Hi! Welcome to the history of the Action Girl Newsletter. AGN is the very first project I did under the AG umbrella, and I consider it the cornerstone of the whole AG "empire". AGN was/is a newsletter dedicated to networking girls who do zines and comics, and bringing information about zines done by girls to the people who want it. Unfortunately, it doesn't exactly exist anymore...while I fully intended to bring the print version back, I doubt that will really ever happen. Instead, I folded the purpose of the Newsletter right into the comic -- every issue now features the reviews and listings I once would have put in AGN. This works a lot better for many reasons -- one being that I can focus on the absolute best stuff I get and give that stuff more-in depth coverage, rather than being forced to briefly list a huge list of varied stuff. Anyway, here's the background:

It all began in 1992, when I was sending out copies of a new issue of Mad Planet and wondering why I couldn't find any other zines by girls. Not that I don't want to read guy's zines, just that I was looking for other girls writing about their lives. While we were in London for the Fall 92 UKCAC, I found a cool zine called Girlfrenzy in a small magazine shop. It was a comic-oriented zine "by women for everyone" and it listed several zines by girls in the US that I'd never heard of. At the time, Factsheet Five wasn't coming out, and I was really having trouble reading through pages of zine reviews trying to figure out which ones might be by girls and about girl's issues. I kept thinking -- "gee, there ought to be some way to compile this info and network all the girls doing zines, because if I'm having this much trouble I'm sure they are too." After a couple weeks like this, I said, okay, fine, I'll do it. So, I created the Action Girl Newsletter (naming it after my autobiographical comic character) -- the very first issue was only one side of one sheet of paper!!

As many of you know, the whole zine world broke wide and mainstream -- I and all other zine reviewers were absolutely inundated with mountains of zines, many of which were, quite frankly, a little difficult to read. I found myself completely burning out on the whole thing and took about a year off, before starting to pick and choose among submissions and only reviewing the ones I really liked in the back of Action Girl Comics.

So at the moment, that's where AGN lives on!

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