The Unloved #1

The Unloved Issue 01 began exactly the way the best underground skate zines should: half-planned, sleep-deprived and held together by blind confidence. The original idea was simple, photocopied black-and-white pages, hand stapled in true fanzine style, with copies quietly stolen from workplace printers over a few weeks. But when Justin suddenly got access to a professional print shop for a few nights while his boss was away, everything accelerated before the issue was even properly finished. The cover still wasn’t sorted, so a last-minute instant camera photo of local groms hanging around Campbell Parade became the front image. In the pre-digital era, even getting photos developed was a gamble, often involving half-day waits only to discover the shots were blurry disasters.

One of the biggest frustrations surrounding Issue 01 was not being able to contact skate photographer Gabe Morford, whose photo of Billy Valdez directly inspired the name The Unloved and was originally imagined as the perfect cover image. Without permission and with no fast way to contact him, the idea was abandoned. The famous Unloved logo itself did not even exist until days after printing. Sneaking into the print shop late at night, the pair attempted to operate industrial printing machinery with almost no real knowledge of how any of it worked. Metal plates, pagination, folding, stapling and giant guillotines quickly turned into chaos. The cover accidentally printed as a negative, Justin nearly lost fingers to the industrial cutter and the only paper stock available was awful glossy paper. The finished product looked rough, cheap and completely imperfect, but by sunrise The Unloved existed, born from equal parts desperation, stupidity and pure love for skateboarding culture.