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EMG-Zine Retrospective: January 2006
Dec. 3rd, 2012 08:49 amOur very last issue of EMG-Zine went live this weekend! To celebrate seven years and a whole lot of amazing work, I will be featuring a look back through the project throughout this month. I'd like to remind you that we're looking for nominations for your favorite articles - you may nominate as many as you like, so if you happen to run across one you feel is worthy, go ahead and shoot an email to editor AT emg-zine DOT com at any point. We'll be handing out some awards in January, and the best of the articles will be given some extra love in the final incarnation of the site. (I don't want to leave a boring static page just pointing at the last issue!)
SO, Issue 1.
Cover by Kiriko Moth
Our theme was Phoenix; I wanted something that symbolized beginnings - or restarts - and something that would be catchy for artists and writers. Our art gallery this month was one of the largest that we collected, though we had no fiction.
We did have a feature by CE Murphy on Rejection, Liiga Smilshkalne wrote about Online Marketing (part 1), and we introduced five columns: Ursula Vernon's Wombat Droppings (talking about starting a piece), Janet Chui's Healthy Green Artists (Artmakers as Friends of the Earth), Annie Rodrigue's Behind the Art (Brainstorming and Thumbnailing), Amy Waller's Cosplay 101 (An introduction) and Marina Bonomi's Myths and Symbols (The Two-headed Phoenix). We also had a collection of movie reviews, and two regular highlights that didn't end up being regular - a Portrait Adoption spotlight, and an artwork critique.
As is often the case with projects coming out of the starting gate - it wasn't quite what I thought it would be. I had planned to have .php-driven administrative tools by the time we started, and there had been additional talk about a comic, and some other columns that didn't pan out. We also had a Bootcamp column, with artistic exercises for readers to do - this didn't make it into the archives when the site was transferred over to the current platform, as it was rather short-lived. For the first several issues, I ended up hand-coding the site in html, page-at-a-time, which was laborious, but it got the job done.
In all, this issue was a strong start. I had no idea then that we would keep it going for a rather amazing seven year run, but I was full of hope and energy for the project. It was a very organic 'zine, and you can see that it changed a lot as the years passed.
Selected quotes:
And it was!
In future retrospectives, I will be looking at several issues per post - doing one every day would take me into FEBRUARY, and I plan to wrap this up this month.
SO, Issue 1.
Cover by Kiriko Moth
Our theme was Phoenix; I wanted something that symbolized beginnings - or restarts - and something that would be catchy for artists and writers. Our art gallery this month was one of the largest that we collected, though we had no fiction.
We did have a feature by CE Murphy on Rejection, Liiga Smilshkalne wrote about Online Marketing (part 1), and we introduced five columns: Ursula Vernon's Wombat Droppings (talking about starting a piece), Janet Chui's Healthy Green Artists (Artmakers as Friends of the Earth), Annie Rodrigue's Behind the Art (Brainstorming and Thumbnailing), Amy Waller's Cosplay 101 (An introduction) and Marina Bonomi's Myths and Symbols (The Two-headed Phoenix). We also had a collection of movie reviews, and two regular highlights that didn't end up being regular - a Portrait Adoption spotlight, and an artwork critique.
As is often the case with projects coming out of the starting gate - it wasn't quite what I thought it would be. I had planned to have .php-driven administrative tools by the time we started, and there had been additional talk about a comic, and some other columns that didn't pan out. We also had a Bootcamp column, with artistic exercises for readers to do - this didn't make it into the archives when the site was transferred over to the current platform, as it was rather short-lived. For the first several issues, I ended up hand-coding the site in html, page-at-a-time, which was laborious, but it got the job done.
In all, this issue was a strong start. I had no idea then that we would keep it going for a rather amazing seven year run, but I was full of hope and energy for the project. It was a very organic 'zine, and you can see that it changed a lot as the years passed.
Selected quotes:
Occasionally people ask me, "How do you start a painting?" and I find myself making vague hand gestures and going, "Ah...I...uh..." until I've run through most of the basic vowels and they're looking at me like I'm an idiot. ~Ursula Vernon, Poking the Gravid Chicken
In my filing cabinet is a folder labeled "Rejection Letters--the fools, the fools!" ~CE Murphy, Rising From the Ashes
Hopefully [EMG-Zine] will be entertaining, educational, and more fun than a bucket of monkeys. Ellen Million, the Introduction
And it was!
In future retrospectives, I will be looking at several issues per post - doing one every day would take me into FEBRUARY, and I plan to wrap this up this month.
