Notes from The Archives: BLASTA! A Killjoys Zine
Welcome to @mcrzines , a blog database aiming to collect the history of My Chemical Romance Fanzines!
Normally, this involves finding and reblogging posts documenting what zines have existed, are still on sale for you to collect right now (!!), or zines that are currently seeking artists and writers! However, not all zines have a Tumblr presence; thus, NOTES FROM THE ARCHIVES is where I'll document zines found on other platforms, or maybe even post other notes from time to time!
This is another one that is a bit of a call for further information - like last time, the zine itself is not in current publication, and it seems impossible to order or find anymore. I'd love to see examples of what was inside. Big thanks to @sobqjmv for bringing this one to my attention!
BLASTA! was a multi-issue zine that was in active publication around 2010 - 2011, run from their Wordpress blog, accepting submissions of "stories, how-to guides, puzzles/games, art, fake ads, or anything else you can think of" - making it the oldest collaborative, open-submissions MCR zine currently known to this archive (and if you find any older or contemporary ones, be sure to drop a line here - I'd love to see!)
The zine had an interesting understudy/waitlist system, in the spirit of fairness - aside from the officially selected artists and writers, a selection of "backup" artists and writers were announced for every issue, in case official contributors couldn't make the deadline. In the event backup contributors weren't used, they'd be first in line for the next issue.
Particularly of note is that the earliest posts date to November 25th, 2010: 3 days after Danger Days's album release. This is extremely contemporary fandom activity.
The organiser also kindly provides a physical description of the zine: "The zine will be pocket sized which means it will be one sheet of paper, front and back, folded into fourths. Both sides will be in full color. With it being only one sheet of paper, it allows me to sell the zine for the very small price of $1 US (+$0.50 postage) for printed versions and just $1 for an online version."
Unfortunately, all purchase links to physical or digital copies are dead. In an interesting artifact of a pre-Gumroad world, the PDF link is an eBay listing which is no longer available.
I can't see what was ever in these zines. But I'm glad so much information about it and its contributors is preserved for posterity; it's an interesting time capsule going through the publicly available contributor lists and following links to their abandoned deviantart accounts (those that aren't deactivated) - gives a taste of the messy, earnest visual identity of the work fans were producing at the time.
Maybe some folks would cringe to be reminded of what they produced for this zine 16 entire years ago - but I hope most of them at least remember it fondly and proudly.
Do you own a copy of BLASTA! zine? Did you contribute? Tell us about it! We'd love to know more about this project!
Know about any MCR zines this blog hasn't posted about yet? Drop us a line in our ask submissions or messages!