This week marks my fifth anniversary as editor of FANGORIA, and when I mentioned this on Twitter, people were incredibly kind and generous with messages of support and congratulations. I try to remember every day that the Fango brand means something to many, many people, and in the replies to my post, I was reminded anew.
That part of the job is so cool. Social media can be a nightmare, but with it I get instant feedback on the work we do, and when something we put out resonates with someone, it still makes my day to hear it from them. I never forget a kind word or gesture, and in this job I’ve come to appreciate them in a way I maybe never did before.
That’s because the negative feedback is equally instant and just as forthcoming, and I never forget those remarks either.
And those comments started the INSTANT I was hired, before I even had a chance to earn any. Every February 15th, I think about the very first message I got when the trades first announced Fango’s return and my role in that return. I received, no lie, hundreds of messages that day. I saved them all. But the first one sent was from a writer who simultaneously tried to diminish the gig while asking me why it wasn’t him. The word “congratulations” was not mentioned. It was an early tip-off to the world I was about to enter and, in hindsight, I should have seen the subsequent bile tsunami coming.
The petty jealousy is one thing, and I suppose I get it. More men have walked on the moon than have been EIC of Fango, to borrow an oft-used metric from my Bond fandom. For the “why not me?” crowd it’s literally a dream gig, and I have no doubt there are folks who wanted it (and want it still) more than I did. One guy messaged me for a year about it. A year of messages, from someone I don’t know, about how much he deserved my job. You involuntarily become part of someone’s narrative of themselves, and it’s frequently unsettling.
And it often sneaks up on me. I once got a note from a reader cheerfully correcting me on a factual error; when I politely replied that they had misread what I wrote, and that I was in fact correct (if a bit unclear), the next reply was bare-fanged and claws out, with the reader telling me I should spend less time replying to emails and that maybe they should message my bosses about giving him my job. Those are always wild exchanges, because they have a mask of civility until you push back in the slightest. It makes me wonder how many of those landmines are hiding under some “supporters.”
So when I say “FANGORIA means so much to people,” I’m not mouthing some empty platitude, or even necessarily saying a positive thing. Because as I moved into the role and made it clear to readers, employers, and rubberneckers what I believe the brand should stand for (and, to get it out of the way, anyone claiming neutrality on certain topics is possible in 2023 is lying), people have had NO problem telling me how much they hate what I’ve done to “their” magazine. (Well, most people have no problem telling me; I’ve been told that a genre veteran, an individual for whom I’ve always had a great deal of affection and have only ever treated kindly, delights in throwing their new issues of Fango in the fireplace, but has never engaged me about their problems. Whatever works!)
The most predictable venom comes from folks trying to play “gotcha” about what should and shouldn’t be in FANGORIA, as if this magazine did not have Planet of the Apes and Total Recall and Batman Returns on the cover back in the day. Folks mad that we don’t cover ‘80s movies, or that we put a music video on the cover (the way Fango did multiple times in the ‘80s, but whatever), or that Godzilla isn’t horror (Fango #1 in 1979 had Godzilla on the cover, and Godzilla has appeared on the cover or in the mag in every decade since, but whatever), or that Nope isn’t horror, or that Us isn’t horror, or that The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula isn’t… you get the idea.
They try to couch it as “customer” feedback, but it’s almost never customers. It is, however, exclusively people who’re REAL mad that my and my team’s views don’t line up with theirs, soft-brained dopes who’ve bought into some “woke/unwoke” binary that their favorite TV grifter has fed them. These are people who hadn’t thought about FANGORIA in years and did not know who I was before this job, and who now come out of the woodwork to actively wish for my unemployment (or worse). Have you ever taken a job where throngs of strangers had an opinion about you having that job? And made anonymous blogs about it? It’s weird! It’s weird and I’m still not used to it. Strangers (and, again, not customers) emailing my boss to say I should be fired for my opinions. Folks on Twitter telling on themselves about how much attention they’ve been paying to any of this shit by responding to Fango’s editorial views with “guess I’ll subscribe to Rue Morgue” (as if the great Andrea Subissati is going to tolerate their bullshit for one second). It’s exhausting, though it is frequently hilarious.
I promise I’m not complaining, though. Every old dinosaur shrieking about where I’ve taken the mag in the past five years reminds me of that line from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil about “pissing off all the right people.” Their anger only fuels me; I’m more spite than man at this point. I watched all the same horror classics as these haters did in the ‘80s, but my heroes back then weren’t just social commentary genre gods like Romero and Carpenter, but public figures like David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen and Michael Stipe — people who used their positions in pop culture to try to do good and effect positive change. I think to anyone who actually knows me, my choices with the brand and this platform have been incredibly predictable. We are the world, bitch.
And on that note, none of these negative Nelsons drown out the things worth celebrating from the past five years. With Meredith Borders (my colleague and friend who I trust more than just about anyone on the planet) as my very first hire, we brought back the magazine (to print? In THIS economy?!) and it’s only gotten bigger and better each year since 2018. We’ve published bylines by folks like Paul Thomas Anderson, Jordan Peele, Tananarive Due, Ari Aster, Chuck Palahniuk, and Joe Lansdale. We got Barbara Crampton to write a personal and informative column about her life in horror, and she just turned in her 19th piece! We have author Stephen Graham Jones (Don’t Fear the Reaper) dropping thoughtful pieces on slasher films in every issue. I got to introduce the legendary Kerry O’Quinn, co-founder of the magazine, to Angel Melanson, the charismatic, blue-haired future of the brand.
And if the job presented opportunities to do things that we felt were important (or even just cool) to do, excuse us for taking them! We’ve platformed countless new voices, and returned the great Michael Gingold to the masthead. When inmates in the prison system had their Fangos confiscated for “graphic content,” we successfully petitioned those prisons and got the inmates their magazines back. We’ve championed films big and small (including one made by teens for $2000). We’re slowly but surely growing the Chainsaw Awards into the genre’s own Super Bowl, filling a deeply felt void in awards season. We’ve raised tens of thousands of dollars for LGBTQ+ organizations through our Pride merch collabs with Fright-Rags, and will continue that mission this year. And Fango’s core team of Meredith, Angel, Jason Kauzlarich, and myself are poised and excited to take the brand into the next era, leaving the shrieking dinosaurs in our rearview.
It’s been five years of big moments, little moments, good, bad, and ugly moments. It has been at once the longest five years of my life, and the quickest. I think it’s been mostly great. And any negative feedback, wherever it’s coming from, only reminds us that our work isn’t yet done. So thanks from the whole Fango fam for many and varied reminders to keep going, and we’ll see you in the mag this April. <3
An earlier version of this article ran in this week’s Terror Teletype. Subscribe!
