I bet by now you're wondering who the heck I am and why I'm doing this online magazine. I've been a phan since 1993 and have seen the show many times in Toronto and the Music Box Tour. In 1995, I realised that there was not a lot of information on the women who played Carlotta on the Internet, so I decided to make a website with the information I had. That grew into The Carlotta Shrine and was eventually joined by The Piangi Shrine.

I was the Canadian Correspondant for the POTO Phantom Magazine, and when I heard that was ending, I decided that the Phantom world still needed a fan-based magazine. After doing a little bit of cost research, I decided the easiest (and cheapest!) way to produce this would be online and free to everyone.

But where to put this magazine? I didn't want to use Tripod or Geocities, because I wanted this to look professional and the banners that those sites use was not what I wanted. Then Karin Willison told me that I could use some space at her phantomoftheopera.com domain - as long as the magazine was kept small!

So I had a place to put it. But what about people? I started out asking people if they wanted to join a regular staff, but that didn't work out to well so I started bugging people to send me stuff when I was doing the issue. As you can see from the size of this issue, it seems to have worked!

Right now, I'm pretty happy with the way the Phanzine looks and is working. But I can always use submissions of stories, reviews, interviews, and other great stuff! Or even a little contribution to the Opinions section!

I want to thank everyone who has contributed stuff to the issues, Karin for the webspace, Carrie Hernandez for the advice, Krista for some proof-reading, and all of you for coming to the site.