 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

Soon thereafter however, the zine seems to have embraced a now very dated looking digital/DTP approach to design, moving toward a gothy/cyberpunky feel which is… less to my taste, shall we say. At least some of the extant cover illustrations from the MS Publisher era are still pretty cool though, nonetheless.

(Still working primarily in the realm of the monstrous to this day, cover artist Paul Komoda apparently went on to lend his talents to the 2012 remake of ‘The Thing’.)

(Vol. 1, No. 16 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

(Vol. 1, No. 18 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

(Vol. 1, No. 18 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

During its second ‘volume’ in the early ‘00s, ‘Cthulhu Sex’ gradually became a somewhat more lavish, semi-pro type affair, even moving into colour, and featuring far less explicit / attention-grabbing imagery on its covers. A few examples follow;

(Vol. 2, No. 13 - artwork by ‘Popeye Wong’.)

(Vol. 2, No. 23 - artwork by Chad Savage.)

As to the actual contents of ‘Cthulhu Sex’, all we have to go on is a partial set of contents lists available on the Galactic Central database. Scanning through these, we learn that the pseudonymous figures of ‘St Michael’ (presumably credited editor Michael A. Morel) and ‘Father Baer’ seem to have loomed large over proceedings, with other contributors to the earlier issues including ‘Racheline Maltese’, ‘Abigail Parsley’ and ‘Oneroid Psychosis’. All of which gives me the pleasant (if likely entirely misleading) impression of some seedy clique of sun-shunning reprobates creeping around the back-streets Manhattan in the late 1990s, knocking on unmarked basement doors and whispering hoarsely to each other of ever more twisted new ideas for their next issue.

Later on, the sense of mystery dissipates somewhat, with a greater number of contributors using what may actually be their birth names (alongside some choice chatroom-era teen-goth alter egos). There are also what appear to be some interviews with bands (none of whom I’ve heard of, but imagine the sheer sense of accomplishment they must have felt when ‘Cthulhu Sex’ called them up to request an interview), along with the inevitable reviews section. More spine-chilling terror than any of the tentacle-sex based material is surely promised meanwhile by a regular column entitled ‘Gothic Nightclub Romance Monthly’.

The official website of ‘Cthulhu Sex’ appears to have been stone cold dead since the final issue hit highly selective shelves in 2007, but Horror Between The Sheets, a collection of writing taken from the zine, was published in 2005, and as of September 2019, a volume entitled ‘Letters to the Editor of Cthulhu Sex Magazine’ can sit proudly upon your shelves for only $16.99 payable to amazon.com, courtesy of e-book/print-on-demand publishers Crossroad Press.

Authorship is credited to Oliver Baer - Father Baer himself no less - whose other credits apparently include “..a history of the Wu Tang Physical Culture Association”. His Amazon biography furthermore informs us that, “he has performed as an unspeakable horror from the depths and his likeness has appeared on film in the documentary ‘Tai Chi Club’ as well as in videos of different sorts.” What a guy.

And, that’s about all the info I can dredge up on this subject for the time being, though of course I’d be interested to learn more about this unique zine and its contents, particularly those elusive older issues whose covers seem never to have seen the light of a scanner. In all seriousness, I hope that ‘Cthulhu Sex’ provided a lively and valued community organ (so to speak) for the select group of readers and writers bold enough to place it on the counter of their local underground bookshop and/or post their subscription cheque to the mag’s Grand Central Station PO Box, and it saddens me that I missed out on the opportunity to at least sample an issue or two.