Doctor Who thing: the brief moment late 80s/early 90s when print fanzines flourished

If you haven’t yet made it to the National Media Museum in Bradford, Yorkshire, for its exhibit “Doctor Who and Me: 50 Years of Doctor Who Fans” (which I’ve mentioned before), you’ve got less than two weeks: the exhibit closes on February 9th.

I was at the opening night of the exhibit back in November, and I figure it’s time to share some thoughts and images from the exhibit. So I’m doing that all this week.

Today: fanzines. It’s a shame these were not available to visitors to actually flip through and read. We could but enjoy the covers. Such as this one, my own zine, The Cricketer:

(This is in fact readable online, because someone, unbeknownst to me, scanned it and uploaded it.)

Faithful Friends/Agreeable Companions was edited by my friend Bonnie-Ann Black:

(I have a story in this; you can read “Father Figure,” about Nyssa after Terminus, at my portfolio site.)

This one appears to be covering “a season of Doctor Who television material at the NFT” (which is the National Film Theatre, now the BFI’s Southbank facility):

This isn’t a zine but a “final year dissertation” by Ian Fortt (I don’t think there was a title cut off at the top):

So many zines:

These are but the tiniest hint of the zines that were around in the late 80s and early 90s. It was pre-Internet, but desktop publishing and cheap and readily accessible xeroxing made fan publishing easy(ish)… or at least easier than it had been.

For the zines here without publisher information: if you know who created them, please drop a comment or send me an email, and I’ll update the post.

(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)