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QRD is a zine.

I started doing QRD in the fall of 1994 & the first issue came out on Valentine's Day 1995.  Eight sheets of paper folded in half with a staple in the middle for 32 pages.  Typed on my girlfriend's electric typewriter.   All the text cut out & pasted on top of album art.  Pages pasted up with marshmallow fluff because I could get that as part of my meal plan at university & a glue stick would cost a dollar.  Printed on a broken copier at the school library that shot out four copies of anything you put in for a dime instead of just one page for a dime (so an issue cost just 40¢!).  Those were the days.  I thought I was on the cusp of taking over the world & building a multi-media empire based around music & magazines.

Anyway, I started it because I had too much time on my hands because I didn't have many friends & I wanted to avoid thinking & I thought there must be other people out there like me & maybe they'd like my zine & maybe they'd like me & external validation is very important to me.  Maybe it worked & maybe it didn't, I don't know.  I guess some of the people who are my best friends now have come through it.  But I'd feel a lot better if I thought it was actually successful & appreciated, instead of just me spending all my spare time & money on something that's a waste of everyone's time.  Maybe it's just because I'm getting older & time is seeming a little harder to find & that things are seeming more & more static & to be expected & not exciting anymore.  I guess this is how things work the closer I get to recognizing reality.   QRD was most influenced as a zine by Whirlpool & 72 Jellybeans & a ton of horrible zines that showed me what I didn't want to do which probably are lost forever to obscurity.  I would like to give a special shout out to some of my zining peers that encouraged me along the way - Jayson @ Permission, Katie @ Thistle, Rhona @ Black Planet, Ian @ Autoreverse, Katherine @ Retail Whore, Richard @ Jack, Ben @ Vendetta, Nathan @ Pretty Bruises, & Octavia @ Outburn. Also a special shout out to all the bands I interviewed over the years (especially Lycia & Attrition who really pushed it forward in the crucial first year & several times since) & to all the labels who have helped out the bands I love along the way (I'm not sure you can really talk about the history of QRD without at some point mentioning Projekt who in some way turned me on to half of the bands interviewed in the first five years).

Most of the covers for the first twenty issues were made by shoving photo negatives into a microfiche reader at the library & printing them out.  It gave it a certain look that I really was into at a time when scanners & digital photo editing were essentially unavailable.

One of the main things I try to do with QRD is interviews & I try to get them as in depth as possible.  I try to really get at things that you don't see in other interviews with a band.  I also hate the article interviews & always stick with strict Q&A, which some people think is amateur.  But those people are wrong.  It's much harder to make someone look interesting & intelligent by asking the right questions than it is to make them look interesting & intelligent by putting in a single quote per paragraph.

Unfortunately QRD stopped being physically printed in 2001 (there are a lot of reasons why, from the rise of the internet to the rise of postage & printing costs to wanting to do longer & longer interviews) & will only be online from here on out, though I may make some ebooks & print on demand collections at some point.  Seven years & twenty issues of a print zine is pretty impressive to me.  Maybe even more impressive than the current run of almost 50 digital issues in fourteen years.  But I look at the total of over 1000 articles & interviews & short stories (probably 1000 of which are by me) & I am really shocked at the body of work.  I hope you dig a lot of the stuff I've done & get to nose around & discover some new stuff that you dig whether you're a music fan or a comics fan or just a fan of interviews.

It might be worth noting that while QRD very rarely does reviews these days, I do put reviews up of old things I never got around to checking out before at Finally Checking It Out & of things I remember fondly (or sometimes not so fondly) at Nostalgia Equals Distortion.

This site was originally designed with Netscape Composer with the help of Melissa Williams back in 1998, though it has been tweaked a bit over the years.  I kinda like that it looks retro now.  Archives is all the timeless material from out of print issues of QRD (I skipped the majority of the reviews & funny pictures, I may eventually go back & put in the introductions to the issues) & pretty much where to go to read everything we have.  Silber Records is a little label thing we do that so far has about 200 releases, there's some MP3 links there.  Zombie Kisses is a serial-story that is about me & my brother & is probably emotionally true if not actually true.  Lost Kisses is a comic about being lost in real life. Tell all your friends about QRD....

 Hrt
Brian John Mitchell
 
 

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short story serial after the zombie plague
a comic about interior turmoil
silber records - a record label
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