Richard Lupoff (February 21, 1935-October 22, 2020) was an Ameican sf and mystery writer, but also an important maker of early zines with the Hugo award-winning Xero, co-published with his wife Pat Lupoff and Bhob Stewart, from 1960-1963. Xero was a key zine in particular for its pioneering work studying comics, beginning a series, “All in Color for a Dime,” which became a book, one of the first in what is now a respected academic field of study of what are now called “graphic novels.” I had the chance to ask Richard about his zine-making shortly before his passing. He tells us about what got him into reading zines, making his own first zine, and the creation of Xero. Richard passed just before the Zines to the Future Exhibit opened. The interview here documents his love of zines and the creativity and community they represent.
ZinestotheFuture: Richard, thank you for agreeing to do a Zines to the Future! interview. Can you tell us when and how you first encountered zines, and what they meant to you as a fan?
Richard Lupoff: There were two youngsters in our family, my older brother and myself. Our mother had died at an early age (in her thirties) and our father's work required almost constant travel. How could he raise two young sons? As a result, Jerry and I were packed off to a boarding school. I'm sure that our father's intentions were positive, but he could hardly have made a worse choice. The school was run on lines of strict military discipline. Obedience and conformity were required.
And there I was, eight years old, something of a dreamer. My only way out of this hellish situation was to live a rich fantasy life, fuelled first by comic books (especially super-heroes) and a few years later by science fiction. Aside from enjoying the fiction itself -- this was the era of Bradbury, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Pohl and Kornbluth, Judith Merrill, William Tenn -- I discovered that several of the science fiction magazines used to run columns of fanzine reviews. I remember these especially in Startling Stories and Amazing Stories, although I'm sure there were others.
My curiosity was piqued. I sent away for fanzines published by Lee Hoffman, Walter Willis, and Gregg Calkins. Suddenly I found myself knocking on the door of a community that welcomed creativity, imagination, freedom of thought and variety of ideas. In short, all of the values that appealed to me -- and the opposite of all the fascist-like tropes that were forced upon me by that school. This was nothing less than a wondrous new world.
Soon I was reading all the fanzines I could get. Not long after that I was writing for them, and eventually -- it didn't take too long! -- I was publishing fanzines of my own.
ZinestotheFuture: What did you write about in your first publications in zines? Did you write articles or stories? Did you remember getting a response from other fans?
Richard Lupoff: My first fanzine, "SF52," contained a brief editorial and a short story. At least that's my recollection. It was "half-size" and produced on my Smith-Corona portable typewriter. I had no access to duplicating equipment, so I made four copies at a time, via carbon paper. By typing the whole fanzine twice I could make eight copies -- one for file and seven for circulation. As I recall SF52 lasted for four issues.
My second effort was called "One Shot Wonder." Each issue was devoted to parody. The first issue was called "Pal Maxy Science Fiction." Contained stories by "Ray Razzberry," "Robert A. Mainline," and "A. E. Van Hocked."
The second issue was "Joe's Occasional Fanzine" and was, you've guessed it, a parody of a typical fanzine.
That was all for those two attempts. I got at least one prozine review and a wonderfully encouraging letter from Lee Hoffman. Surely you know who Lee Hoffman was. Or if you don't, just ask around. She does not deserve to be forgotten!
I didn't think that any copies of SF52 or OSW survived, but I recently had a note from Joe Siclari saying that he'd turned up several. Amazing what people will save!
ZinestotheFuture: Thank you for the details on early zinemaking—many younger zinesters will be curious about the process and the tech. Because they might not have seen such things, I have included some images of carbon paper and a smith-corona—was this about the era for the typewriter?
But let’s press on with the interview! How did your most famous zine, Xero, with its important content on comics as well as other things, come about? How was the process for putting it together different from your earliest zines? Did you think of the comics content as something that wasn’t appearing in other zines you read, or did it just seem like a natural thing to talk about in your new zine?
Richard Lupoff: Yes, that typewriter looks a lot like mine. The first one that I owned was a Smith-Corona manual-portable that I received as a Christmas present when I was sixteen years old. Turning out those four copies at a time required banging away pretty hard on the keys. My second, which I used to cut stencils for Xero -- a very different process for making multiple copies via carbon paper -- was a Smith-Corona electric-portable that I bought about six years later, while I was in the army.
The keys were electric but the carriage-return was manual. My son Ken has it now, but I think it's more of an antique than anything else. I'm sure that both of my sons, Ken and Tom, are more computer-literate than I am, and Ken's son Ethan is probably more so than his dad. I did spend twelve years in the computer industry, working first for Univac and then for IBM, and I was pretty much up-to-date in those days. But I've been only a computer user since 1970. Anybody wants a program written for Univac I or II, give me a call.
As far as the production process is concerned, of course carbon-reproduction is a very limited and primitive method. Xero was produced on a mimeograph -- a process invented by Thomas Edison! The mimeo stencil is a sheet of very thin fiber -- I think silk -- coated with a layer of wax. Text is applied by running the stencil through a typewriter with the typewriter ribbon removed, so that the keys punch holes in the wax. Display type and artwork is entered by means of a stylus.
Of course the mimeograph is totally obsolete now. There was one incident, though, around 1980, when my wife, Pat, was working in an insurance office in Oakland. The mimeograph was being phased out but they still had one in her office. Turned out that Pat was the only person there who knew how to cut stencils or run a mimeograph. She became the hero of the day!
As for the comics-oriented material in Xero, that was the product more of impulse than planning. I'd been out of the army for a while, and Pat had just got her college degree. We were starting to move through the science fiction world in New York, and a number of our friends were publishing fanzines. This looked like fun, and we decided to create one of our own. We didn't have many connections to call upon for material, so we wound up creating most of the first issue ourselves.
I remember Pat writing two fine pieces. One was a book review of Brood of the Witch Queen, a fantasy novel by Sax Rohmer. The other was a survey of the career and works of Mervyn Peake, author of the Gormenghast novels. Our only outside contribution was a review of the film of Psycho, based on the novel by Robert Bloch. The reviewer was Harlan Ellison.
At which point I felt that I needed to write something, too. I had a certain nostalgic feeling about the comic books I'd enjoyed so much in my childhood -- especially the adventures of Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family. So I wrote a memoir of my days as a fan of Captain Marvel. Called the essay "The Big Red Cheese" after a term applied to Captain Marvel by his arch-foe, Dr. Thaddeus Bodog Sivana.
Xero 1 had a circulation of less than one hundred copies, but we received enthusiastic letters of comment, and many readers offered to write memoirs of their own, about their favorite comics. Human Torch, Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Bulletman, Spy Smasher, Tarzan, the inhabitants of The Lost World . . . Eventually this series grew into two volumes, All in Color for a Dime and The Comic-Book Book. My friend Don Thomson co-edited these books with me, and we had planned on a third volume, to be called The Best Comics Ever, but Don's untimely death prevented our completing the project.
ZinestotheFuture: Thank you, Richard, for sharing your experience with zines in the 20th century!