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Indy Magazine: Now On Kwakk

Oops!

OK, I bought all the issues of what’s usually called Indy Magazine, scanned them, and put them on kwakk.info. So you can now do research into Elflord and stuff. There’s already 20 other magazines on kwakk.info where you can do research into whether Jack Kirkeby or Stan Lees created the Fantastical Four, but there’s not that many magazines that are into non-superhero comics, so I thought this is an interesting addition.

The most useful thing when scanning magazines is, of course, a USB pedal.

Anyway… what was Indy Magazine anyway? It went through some slight name changes over the years.

It was originally called just “Indy”, possibly — with a number of different tag lines, like “The Independent Comic Guide” or “Your Independent Comic Source”, before morphing into “Indy Magazine” and “THE Guide to Alternative Comics”. I’m just mentioning this because trying to google/ebay the magazine is quite hard — especially since there are many other magazines called “Indy” or “Indie” or the like. (Not to mention the popular fictional character. Oops!)

It was originally edited by Dan DeBono, and published by Blackmore Publishing (which I assume was just DeBono, but I have no idea).

And it’s not a price guide. WARNING!

A striking feature of the Blackmore issues is having the advertising rates on the second page — so I guess it’s straddling the adzine/magazine area?

And here we have… possibly issue #4 (where Indy is now an “Independent Only Price Guide”, possibly as a reaction to Wizard, and they changed their minds?), but it doesn’t really say what issue number it is anywhere in the book.

And there’s absolutely nothing about comics prices in the book, so it’s not much of a price guide. And… “Kramer T. Kaos”? I’m guessing the editor wrote many of these columns himself under various names?

Oh, and I haven’t mentioned one final peculiarity — almost all the issues have different sizes. It’s not just that it flips back and forth between magazine size and comics size, but each issue is a few mm wider/shorter than the last, which made for annoying scanning. (It’s an outrage!!!) (I’m guessing they shopped around for different printers a lot.)

And who can forget the “Hottest Women Of Independents!” issue?

I think distribution was pretty spotty, because I was totally and utterly unable to find #6 and #9 — I can’t even google their covers, so I don’t even know whether they exist. (And the editorial in #10 says that it’s #9…)

But the main reason I wanted to make this magazine available for research is that it became a kinda different magazine with #10: Jeff Mason took over as the editor, and Alternative Comics became the publisher (I think). There’s some interesting stuff in the pre-Mason issues, but the remaining issues are brimming with interviews with alternative comics luminaries like Evan Dorkin, Rob Walton, Sarah Dyer, Terry Moore, etc, etc. And lots of reviews of things you don’t see reviews of in other magazines of this era.

Now, as with all the other magazines on kwakk.info, I don’t have the rights to actually put them there, but I’m assuming it’s OK because these mags are about 25 years old at this point. However, three of them are still available for buying, so I’m not quite sure… Jeff, if you’re reading this and you want me to take it down, or limit the interface to only displaying 5 pages per search result (like with The Comics Journal), or remove those issues that are still available, let me know. I think it could be a valuable research resource for this era, though.

Oh, and I also scanned the one issue of Crash: The Quarterly Comic Book Review that I have. There were only two issues published, but finding that second issue has, so far, proven impossible. I’ll add the second issue if I find it. (If anybody has #2 and a scanner, please drop me a note. Or just want to sell me it.)

Oh yeah, while scanning the Indy issues, I watched an old Boris DVD — it’s from around 2009, and it’s the most awesome concert ever. EVER! I saw them like five? times around this time, and this brought back so many memories… Boris (with Michio Kurihara) had the perfect combination of tunes and sonic excess around this time. Just flabbergasting.

I mean, they’re still good, but those concerts were just everything.

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