Meet the Horror Bloggers: Dinner With Max Jenke
Many fans of horror, amateur and professional alike, have devoted themselves to blogging about the thrills, chills, and no-frills side of the genre as seen in cinema and print. In this ongoing series that highlights the writers behind the blogs, we meet the unique personalities and talents that make the online horror scene so engaging. Up close and personal.
In this installment, Jeff Allard invites us to Dinner With Max Jenke and reminds us how easy it is to be a horror fan these days.
Writing about horror has been a constant in my life for, well, long enough to scare me. In the early ‘90s, inspired by the Lester Bangs of horror journalism, Chas. Balun (Horror Holocaust, The Gore Score, Deep Red magazine, GoreZone’s “Piece O’ Mind” column), I thought it’d be a great idea to start self-publishing my own fanzine and with some expert help from a friend who did layout and design work at the newspaper I wrote for at the time, the first issue of Gravedigger’s Union made it into the world back in 1993 – a year that now seems ancient to me.
Looking back on that issue, which included a tribute to Night of the Living Dead – then celebrating its mere 25th (!) anniversary – I have to marvel at one thing: how much free time I clearly had on my hands back then! But I’m very glad I had the time and money to devote to publishing Gravedigger’s Union as the four issues that eventually saw print over the next four years (the mag that started as an intended quarterly became an annual event!) before being forced by financial realities to throw in the towel (seeking out advertisers might’ve been a smart move but I opted not to) remain a nice little personal snapshot of a different age of fandom.
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