What is a 'fanzine'?

What is a 'fanzine'?

Mark Zaid (Owner of Esquire Comics) gives expert video advice on: What is a 'graphic novel'?; What is a 'pulp magazine' or 'pulp fiction'?; What is 'manga'? and more...

A fanzine usually refers to - essentially if you break it down -fan. These were newspapers and sort of self-published magazine styles, especially in the 60s and 70s where collectors and hobbyists were communicating to one another to tell them what was going on in the hobby. Fanzines talked about maybe things that were being sold, telling them about the different conventions. These were very much the early days of comic book collecting as a hobby. There were always comic book collectors, but for many years, there were just comic book readers, and those who created the fanzines in the 60s and 70s really created, or in many ways perhaps could be regarded as the forefathers of, the modern day comic collectors.