Volume 1, Issue #5 – December 1994

LogBook #5theLogBook ‘Zine was already kind of Trek-centric, but this issue removed any doubt – the bulk of it was devoted to a massive, two-hander review of Star Trek: Generations by Rob Heyman and myself, and it’s still one of my favorite pieces that ever appeared in the ‘zine. It truly gave the impression that the ‘zine was being put together by a bunch of guys who actually hung out together, rather than a bunch of guys who had never met in person and only knew each other via the internet and bulletin board systems.

Issue 5 PDF (6.32mb)

The funny thing is that the blurb at the top of the front page was dead wrong – I just didn’t know it at the time. I was working at a Fox station which had sprouted a secondary station that was intended, from the word go, to be a UPN affiliate. But the negotiations didn’t go as planned, and UPN passed on our little station. I didn’t know, at the time, that UPN then offered Voyager as a syndicated show to another station in the market (where I’d wind up working several years later)… hence the gloomy prediction that Fort Smith wouldn’t be seeing the new Star Trek.

The relationship between theLogBook ‘Zine and work was an interesting one. My use of the photocopier was tolerated because this little thing was pushing a lot of our programming. (There was use of other equipment at work too, including the screen-grabs from TV spots for Generations that appeared on page 2 and the DS9 screen grab on page 8.) The falling-out with UPN was an unanticipated speed bump in that cross-pollination.

The layout continued to evolve, with a one-time-only 90-degree rotation of the masthead on the front page. I liked the curves I was learning how to do with the dividers between columns/articles, but I can’t tell you what was up with the first-time-I-ever-touched-Mac-Paint-style shapes surrounding the next-issue blurb on the last page…