1985: V - THE VISITOR TECHNICAL INFORMATION MANUAL - PART ONE (Fanzine)

The Visitors are not our friends!

THE VISITORS: A TECHNICAL INFORMATION MANUAL is a fan publication - of unknown origin - that I've had knocking around my collection for decades.  I've finally got around to scanning it for Starlogged.

I bought this from a dealer at the Westminster Comic Mart (held at the Westminster Central Hall, just across from Parliament and the Abbey) sometime in the late eighties.  There's a very small £4.99 written, in pencil, at the bottom of the (otherwise completely blank) back cover.  That seemed an awful lot of money to a school kid... but finding anything 'V' related at the time (and now!) was pretty hard... so I snapped it up.  Lucky I did as I've never seen another copy in the UK.

There are no credits or publishing information so I've no idea who produced this.  I do seem to recall seeing it advertised in STARLOG magazine around the same time.

It would be nice to think this (or a version of it) was created by the makers of the weekly series to form some sort of writers' bible for the show.  But, knowing their slap-dash approach to their own product, I think we can safely rule that out!  I also recall reading, in the letters pages of DC's V comic, that the producers had never really thought-through the Visitor language and written symbols.  Which makes me think that the guide included herein is fan-produced.  They did a good job, the symbol for "transport" really does appear on the Mothership landing bay set.

The Manual incorporates material and information from throughout the weekly series so it was obviously written after the show's solitary season (which ended in 1985).  There's also a lot of 'gap-filling' which really amounts to fan speculation.  But whoever wrote it does show more creativity than the writers of the show did!

The manual is 32-pages (including several blank pages) printed on pretty cheap paper.  The cover is a pinkish-red colour (my scanner has made it fractionally pinker than the printed copy) and the interior is b&w throughout.  The printing is not excellent which is why some of the pages have "lighter" areas of text.

I'll post the remaining pages over the next few days.

- TO BE CONTINUED -