Harpoon Magazine

In 1992 I was waiting tables in San Francisco, and still dreaming of breaking into advertising as an art director. It would be a year or so before I went back to school to get a degree in English Lit from Berkeley and subsequently start working as a Web writer. So in 1992, I was still focused on advertising or illustration as a possible escape from coming home sticky and stinking of cigarettes and beer at 2:00 am (albeit with $150 in my pocket).

My friend Nick worked with a guy, Todd (Nemet, who was brilliant. I often wonder what happened to him), who wrote for Harpoon Magazine, a monthly comedy periodical. They were looking for someone who could do illustration and ad paste-up on a Mac using PageMaker. So I said, I'll do it. I hadn't much else going on socially. The job paid no money.

From what I remember, there were staff meetings every Thursday evening, mostly comedy writers, editors, ad salespeople, and the owners of the Magazine. Everyone sat around on the floor in the magazine's offices (above the Jack in the Box at 7th and Market, which I think is gone now), discussing story ideas and how ad sales were going. One frequent advertiser was Newcastle Brown Ale. They paid us in beer.

The main guy was Scott Zeller. He was funny, though not as funny as some of the writers who worked there. He was also a doctor, and this magazine was his dream. One day on my way to the magazine to do some ads I came off my motorcycle on Hyde Street. I was wearing shorts and got road rash pretty bad. Instead of going home, I continued to Harpoon. Only Scott was there. He went to Walgreens to get Neosporin and gauze and bandaged me up like a true doctor.

The writers at Harpoon were so funny and smart that I got tongue-tied around them, but they all seemed to like me well enough, and I learned quite a bit about PageMaker, a skill that I put to absolutely no use afterwards.

Around that time there was a competing comedy periodical in San Francisco, Might Magazine, which was magazine format, not tabloid like Harpoon. We all know what happened to the guy who started that.

It was a fun time to be in San Francisco. I felt part of something vibrant and exciting, sitting on the floor in a shitty office downtown, drinking warm free beer. I wonder what happened to all those people. I know the copy editor, Emily, went on to become copy chief at Wired, but as for the others, lost to the ether.

Comments

[carlarey]

I've had jobs like that, where everybody was so brilliant and it didn't feel like work at all, and you are making no money, but feel like you are part of something so that doesn't really matter.
Then someone gets offered a real job, and someone else decides to go to grad school, and suddenly it's ten years later and you google them once in a while, but know that even if you found them, you could never recapture that time.

[annie]

well, with further Googling I found out that one writer is a senior editor at CNET, another is an engineer at Google, and the doctor is still a doctor. Smart bunch!