Boing Boing died but was revived as a vary successful blog.
In the world of comics, this happens all the time. Especially with titles like Wonder Woman that have special provisos that if they don’t get published within a certain time frame the right revert back to the original owners.
Outsiders for example, has had at least 3 different runs, 5 if you get particular.
But in general, I think that if you wanted to really revive a long lost magazine you’d have to do it digitally…
Spy (‘The New York Monthly’) an edgy, arcane humor magazine was founded in 1986. It folded in the early 1990s, but came back a few years later as a more mainstream celebrity worship mag (similar to what it used to make fun of) before folding again.
For what it’s worth (and I’m not sure it’s worth much), I didn’t think that the problem with the later issues of Spy were that it changed from making fun of celebrities to worshipping them. It seemed to me that at the end it was still making fun of celebrities, but it just wasn’t funny enough. The magazine never made much money, In fact, over its entire history, it probably lost a lot of money in total for its publishers. The original editors weren’t there that long. The publishers brought in new editors and then folded the magazine after a few years. Not long afterwards it came back with more new editors and then folded again after a short while. As much as I liked Spy at its best, it was really never more than a marginal operation that could never really be worth the bother for a publisher.
Actually it was under Steve Forbes it was a great magazine, showing another side that the left wing socialist extra Y chromosome cretins refuse to publish.
I was thinking Amazing Stories might be a candidate, but according to Wikipedia (if I’m reading it correctly), even though it went through several incarnations, it never actually ceased publication and then started back up again after a period of dormancy.
I wouldn’t call it great, nor did I see any particular bias toward capitalism. It still published some first class history articles.
I still have a subscription, mostly because I bought a long-term sub shortly before the hiatus. I get an issue in the mail every once in awhile, but it’s been only so-so. However the most recent issue pointed out an aspect of the Civil War that has been glossed over (yes, it really was all about slavery; the South and most history books say it was “states rights,” but clearly the only right the South claimed was the right to leave the Union).
I am not dead, and I remember Collier’s. I cannot say for certain, but I expect that if I were dead, I’d not remember it, on account of being nonexistent.
Fortune was one of the great magazines and stayed that way until very recently when it declined badly. It had some of the best analysis of the bank crisis. It’s strength was that it applauded business when it worked right and criticized business when it screwed up. That’s a crucial distinction.
Here’s another one. Business isn’t capitalism. And libertarianism sure isn’t either. Libertarianism is to the social sciences what creationism is to the physical sciences. Rejecting libertarianism doesn’t make one a liberal any more than rejecting creationism makes one an atheist.
…along with other beloved characters Abe “I’m Writing As Bad As I Can” Rosenthal and “Bosomy Dirty Book Writer” Shirley Lord. Trump was also referred to as Donald “Stinky” Trump, reportedly a play on British slang for farting.
I miss that magazine. They had great reporting, their report on the Church of Scientology was one of the first to publish the Xenu story, and they named George H.W. Bush’s mistress Jennifer Fitzgerald.
I loved Spy Magazine, but I used to wonder why anyone outside New York or Los Angeles would read it, as it seemed so focused on the Hollywood and media industries in those cities.
Well, Hollywood is easy - a huge percentage of the population loves movies. I love the New Yorker, even though I’ve not spent more than a month’s worth of time in the city in my fifty years. It’s a great magazine. Spy was like Monty Python in that the parody was so funny that you could be completely unaware of the person or thing being parodied and still laugh.
Thank you, by the way. Responding to your post lead me to look for this example and I found the entire run of the magazine is available, in full readable form, on my beloved Google Books!
I think part of the appeal was that some of the jokes were going just over most of the readers’ heads. Some of the humor was hard to get if you didn’t run around with a very exclusive crowd in New York (and maybe also in Los Angeles). What I liked about the magazine was learning to understand the more arcane references.
I’ve joked that if I ever came into money, I’d like to relaunch American Mercury. I may not be H.L. Mencken but I sure as hell ain’t Willis Carto either!
Altho if I re-launched The Spotlight, then such accusations might be fair.
