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Cut and paste: zines, ezines, and zine culture
By Lindsey | March 4, 2008
Wow, two posts in one day? Since the They Might Be Giants article wasn’t exactly writing-related, here’s one I wrote on zines. Enjoy!
Cut and paste: zines, ezines, and zine culture
Lindsey Rivait
Lance Arts Writer
Zines have been around in various forms since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. People have been self-publishing zines and pamphlets expressing their own opinions and promoting events ever since. Zines gained popularity during the punk D.I.Y. movement in the 1970s with underground publishing and has blossomed with technology—spouting forth the zine, the ezine, and an entire culture that surrounds the phenomenon.
A zine, short for “magazine,” is just that—a short magazine-like publication, usually the size of a piece of paper folded in half. Zines have a small circulation and feature original or appropriated texts and images. In general, zines are not made for profit; an issue typically sells for only $2-5 to cover printing fees. These small circulation zines are not often copyrighted, as there is a belief held among zine creators and readers that the material within it should be distributed freely.
Zines are often made in spare moments, becoming a project the zine creator enjoys doing so much that they don’t expect to make money. “You cannot pay the rent with zines, unless you’re on welfare, too,” jokes Adam Thomlison, while speaking to a room full of Canadian University Press members. Thomlison put together tales of love gone wrong for his zine, We Were Writers for Disastrous Love Affairs Magazine, and runs 40wattspotlight press, which releases books and zines.
Some modern zines are laid out via computer and then printed out. Traditionally, zines are pure copy-and-paste; that is, cutting papers up and pasting them back down, juxtaposing words on pictures, getting your hands dirty and your table sticky. Zines are practical, inexpensive, and also fun to make.
Lindsay Gibb, editor of Broken Pencil, a Canadian magazine that reviews zines and profiles independent arts and music, believes that zines have a big impact on our culture.
“Since there are no restrictions on what zine creators do with their zines, they also impact culture in and of themselves, as a piece of culture. In some cases they document history, so they are important as a record of what is happening and has happened in certain scenes. In some cases they serve to document something smaller, such a segment of the life of the creator. In other cases still, they are a piece of art, a way to express yourself, a form of self publishing and do not document anything except maybe a feeling,” explains Gibb. In addition to reviewing zines, Broken Pencil offers articles about zines, and plans to run more articles focusing on the how-to side of making zines in the future.
There are many different types of zines, including perzines (personal zines), fanzines (made by fans of a specific cultural icon), litzines (literary zine), and ezines (online zines). The very nature of zines allows one to really play with the format, to break the rules of journalism, and to publish personal views.
“Zines are a form of publication that is really open to a lot of people who traditional publishing might ignore or leave out. Not only does this make the content so varied and exciting, but it gives zines a lot of personality as they are all unique in their direction,” says local zine creator Kate Hargreaves. “I think there is a much lesser gap between the contributors and creators and the people who pick up the zine,” she explains.
Hargreaves started her litzine, ibid, to help get her own work as well as her peers’ work out there.
“I was thinking a while ago about the number of really creative people I know in so many different areas, and how there are not many outlets for them to showcase their work. I wanted to collect work from a mix of talented people and put it all together, regardless of what format it took,” says Hargreaves.
While printed zines are much more portable than a computer, their popularity dwindled in the late 1990s, in part due to the growth of the Internet and the subsequent rising popularity of ezines. Ezines are available through e-mail or on a website, and began on the BBS (Bulletin Board System) in the 1980s, but are now moving toward the blog format. “Online zines are more popular under the term blog,” says Thomlison. “There’s no handmade aspect to it, no physical personal connection, no face to face meeting,” he explains. It’s easy to meet or get in contact with a zine creator, which is a rare opportunity in the writing world as a whole, bringing the writers and readers closer together.
The production and maintenance of ezines is arguably easier than print zines and allows the content to reach a wider audience. “There’s also less lag time between issues, or the potential for less lag time,” Gibb points out. On the other hand, “A lot of ezines look exactly the same and blend together, where, I feel, more personality can be put into a printed version,” she says.
For those who are considering starting up their own zine, Hargreaves offers some words of advice: “On a technical level, I would say do your best to get your printing as cheap as possible so you can make more zines and get them out to a broader basis. As far as the zine itself, perhaps just decide yourself what you want the end product to be, and go with it instead of getting bogged down by what people might expect,” she says.
Creativity is key to all zines. “When I teach classes on zine making, the most common questions I get revolve around the ‘how to’ of making them. I think people look at zines and think that they can’t do it themselves, but you absolutely can. Anyone can,” explains Gibb. “Just use your creativity, look at other zines for inspiration, and do it,” encourages Gibb.
As for the future of zines, Gibb is definitely noticing different types of zines emerging. “What I see happening right now is a lot more comic zines coming through our door. I think comics and litzines seem to be the most popular use of zine making right now. I hope to see more political zines popping up, though,” she says.
Gibb remains optimistic of the future. “I don’t see the printed zine dying off, as I may have once predicted. Not exactly dying off, but heading back underground so that they existed on a limited scale. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. There may not be as many zines floating around as there were in the nineties, but there are still lots of them out there and new ones surfacing all the time. Canzine is still crammed, and it only represents a very small percentage of the zines that are out there,” explains Gibb.
The Bookroom, located at 2161 Wyandotte St. W. carries some zines from the area, including ibid. For further information about zines and zine culture, check out Broken Pencil at http://www.brokenpencil.com.
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