Tuesday this week, 17th March was a special day for some as it marked the 75th anniversary of the first appearance of a young scallywag called Dennis the Menace. Beside the obvious trouble making antics why is this important to fanzines? Well, let’s find out.

Cover Versions

Starting with covers, Port Vale’s great long running fanzine The Vale Park Beano has an obvious issue. DC Thompson was notoriously litigious but I assume they let this one slide because copyright of words like beano is not really a thing (the logo is a different matter) plus it is a long established slang term for celebration (and apparently is another word for bingo in that there USA!)

Also skirting round the edge of such issues was the use of song names in your fanzine title. We’ve covered this in a few blogs but I need to tell you that I have recently confirmed the existence of perhaps the greatest cover version of all time, Manchester City’s This Charming Fan.  As there were only 2 issues of this ever produced, I expect this fanzine will be worth millions by the time I leave it in my will.

I can’t help but continue inside with them furthering the musical allusion and New Order/ The Smiths cause with the brilliant title of the editorial and pairing perhaps the most miserable pop verse of all time with a comparison to defeat away at Halifax. Majestic.

The editor was in fact making a serious point though, during that 2-4 quarter final cup defeat at Maine Road there had been a pitch invasion during the game. Though this was meant to be a protest directed against chairman Peter Swales things of course took a turn and just 4 years on from Hillsborough the press twisted events and started to question whether it had been right to pull down the fences…

Gerry Anderson was famously precious about the use of anything Thunderbird related. We recently remembered that Fuzzbox had to use images from Barbarella in the video for their massive hit International Rescue https://footballfanzineculture.blog/2026/02/13/floodlightfriday-the-oatcake-stoke-city/ Back in 1989 with a 4-1 thumping of Tottenham fresh in their minds, Chelsea Independent ignored this completely, comparing Terry Venables to Virgil Tracy on a cover.

Tezza was also famously litigious so could Terry and not Gerry have taken legal action…perhaps best not to based on his 1995 experience as England manager in the courts. England managers defending themselves in court, a tradition not carried on by Big Sam.

In 1990, Sunderland’s Wise Men Say went one step further with this cover though, with Asterix and Obelix appearing in Sunlun’ shirts complete with sponsors name. As always with this great fanzine there was a serious point, ticket prices in this case. A season ticket for Roker Park in 1990 was about £85 but the article this copyright busting cover refers to is about a newly announced membership scheme which will do nothing much except add costs. Fans quite rightly protested against it but the like of these schemes are sadly now common..if only there were still more fanzines around to protest.

The article picks the scheme to pieces and is worth a read if you have the time. The “two tier” architecture of this membership masterpiece was a hastily drawn up shitshow created in a smoky boardroom by “businessmen”. Typical of the way clubs were run at the time, happy days.

Cut and Paste

Cartoon copyright was broken many times, sometimes multiple times within one issue. Partick Thistle’s Dear John issue 4 from July 1990 uses cartoons to protest Old Firm dominated Scottish media, unenthusiastically announce a new club signing and poke fun at the demise of neighbours, all using “borrowed” characters. Excellent fanzine cut and paste, handwritten combos here as well.

I’ll include the entire “Noddy” article as it is a great example of the type of bitter vitriol we’ve all encountered and indeed enjoyed when we have played a real part in relegation for local rivals. Aside from Dennis Law who hasn’t wildly celebrated a result for your team that sends your neighbours down although Noddy drinking buckie seems unlively even if he was a Jags fan and I’m not sure copyright owners would have enjoyed him behaving like this.

You never have to look far, as I write this piece a couple of editions of St Mirren classic Saints Quarterly dropped through the letterbox so as an experiment, I decided to flick through issue 22 from February 2000.

Right there on page 34 (40 pages full of quality was SQ) is what looks very much like a Playboy strip by David Rowe. Oh come on, you all remember the classic Daily Mirror strip surely?! It is even signed by Rowe though obviously this is a cleverly edited strip. The repeated photocopying has even covered up the joints and the St Mirren badge is very convincing! Even better, Jim’s surname is spelt wrong (Gardner) and he was long gone from Love Street by then, transferred to Scarborough in 1995.

Cowabunga

I’m not sure that the legal team from Paramount Global read Cambridge United fanzine The Abbey Rabbit but if they had they surely would have shouted COWABUNGA and leapt into action in 1992 when this picture of a supposed U’s fan appeared in issue 24. I’m not sure the Mutant Ninja Turtles ever professed an interest in the 2^nd tier of English football on screen but anyway.

Russell Grant was ubiquitous in the 90s so it is not surprising that long before the days of image rights his face appeared in fanzines. As we’ve said many times, fanzines were always looking for creative ways of taking the mickey out of neighbours and rivals and general fanzine from Merseyside What’s The Score never missed an opportunity to have a go at this. So Grant’s “Your Stars Tomorrow” was gerrymandered for some lighthearted and lightweight jibes at every English target they could be bothered with in this 1990 article.

The “large bejewelled man from Old Swan” took me a while until I remembered that Big Ron had in fact been born in Old Swan on Merseyside. Plus, the bit about grounds like Anfield becoming “all seated and singing will die out completely. Eventually all the season tickets will be sold to robots who will politely applaud after each victory” seems remarkably prescient now.

And Now a Short Break For Commercials

The amount of effort put into copies was sometimes breathtakingly minimal. This cartoon from Hibs Monthly issue 18 in 1989 called “The Jambos” was clearly just a rebadged Yobs strip by Tony Husband from Private Eye fame. Still, it filled a gap and extracted it from cross city rivals. FYI, Barrs newsagent is now a barbers’ shop, one of approximately 27,000,000 up and down the country.

A rich source of space filling in fanzines was spoof adverts. The cut and paste technology used in 1994 by Aldershot fanzine Talk of the Town almost certainly infringed on the copyright of now rebadged travel titans Thomson when taking a swipe at their neighbours from 4 miles away.

Bit of an odd one this, the zine published it’s Farnborough address on just about every page and yet they are suggesting that Farnborough is the last place you’d want to take a trip to..

The Final Whistle

Attempts to be creative often stretched the limits a bit but you can’t begrudge the quality and breadth of work here.

Fanzines stole and borrowed (rarely begged) from a variety of sources and largely got away with it thank goodness, it was hardly grand theft larceny now was it.

We’ve hardly even scratched the surface on this topic yet and we will return to copyright and other general issues of the law being used against fanzines in a later edition. Part II, if I can locate it in my files, will include a cartoon strip called Roy the Racist. You have been warned.