The And the Back in the summer of 1984, mean an old high school buddy, Connor were self-publishing a horror zine out of my mom and dad's

basement over in Shreveport.

For those who don't know, zine is short for magazine, but the term specifically refers to

any small-time self-publishing operation where the

prints are either sold for a few cents if not given away for free.

The 80s and early 90s were the golden age of Zines. It's no coincidence that Zines basically

died out once website creation became easy, so think of Zines as being like the internet, before

the internet was even a thing.

They plugged a gap in the demand for uncensored underground, and everything from punk rock

to anarcho-communism, and like I already mentioned, ours were centered around the horror genre.

We called it head trauma.

And the covers always featured different drawings of this mascot character that Connor

designed.

It was a guy with an

H.T. shirt whose head was revoltingly cracked open due to the titular head

trauma. Each issue was filled with a bunch of gruesome, poorly written horror stories, usually penned

by me while Connor dealt with the illustrations.

We also included a bunch of horror-related news stories, new film releases and the like,

then our final section was a bunch of what we called

Reader's Correspondence.

The RC section consisted of one or two letters from our readers, which tended to be their

own stories of real-life horrifying events.

...