Xero 9 cover illustration byBhob Stewart, originally printed onDayGlo red paper. To see this image at full resolution, go toPotrzebie.
Xero was afanzine edited and published byDick Lupoff,Pat Lupoff andBhob Stewart from 1960 to 1963, winning aHugo Award in the latter year. Withscience fiction andcomic books as the core subjects,Xero also featured essays, satire, articles, poetry, artwork and cartoons on a wide range of other topics, material later collected into two hardcover books.
The first issue was distributed September 3–5, 1960, at Pittcon (the18th World Science Fiction Convention inPittsburgh). That issue featured an article aboutCaptain Marvel andFawcett Comics, the first "All in Color for a Dime" installment. In 1961, Lupoff wrote an article forComic Art about the launch ofXero and his focus on comics:
The night of the costume ball, Pat and I showed up in our costumes: hastily devised Captain Marvel andMary Marvel outfits. Mine was made from a set of long underwear, and hers was nothing but a man’s red T-shirt emblazoned with felt lightning, plus a yellow sash. They were extremely popular costumes. Everyone fromDoc Smith on down wanted to take our pictures. Why?… The only conclusion that can be drawn is that it was not us, nor our costumes themselves, that were popular. It was Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel, momentarily embodied in us, that drew the admiration and applause... Further, "All in Color" has been the most letter-provoking feature ofXero, numerous people have requested copies, specifying that their motive is to obtain the comics articles, and if all the authors currently committed to write for the series come through with articles, the series will run well into 1962 before material runs out.[1]
The format ofXero imitated Ace Books'Ace Doubles (two novels bound together with cover illustrations on front and back). WhenXero was flipped over, it revealed a second cover leading into an article on comic books. These articles were mostly about 1940s superheroes: "The Spawn of M.C. Gaines" by Ted White; "Me To Your Leader Take" by Richard Ellington; "The Big Red Cheese" by Dick Lupoff; "The First (arf, arf) Superhero of Them All (Popeye)" byBill Blackbeard; "OK, Axis, Here We Come!" byDon Thompson; "One on All and All on One" byTom Fagan; "A Swell Bunch of Guys" byJim Harmon; "The Four-Panelled, Sock-Bang-Powie Saturday Afternoon Screen" byChris Steinbrunner; "Captain Billy's Whiz Gang!" byRoy Thomas; "The Second Banana Superheroes" byRon Goulart; and "Comic of the Absurd" by Harlan Ellison. These articles were later collected in the hardcover bookAll in Color for a Dime (Arlington House, 1970), reprinted in paperback by Ace Books in 1971 and Krause Publications in 1997.[2]
Other articles and art fromXero were reprinted inThe Best of Xero, published by San Francisco's Tachyon Publications in 2004.[3]John Hertz reviewedThe Best of Xero inEmerald City:
Davidson, Carter, and Stiles all contributed toXero; Stiles, who in 2004 was on the Best Fanartist ballot, then drew with a stylus on mimeograph stencils, the technology of the day. Pat & Dick Lupoff typed stencils in their Manhattan apartment, printed them on a machine in Noreen & Larry Shaw’s basement, collated by hand, and lugged the results to SF cons or stuffed them in mailboxes. The machine had not been given byDamon Knight,A. J. Budrys explained in a letter after a while, but lent. Eventually drawings could be scanned by electro-stencil, a higher tech. Colored ink joined colored paper, sometimes wildly colored.Xero could be spectacular. Knight later founded the Science Fiction Writers of America; he and Budrys were each later Writer Guest of Honor at a Worldcon. James Blish won two Retrospective Hugos in 2004; inXero he reviewed Budrys’Rogue Moon (not reprinted by Tachyon), andKingsley Amis’New Maps of Hell. You’ll also see Anthony Boucher, Harlan Ellison, Ethel Lindsay, Fred Pohl, Rick Sneary, Bob Tucker as "Hoy Ping Pong", Harry Warner—fans and pros mixing it up. Roger Ebert, later a movie critic, contributed poetry, often free-style, or formal and funny in his fanziner’s version of Browning’s "Last Duchess":
