State Of The Compendium

We’re in the final stretch of our 30-day Kickstarter campaign for First In Fright: The FANGORIA Compendium and Volume 1 digital archive companion. Experiencing the reader support for this project has been enormously heartening, because it shows how deeply you all value our magazine’s legacy, and that means the world to us here at Fango. FANGORIA has been pioneering horror journalism since 1979. This publication took horror seriously when almost no one else was open to treating it as an artform of any real consequence.

It’s one reason I’ve loved the magazine all my life – that care and respect it has shown for a genre I adore – and I suspect that’s true for many of you, as well. That’s why this project is so important: we’re all working together as conservationists of horror history and scholarship. If you’ve pledged any tier or shared our campaign, you have become a member of this movement. 

There have been a few questions about how we’re working within the crowdfunding process, and I’m happy to answer some of those here. To clear up any confusion, the Kickstarter acts as a platform to allow readers to pre-order First in Fright: The FANGORIA Compendium. We, amazingly, reached our funding goal within something like 62 minutes of launching, so this book is a guaranteed reality!

It will be all-new content – new perspectives on FANGORIA’s entire run, from 1979 to today, new insights about the rise and fall of horror trends and how they have intersected with the most important moments in the publication’s history, new trivia and stories and memories from the people who have helped build this magazine, or whose careers have been shaped by it. This book isn’t about repeating what Fango has already done over the years – it’s about commenting on it, learning from it, seeing it with new eyes. It’s a scholarly dive into a publication that means a lot to every single one of us who are working on the book, and hopefully, to all of you, as well.

It’s a separate project from The FANGORIA Digital Archive, but the campaign is also helping us build the online archive of the magazine’s first volume. The archive will be indexed, searchable and will offer robust functionality – all features we couldn’t build without your help. To that end, we have many different tiers of support, starting at $10 for access to the digital archive. You can also get bundles including the book and the archive, and then of course we have so many fun extras: trading cards, special editions and covers, signed copies, VIP event invites, blood-red vinyl copies of