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 The Music of FANGORIA, and a whole bunch more.

Here's what we've accomplished together so far, since the campaign launched on October 28:

Over 6,200 people have shown their support for this project, making us the fourth most successful non-fiction book campaign in Kickstarter history! We’ve reached our first TEN stretch goals, allowing us, thanks to you, to make a bigger, longer, fancier book, one with deeper content, red gilded pages and a ribbon bookmark. We’re now able to open the vault to backers and show never-before-seen finds from within our physical archives, and provide special, exclusive perks like a FANGORIA calendar, Gorezone archive access, and a digital download of our all-new Music of FANGORIA album to backers. 

With less than 48 hours to go, our next stretch goal can still be reached if we make it to $750,000, at which point we’ll add another 16 pages to the book, a Horror Hall of Fame segment honoring the artists who have made this genre what it is, as selected by the Fango editorial team based on categories chosen by our backers. It’s been one of my favorite parts of reaching some of these stretch goals: the bigger the compendium gets, the more space we have to let the people who are helping us make this book (YOU, in other words) weigh in on what it will be! 

On that editorial front, I’ve been hard at work with our A+ team of contributors: FANGORIA Creative Director Jason Kauzlarich; current and past Fango editors Phil Nobile Jr., Tony Timpone, Michael Gingold and Chris Alexander; esteemed genre journalists Sean Abley, BJ Colangelo, Brian W. Collins, Amelia Emberwing, Richard Newby and Eric Vespe; and so many vastly important filmmakers, effects artists and performers who have helped shape FANGORIA’s pages over the years. We’re deep into the research and talent interview portion of the job (which, candidly, is my favorite part!), but we’re also happy to share a few pages with the FANGORIA community, as thanks for your support:

You don’t start working for a magazine unless you’re passionate about the written word. That’s something that gets lost in all the online noise these days – the passion for print, for history, for journalism, for human artistry. Every single person who works for FANGORIA shares this passion, and that’s what First In Fright: The FANGORIA Compendium is about for all of us. We’re just lucky and grateful to be able to share that passion with you. Thank you for helping us do that.