A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
...there were two slash fans. One had seen the first published slash around 1977 or so, but hadn't had the opportunity to really pursue it; the other had always known she couldn't be the only person who liked making up stories about television characters and had only just managed to finally track people down and find out what the hell this stuff was actually called.
Mi casa es su casa...
Unbeknownst to each other, they'd both been invited (complete strangers though they were to the other fans) to attend a small slash get-together a fair distance away. A meeting place for a carpool was organised (by those same generous fans who'd invited the newbies to begin with), the two newbies saw each other, chatted for oh, nearly a whole ten minutes, before they decided they were best friends and should pool their resources so they could buy twice as many zines. That was uhm... January, 1988. We thought we'd just buy some zines, talk to each other, perhaps get together to chat once in a while, that would be pretty much it. We were, ever so slightly, wrong.
Where no man has gone before...
That first weekend, thrilled beyond words, we bought K/S zines and devoured them. They were wonderful; we were new, this was what we'd been looking for, we finally had this thing called 'slash' clutched tightly in our grubby little paws—and we weren't about to let go. A few months later, we were re-introduced to Blake's 7, and that was when we first succumbed to insanity—it has to have been insanity, how else can you explain doing zines? Nine months after we first met, we attended our first all-slash con together (IDICon—wonderful cons!) and produced our bouncing baby boy, our first Blake's 7 zine, "Oblaque." The zine title is another of our bad puns—"Oh, Blake!" (which was something we couldn't quite envision Avon sighing breathily a la romance novel)—and our press name was GBH Productions, which seemed appropriate since 'slash' sounds so violent but rarely is. GBH stands for (in the British system anyway) Grievous Bodily Harm. Somewhere along the line, we changed to "Oblique," as a play on Oblaque and of course, oblique is the British term for a slash mark, which seemed even more appropriate a name.
A snarl, a sneer, a whip that stings...
With Oblaque, we started the way we continued: we did zines that were what we wanted to read. There were plenty of other really good stories and zines out there, but they didn't give us quite everything we wanted. Hard to believe though it now is, our first zine actually caused a bit of a stir, because it pushed the envelope—it contained such shocking things as (what is now incredibly mild!) BDSM where the two men involved were doing it not because they were forced into it, or in an a/u where one was a Pre-Reform Vulcan, or what have you, but simply because this was something they both wanted. We didn't guarantee happy endings, we had stories where the characters (gasp!) weren't nice, etc., and design really mattered to us, so we paid a great deal of attention to our own particular aesthetics. It's impossible to please everyone, and we never tried: our goal was to do zines which we ourselves enjoyed, zines of which we were proud (hindsight is not allowed here!).
Reverse the polarity flow...
Since we've been doing zines since '88, how come we're only now making it onto the web? It's not that we're Luddites: we've both been on-line from the days when that meant a shell account, a Lynx browser at best (when you could count the number of websites that existed), and the top-of-the-line was a 2400 modem (external, of course!). The problem has been a combination of aesthetics, control, and the sheer amount of work involved in putting a horde of zines up. If we'd been willing to do plain html or text, it would've been easier. But... Well, the choice of PDF is explained elsewhere on this site. Part of the reason for using PDF is that we wanted to create an archive of these zines as they first were, warts and all. Despite the temptation to 'fix' things, we haven't changed the zines—not even those things that make us cringe or that we'd do very differently now.
It seemed like a good idea at the time...
These zines are a roadmap, a photo album of the past. There's a clear progression of fandoms (from Blake's 7 to Pros to Holmes/Watson to Due South to Skinner/Mulder to Phantom Menace and all the others in between) with overlaps and backtracks, with themes that were explored once or revisited time after time after time, with design that changes and grows. There are stories that are the results of intense discussion and/or reflections of what was going on within fandom at the time ('we're not gay, we just love each other'; could a story be about sex but still have heart? etc.); stories that are reactions to particular themes that would be all over the place all of a sudden; stories that illustrate the great constant of slash: the 'first time' story! Th-th-th-that's all, folks. So this is it: an archive of where we've been and the foundation of where we're going. We hope you enjoy digging through our mis-spent youth.
