Bitch’s relationship with that crazy series of tubes known as the Internet has been marked by emotions ranging from mild curiosity to passionate indifference. The magazine was born in 1996 in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was also ground zero for much web- related hoopla—Wired, Yahoo!, and the short-lived Future Sex magazine, among other entities. From a zeitgeist perspective, our little paper zine was in exactly the right place at exactly the wrong time.

“People think I have the greatest job in the world,” says “Spooky” Suicide. On any given day, he’s busy coding, designing, or holding up the business end of his website. It doesn’t sound too glamorous—until you realize that his site, Suicide Girls, is probably the best known in a growing trend in adult entertainment: alternative, independent web porn. Of course, amateur pornography is nothing new—the popularity of home videos and webcams have made it relatively easy and cheap to produce—but the average amateur site doesn’t feature girls with baby-blue dreadlocks and septum piercings. As one Suicide Girls slogan declares, “We’ve kidnapped your daughter and given her a tattoo.”