Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of The Final Cut. It seems that reviewing “stuff” is becoming quite a regular feature for my column these days. Here is yet another review for you to enjoy.
This week I will be reviewing the second issue of the latest professional wrestling fanzine to come out onto the market, The Suplex Monthly. I would have reviewed their first issue but I could not buy a copy as they were all sold out.
The first thing that I noticed was the value was for money …. or should I say the lack of value for money. The cover price for the fanzine is currently set at £2.50 and for that you get a 40-page publication. other fanzines offer 85-pages for around £2.00.
Once I actually opened the fanzine and flicked through it I noticed a whopping 11-pages of full page adverts. I appreciate that people who put these publications together have to make money to cover the cost of production but filling your fanzine with adverts is not offering the reader value for his money.
The front and back cover are both in colour, but the rest of the fanzine is in black and white, but that is not really important if the content can distract you away from that. Some of the photographs did look to be of poor quality.
Without meaning to sound like an old bitter miser, I paid £2.50 to read an old review of No Mercy, outdated wrestling news, a long-winded review of a Super Dragon feud, a two-page plea for a wrestler (who won’t read the fanzine) to return to her family, and some dreadful paragraphiing in some of the columns.
Apart from the above they have the makings of a very good publication that, with the right amount of marketing, could be a success.
Now do not get me wrong. I am all for these fanzine publications, hell I even write for one of them, but what the readers want to see are columns, interviews, reviews that are not three months old or they have already read extensively about on the internet.
Sadly unless there is a significant change in the content then I will not be purchasing anymore issues.
I was asked to ad this on to the end because apparently people want a more detailed review of the fanzine. Never say I am not a reasonable person.
One page of WWE & TNA news
One page of Universal Uproar news
Two page review of No Mercy
Two page article about PWG
Three pages of Fozzy pictures
Three pages documenting one Super Dragon feud
Three pages about WCW PPV’S
Three pages documenting the future of IPW
Four pages about “Money Performers”
Two pages pleading with Sweet Saraya to come home.
Until next time.
