Sidewalk pranks, music videos, and the inescapable Crazy Frog. Those are the things everyone remembers about exploring YouTube in the early 2000s. Well, that and the visceral, profanity ridden skatepark fight.

Filled with altered screenshots of knockouts and roundhouses, Colton’s zine distills these fight videos into a single moment, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks. Immediate fans of the zine, we reached out to Colton to talk about its creation, its meaning to him, and whether he’s ever been in a fight himself.

Is this zine a love letter to when skating was more delinquent?
Oh, for sure. And like we discussed, this is the era that I loved. My first Thrasher subscription was around 2004, and flipping through some mags from this year is so eye opening. Skateboarding has changed so much, and change can be good, but I think the reasons why I got into it are kind of being lost.

A lot of people nowadays are getting into skateboarding with the intention of there being a paycheck down the line, and maybe that’s not a bad thing, but me and all my friends got into skateboarding because there was no other avenue that we were interested in. We all felt at home with skateboarding and with each other.

For sure, it spoke to me and that’s why I hit you up.
I’m stoked that people are excited about it. Print needs to come back, and there’s room for more projects like this. Like this could have easily just been another Instagram page, but there’s something to putting it into a physical form and keeping it off the internet. Online is so censored, offline is premium.

How’d this whole idea come about?
I was working at Tenant [Skate Shop] for two years and every day I’d be sitting in the shop, and to be honest I was kind of bummed out about where skateboarding has been the last couple of years. So I started thinking about my love for skateboarding, and trying to find where that spark came from.

I was reminiscing on when I first got introduced to skating, and I was going through old magazines and videos that I grew up on, stuff from around 2006. There was one video in particular that I remembered from my childhood titled “Skatepark Fight,” and it was just two young kids in a prefab park yelling curse words at each other.

They don’t throw fists or anything, but me and my buddies would quote the video all the time. We thought it was hilarious, and so I was trying to find this video. While looking for it I started thinking about this idea of wanting to preserve some of these videos that I was coming across in search of that one.

Did you ever find the video?
I found it just after I released the zine. One of my homies sent me an alternative link to it, it’s two young kids, they can’t be any older than 12, and they’re just foul mouths, calling each other names.

It’s just one of those early YouTube videos. There wasn’t a lot of skateboarding on there back then and I grew up in Colorado where there wasn’t a huge skate scene, so I spent a lot of time with whatever video content was available on the internet back then. Coming back to the same links time and time again.

Did it take a long time to find all this footage of people fighting at skateparks?
It took a few weeks of scrolling, a lot of the videos got removed from YouTube so it took some digging through different parts of the internet.

I love the videos because there’s a lack of context. For me, I’m always trying to decipher how this fight started. Like by the end of the video most of the time you get to see a winner and a loser, but you don’t have the backstory. It’s very intriguing, and then by isolating these fights into even slimmer moments by screenshotting them, it felt almost artistic. You’re sitting with one frame of a fight, and it’s up to the viewer to figure out what’s really going on. I thought that was really cool, so I started saving screenshots for myself and then it evolved into me wanting to print them.

What changes were made to the screenshots before they made it to print?
A lot of the fight videos are filmed on cell phones or whatever and they’re quite pixelated, so I did a lot of photo treatments to the screenshots. I easily could have just printed them in the quality of the screenshots, but I wanted to give the feeling that the prints are laying on a camera screen, if that makes any sense. So I was printing them, scanning them back in, and then laying them out.

How many fights are featured in the zine?
I’d say at least 40. At a certain point it started to run dry, like I couldn’t really find any more. And I was trying to isolate niche moments from the videos, so at a certain point they started losing their luster.

What era would you characterize most of these videos?
At first I was going for the older stuff, and there are quite a few I remember watching as a kid, but then I’d say most of them are newer. I found quite a few through Reddit pages and those were definitely filmed in the last ten years.

Of all the fights in the zine, is there one that stands out as being the most iconic?
The one that comes to mind is the cholo guy. He doesn’t look like he skates at all, and he just drop kicks the hell out of some guy. There are two screenshots of that one in the zine.

Have you ever been in a skate park fight yourself?
Yeah, I definitely have. I’ve never seen it, but I’m sure somebody got it on video back at Denver Skatepark. I actually have some plans to make a Denver Skatepark specific zine at some point because I grew up there and some of the stuff that has gone down there is absolutely ridiculous and unhinged.

These parks in the Midwest, or other flyover states, are kind of a hub for juvenile activity, like a lot of the people hanging around Denver Skatepark are there for completely different reasons than skateboarding. So you get all these different people in the same area, and sometimes tensions get high.

Closing up, did you win or lose in your own skatepark fight?
I’d say I lost to be honest, but it was on some graffiti shit, and after the fight the dude came up and gave me all the paint in his bag. So I lost the physical fight, but I walked away that day with respect.

Interview by: Ian Michna
Intro and editorial assists: Ben Komins
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