THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 98

I started doing zines in 1988 when I was 12. My best friend (who I’m not married to) Danny Shoup’s parents had got a photocopier for their work. Danny was the co-editor of my first zine “Goblin’s Armpit”. I got the Book of the SubGenius, an issue of Factsheet Five & saw the Return of the Living Dead all that year. I had an out, I had a formula. I was introduced to the idea of being an artist when I was 8, now I had a way to do it, through DIY Punk. Up until that point I was trying to hang on to my childhood innocence but these things pushed me fully into being a juvenile delinquent & non-conformist. Dark Carnival, the shop on the Berkeley/Oakland border (which has since moved, but is still open!) was the place I got Factsheet Five & the Book of the Subgenius, they had an enormous head of “Bob” on the wall & a section of books on “Sex & Death” that really stood out in my young mind. We used typewriters, glue sticks, Sharpies, Scotch tape & collage bits from other magazines & stuff to create this punch of possibility. Later, I started getting my hand-writing up to snuff because I discovered Cometbus. Factsheet Five was a big zine that reviewed lots of zines from all over the world. It was awesome. I would just read the reviews on newsprint with microscopic print & gain a picture of the endless possibilities of zines, of art, of life. I didn’t even have to order the zines. The Church of the Subgenius is a satirical religion surrounding a generic 50s American man with a pipe, it featured awesome collage & original art & hilarious writing. It also had the thumbs up of TONS of art & music luminaries. It had art by Robert Williams, Paul Mavrides & tons of others. It was spread around by Mark Mothersbaugh, Paul Reubens, David Byrne & R. Crumb, among others. Return of the Living Dead was the first movie I saw with Punks in it. I feel like Punk has always been better served by theatricality than by Punks themselves. Return of the Living Dead served exactly what I wanted from life at that point, adventure, hanging out at the graveyard & girls. In 1990 the movie “Pump Up the Volume” came out which sold me on the idea of spreading my media to my school mates & turning some of them, no matter how alienated I was from them. When I wanted to expand my readership beyond the school I would send zines out to Factsheet Five for review & later I’d send zines to Slug & Lettuce, Profane Existence & Maximumrocknroll. Even though I’ve never gotten a positive review from MRR on anything I’ve done!