Contact SF was created out of a desire to participate in the wonderful, wild and wooly world of science fiction fanzines. Joe Zitt and I also figured that it would be a good vehicle for our own writing. By the time issue #3 had rolled around, we'd gotten some money and were able to pay some pros for their articles and their artwork. Interestingly enough, Ginjer Buchana's column on fandom is probably one of the first regular columns to migrate from a prozine (Cosmos) to a semi-prozine. Bob Walters, cover artist, went on to become one of the premiere paleo-illustrators of dinosaurs. (He's done the Smithsonian.) The magazine died after this issue; we knew we could recover our expenses at a dollar a copy, but American Airlines lost all of the copies on the way to Iguanacon and no one got to see anything except the proof of the cover.

Issue 2. We went to digest size and started settling in on our focus - sercon. This issue was printed twice by the printer and even the "better" version was muddy. Delivery was almost tragic, as I drove into a tree at 40 mph taking it around to our subscribers and outlets. The best piece in there (I think) was a retrospective of magazine cover art of the era. Cover again by Bob Hires.

Issue 1. We had no idea what we were doing. We did manage to find Bob Hires who did the cover illo. It's filled with bad fiction and some 'sercon' pieces by Joe and myself. We learned a lot about layout - and had lots of fun with 3M's spraymount adhesive. It was well-received by our local cadre of nascent fans, encouragment enough to continue. Incidentally, the title had to be cut off this copy to provide the title art for issue #2. (We hadn't yet learned to NOT use original art...)

Between issues 1 and 2 of Contact, the entire team (members of our local SF club) attended Philcon. It was the last Philcon ever held at the Mayflower in Philadelphia: the following year, the first cases of Legionnaires Disease would break out there. We decided that the thing to do was to produce a convention one-shot and the result was Sleazy. My copy's cover is missing unfortunately. It featured another Hires original, a globe dripping goo and some very strange aliens running around. We interviewed Hal Clement and hit all the artists up for illos. It was a fun exercise that wouldn't have happened without a lot of bheer.