Incredibly Hot Sex With Hideous People

Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People is the name of the Wellington-based fanzine I started in 2002. It’s still going. There’ve been thirty-six issues to date, which is apparently a staggering number in the world of zines. Most zines exist for one or three issues before the zinester gets restless and changes the name or format of their enterprise, or just ‘grows up’ and moves on. At forty-three years of age, growing up is no longer an option. My age makes me a wonderfully weird fit; the zine scene being as youthful as it is, especially within the sub-genre of perzines (i.e. personal zines), as mine has become. 

Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People started life as a vehicle for the shameless promotion of a CD I’d released under the name Mr Pudding. I was finding it difficult to get any press in the official media. Came the time to stop complaining about this and find another avenue. I asked a fan/ex music-journo to write a vanity piece about my fab new CD and added other pieces on a couple of favourite local bands. I got 150 copies of my modest yet immodest little A5 fanzine photocopied and left them in local cafes, record shops and galleries. 

Did this act of self-promotion enable me to shift units of my ailing CD? No. But it did give me a taste for producing freebee zines (once over the small angst of going public in such an uninvited way). Issue two looked at local short film-makers. 

2002 was also the year that I enrolled to do a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA). With full time work and post-graduate study, how was I going to find time to continue producing my zine? There seemed to be only one option, turn the zine into an MFA project. Thus, with the third issue I departed from my barely established format and attempted to make an art zine. It was called ‘Drummers, are they oversexed and stupid?’ It was about drummers—are they oversexed and stupid. 

This did not satisfy my examiners. Neither did my issue on stencil graffiti, my forays into ‘exquisite corpse’ play, or my reprint of stolen ‘band-mate wanted’ posters. The biggest problem for the powers that be was the perceived inconsistency of my methodology. Thus, with the evolution of Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People into a perzine, my examiners were a little happier. 

I don’t mean to suggest that I was bullied into producing a perzine. I became attracted to the way the autobiographical might insist upon everyday themes. I was attracted by the small and lived story. I wanted to mine the authentic embarrassing moment as a challenge to usual public constructions of ego.  

And the how of it? Sometimes I write a text and then go about illustrating what I’ve written. But what I prefer to do is to dash off late night vivid-marker-on-copy-paper drawings inspired by the day’s thoughts or events, and then edit this stack of doodly material in response to the completed text. This way I get drawings that might resonate with the words on paper rather than mere illustration as a redundant image of what I’ve already written. I’m sure some people probably think these doodly drawings are naff; require no time or skill. Well, personally, I don’t think time necessarily counts for much. Plenty of old dears have peered into an etching or some pointillist wonder with no better affirmation than, “My goodness Doreen, this must have taken a long time!” No, I like doodly drawings. I love the honesty of the unrehearsed line. Love the humanness. Love the pathos. 

At the other end of the critical scale I’m sure there are some zinesters who find my layout… ‘stationery’ is word that comes to mind, a word that was once applied to the overall look of my zine by an Elam lecturer. For many familiar with the aesthetics of zines, my zine might look stationery, for the way it clearly demarcates each page of Courier text against the facing page’s economical doodle. Many might expect the rough cut ‘n’ paste of real typewriter text, ephemera and photocopies of photocopies of photocopies of the 1968 Paris riots. Something more akin to Kurt Schwitters meets Jamie Reid. I defend the look of my own zine by saying it’s at least as authentic as anything that looks ‘zine-y.’ Considering zines come from a place where ‘needs must’, I’d assert that to ignore the now ubiquitous desktop computer that stares back at me from my, er, desktop, would be a bit of a pose. Not that I use my computer with any finesse or technological know how. Mostly I just use it to write. To start scouring the op shops for an old typewriter would seem like a zinester’s pilgrimage. And I’m too much of an iconoclast, even for that.