Talk:Gent (magazine)

Prod

It is certainly frustrating when editors create articles without sources or a more compelling statement regarding notability. Presumably the people motivated enough to create it actually have at least one, which would put them in a better position to be able to write about it. When they don't it often is left to those of us who don't have ready access.

Anyway, as a general statement, like Playboy, many of these men's magazines are not simply pictures but contain fiction and non-fiction. Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, a recurring character in many of his novels has his fiction published in these sorts of places. That's not made up out of nowhere; look at Cavalier (magazine) for example. Google Books search shows Gent was repeatedly given as a market in the yearly writer's market: where & how to sell what you write and other similar reference books. One of the more notable authors to have written in it was Edo van Belkom, some of whose work for the magazine was collected and republished as a book, Virtual Girls[1]. Jack Ketchum's "Jail Bait" appeared there[2] as did Stephen King's "The Boogeyman," "Strawberry Spring," "Man with a Belly"[3] and "The Cat from Hell" (this last in fact links here). There's a $400 copy of it for sale online! There was a contest to have somebody write part of the story; Cavalier published one with the winner, and Gent did one with the runner-up. I don't believe anything but King's own version has been anthologized, so these are King rarities, it would seem. Both The Boogeyman and The Cat from Hell were made into movies.

Charles W. Sasser's Magic Steps to Writing Success also mentions getting started in Gent. On the topic of their non-fiction writing, an article from it is included in a bibliography in Russ Meyer--the life and films by David K. Frasier. It's mentioned in at least a couple novels, Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey and Kiss It Goodbye by John Wessel.

That's what I quickly come up with; it looks like there's more online regarding it. There are holdings in Michigan State University Libraries' Popular Culture Collection.[4] (non-circulating). It's also worth remembering that there could be sources offline too, though it's possible there aren't. Шизомби (talk) 00:58, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, no replies. Less than 30 watchers, so that could be why. I am inclined at this moment to remove the prod and replace it with notability and expert tags, and proceed to work on the article when I can, as I believe the beginnings of my investigating the topic above indicate it may be notable. There is unfortunately as of this moment no notability guideline for magazines. There is a proposal incorporating one at Wikipedia:Notability (media)#Newspapers.2C magazines and journals; I think it's possible it may meet at least one of those proposed criteria. Since removing the prod tag may prompt an AfD, I will note I'm not adverse to that at some point in the future, but for now I would like to work on the article and essentially follow WP:BEFORE by investigating the article history, tagging the article, notifying informed editors, doing a good faith investigation for sources, and seeing if it can be brought up to the standards of policies and guidelines for at least an acceptable stub or start-ranked article. I do not believe it is obviously hopeless, and think it is possible it can be fixed through editing. Other options other than AfD I think potentially could include merging to the publisher, if the publisher is notable, or an article covering the market, rather than having separate stubs for magazines within the market. I would tag the article to indicate it will be worked on, but the inuse tag appears to be just for a revision so active that edit conflicts are likely to result and I will not be active to that degree, and newpage only if it was just created. inconstruction would be appropriate, but that's for templates in construction; hopefully this talk page comment will suffice to indicate that it is agreed that there are problems and that they are going to be worked on. Шизомби (talk) 17:40, 16 December 2009 (UTC)