the whole point of a zine is that it's cheap to produce, amateur and homemade. if you're being asked to apply to participate in a print project, it is not a zine. if the final product is being printed and bound professionally, it is not a zine. if you are being asked to enter into any kind of licensing agreement more complex than "my work can be reproduced as part of this publication" it is not a zine. nine times put of ten if the final product costs more than $5 you have left zine country. im so serious about this.
this isn't snobby gatekeeping or imaginary semantic problems or whatever, this is an issue that has come up irl at cons and zine fairs local to me and which keeps coming up online. people who show up to trade fairs selling professionally printed $15 anthologies as 'zines' have a direct impact on the people trying to sell their $3 chapbooks at the next table over. submission based kickstarter projects that bill themselves as 'zines' exploit the connotations of amateur, punk production values to induce creators to work for less and eschew formal guarantees and protections they are entitled to.
my favorite zines have all been $1 or free and printed on highlighter paper. i used to pick em up from a book store in chelsea that sold predominantly self published work, and had sections for zines. Some were about how to eat cheap in the city when most of your paycheck went to rent, others were talking about the best drag performances in town, and plenty of DIY stuff. all of them had the same unique quality: nobody but the author and their collaborators could've made this, and they wanted to make it easily accessible to the community
i kinda hate that the word that was used for extremely personal and cheap works is applied to essentially art books of your favorite anime OTP
hi! sorry, real quick:
- grab a piece of paper and fold it in half like a book
- write "im indifferent to zines" on the cover
- write "i've never been able to buy one" on the first page
- write "and i'll never be in one" on the second page
- write "just want to be a hater today" on the back
congrats you're in a zine! if you like you can photocopy it and sell it to art students, fellow haters, or anyone with a sense of humour. I'll buy one.
ive been saying this since 2015! all my illustrator friends kept submitting to them (and gettin in which i was proud of) but they... werent zines. they were like massive books with grandiose color schemes and gilded bossing. i couldnt afford them even. zines are oft free or traded and they arent about how pretty a picture you can make.
the first zine idea i found was in a book i checked out from the library (id never remember what it was. it was about cartooning i think and had a section about chibi style lol) that had a little section on taking one sheet of paper, marking it into eighths, cutting a line in the center of the page and folding it over for a quick eight pages. like this
this makes printing soooo easy too. id love to see these floating around places
So I scrolled past this post and was thinking the same thought I always do when I see people talking about zines, which is basically ‘zines are so cool, I’ve never made one because I don’t think I have anything interesting to say in one, but I should make a zine someday if I ever have creative energy again’ and then it gets added to my ever growing mental list of things I want to do but don’t end up doing (I have spent the last several years struggling so hard with my depression that I can’t seam to create anything at all)
And then I thought, hey I have a piece of paper by my desk I should at least follow that diagram and fold it, that way I’m halfway there even if it’s blank and sits on my desk for months, and then 5 minutes later I had this:
Now I’m just holding this little thing I’ve made in my hands and I love it so much
So thank you to this post for inspiring me to make something today! Even if it’s just a simple silly little thing I’m going to treasure it
