Part One - Introduction

Summary

Scrutinising one issue of a fan magazine, while especially paying attention to design and desire, is admittedly specific. While studies of single films continue to be produced and provide useful insights (including Jeffers McDonald 2017), fan magazine scholars generally do not examine a single fan magazine issue. For example, considerations of particular fan magazine titles – such as Sumiko Higashi on early, and 1950s, Photoplay (2017 and 2014, respectively), Jane Bryan and Mark Glancy on Picturegoer during both World Wars (both 2011) – cover several issues of these publications. The relatively recent increased access to multiple issues of various digitised fan magazine titles might be presumed to encourage a broader rather than narrower focus. However, the intense singleissue spotlight allows for the truisms which persist about fan magazines to be investigated more effectively. Such detail is sometimes seen in the analysis of discrete fan magazine articles in studies of individual stars. While these may be positioned in the context of coverage about the star appearing in other magazine issues, Tamar Jeffers McDonald's 2013 study of Doris Day also explores how readers are led through single magazine issues by mentions of the star (41). Jeffers McDonald cites Sally Stein's and Ellen McCracken's comments on the structure of women's magazine issues. According to Stein, ‘the interruption of articles’ causes a reader's attention to spill across the issue and is an ‘inconvenient occurrence’ (Stein 1992, 149), while for McCracken this delay in completing reading an article is pleasurable (McCracken 1993, 8). Regardless of its emotional effect, Jeffers McDonald resolves that ‘[t]he placing of an article or picture within a magazine therefore proves to be as potentially significant as what is being said or portrayed’ (2013, 42).

Although article placement in an issue is important, there is a variety of ways in which one fan magazine issue can be approached. In addition to intense focus on an article (and its location in a magazine), overall tone, matters of race, gender, stardom, advertising, and so on can be studied. Periodical scholars Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman (2010) advocate examining a single issue of a magazine to determine the magazine's implied reader, contents and format.