Thrown into the mix with George, Mademoiselle, and Brill’s Content, Bust magazine, a small independent magazine for women "with something to get off their chest" received its last rites from the national media in late November (see "Bust goes Bust," This Just In, November 15, 2001), when reports emerged that the parent company had laid off the magazine’s staff. The Magazine Publishers of America even included Bust in its list of Defunct Magazines of 2001, an admittedly star-studded cast.

But reports of Bust’s demise were greatly exaggerated. In an unexpected turn of events, Bust’s founders were able resurrect the magazine, and they’re now working around the clock — for no money — to put out an April issue, the first since last summer.

You could say the sagging began when co-founders Debbie Stoller and Laurie Henzel sold Bust, which they started in their spare time in 1993, to Razorfish Studios, run by CEO Jeff Daschis. Mere weeks after a laudatory, well-placed piece on Bust appeared in the September 10 New York Times, Razorfish Studios started swimming upstream financially and opted to lay off the magazine’s staff. (The Studios, a division of the Web company Razorfish, has since gone out of business.)

However, right before Christmas, Stoller and Henzel managed to negotiate, with gratis help from lawyer friends, to buy back, for an undisclosed sum, their trademark and the rights to publish their magazine. "Those guys are not involved with it any more," says a victorious Henzel, from her home, where the two women have fashioned a makeshift office featuring one big plywood desk held up by boxes.

Now that the divorce from their sugar daddies is final, these ladies have moved on to step two: payback time. "We decided to devote the next issue to [the theme of] ‘Fight Like a Girl,’ because we had this big struggle behind us," explains Stoller. The issue, which will feature Lili Taylor on the cover, will include stories on female suicide bombers in Sri Lanka; a woman who is fighting breast cancer with humor; a woman who decided to join the army after September 11; and an interview with the creator of The Powerpuff Girls.

There’s still one big problem, though. While newspapers and magazines jumped on the pun-friendly story about Bust going — heeeheee — bust, no one’s been around to dispel the misleading information, save for a small early-January New York Post piece that detailed the financial constraints put on the women. "I hope that we’re as able to get the word out that we didn’t fold as much as we were able to get the word out that we did fold," says Stoller.

True to form, the Bust women are trying to learn from their experience of "losing their baby" and subsequently getting it back. "I think we were pretty afraid of being businesswomen before; now we’re just like, ‘everything can be learned,’ " says Stoller. She elaborates, "The whole game of bringing in money before was like ‘yuck,’ and now it’s like ‘yum.’ "