Zines

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Zines

Zines are nonprofessional, anti-commercial, small-circulation magazines their creators produce, publish, and distribute themselves. Typed up and laid out on home computers, zines are reproduced on photocopy machines, assembled on kitchen tables, and sold or swapped through the mail or found at small book or music stores. Today, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 different zines circulate throughout the United States and the world. With names like Dishwasher, Temp Slave, Pathetic Life, Practical Anarchy, Punk Planet, and Slug & Lettuce, their subject matter ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, making a detour through the unfathomable. What binds all these publications together is a prime directive: D.I.Y.—Do-It-Yourself. Stop shopping for culture and go out and create your own.

While shaped by the long history of alternative presses in the United States—zine editor Gene Mahoney calls Thomas Paine's revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense "the zine heard 'round the world"—zines as a distinct medium were born in the 1930s. It was then that fans of science fiction, often through the clubs they founded, began producing what they called "fanzines" as a way of sharing SF stories and commentary. Although it's difficult to be certain of anything about a cultural form as ephemeral as zines, it is generally accepted that the first fanzine was The Comet, published by the Science Correspondence Club in May 1930. Nearly half a century later, in the mid-1970s, the other defining influence on modern-day zines began as fans of punk rock music, ignored by and critical of the mainstream music press, started printing fanzines about their music and cultural scene. The first punk zine, appropriately named Punk, appeared in New York City in January 1976.

Central to the story of zines is Factsheet Five and its creator Mike Gunderloy. Part accidental offspring of the same letter sent to a dozen friends, and part conscious plan to "connect up the various people who were exercising their First Amendment rights in a small, non-profit scale [so] … they could learn from each other … and help generate a larger alternative community," Gunderloy began Factsheet Five in May 1982 by printing reviews and contact addresses for any and all zines sent to him. The result was a consolidation and cross-fertilization of the two major zine tributaries of SF and punk, joined by smaller streams of publications created by fans of other cultural genres, disgruntled self-publishers, and the remnants of printed political dissent from the 1960s. A genuine subculture of zines developed over the next decade as the "fan" was by and large dropped off "zine," and their number increased exponentially. Three editors and over sixty issues later, Factsheet Five continued to function in 1999 as the nodal point for the geographically dispersed zine world.

Zines are, first and foremost, about the individuals who create them. Zinesters use their zines to unleash an existential howl: "I exist, and here's what I think." While their subject matter varies from punk music to Pez candy dispensers to anarchist politics, it is the authors and their own personal perspective on the topic that defines the editorial "rants," essays, comics, illustrations, poems, and reviews that make up the standard fare of zines. Consider the prominent sub-genre of "perzines," that is, personal zines that read like the intimate diaries usually kept hidden safely in the back of a drawer. Here personal revelation outweighs rhetoric, and polished literary style takes a back seat to honesty. Unlike most personal diaries, however, these intimate thoughts, philosophical musings, or merely events of the day retold are written for an outside audience.

The audience for zines is, by and large, other zine editors. While the practice is changing, and selling zines is becoming commonplace, it is traditional practice to trade zine for zine. Those individuals doing the selling and trading in the 1980s and 1990s are predominantly young, white, and middle-class. Raised in a relatively privileged position within the dominant society, zinesters have since embarked on careers of deviance that have moved them to the margins: embracing downwardly mobile career aspirations, unpopular musical and artistic tastes, transgressive ideas about sexuality, and a politics resolutely outside the status quo (more often to the left but sometimes to the right). In short, they are what used to be called bohemians. But there is no Paris anymore, instead there are small subcultural scenes in cities scattered across the country, and bohemians living isolated lives in small towns and suburbs. Zines are a way to share, define, and hold together a culture of discontent: a virtual bohemia. "Let's all be alienated together in a newspaper," zine editor John Klima of Day and Age describes only half in jest.

One of the things that keeps these alienated individuals together is a shared ethic and practice that they call: Do-It-Yourself. Zines are a response to a society where consuming culture and entertainment that others have produced for you is the norm. By writing about the often commercial music, sports, literature, etc. that is so central to their lives, fans use their zines to forge a personal connection with what is essentially a mass produced product. Zines also constitute another type of reaction to living in a consumer society: Publishing a zine is an act of creating ones' own culture. As such, zine writers consider what they do as a small step toward reversing their traditional role from cultural consumer to cultural producer. Deliberately lowtech, the message of the medium is that anyone can do-it-themselves. "The scruffier the better," argues Michael Carr, one of the editors of the punk zine Ben is Dead, because "they look as if no corporation, big business or advertisers had anything to do with them." The amateur ethos of the zine world is so strong that writers who dare to move their project across the line into profitability—or at times even popularity—are reigned in with the accusation of "selling out."

Sell out to whom? For over 50 years zines were unknown outside their small circle. But this changed in the last years of the 1980s and the first few of 1990s when a lost generation was found, and young people born in the 1960s and 1970s were tagged with, among other names, "Generation X." This discovery of white, alternative youth culture was fueled in part by the phenomenal success of the post-punk "grunge" band Nirvana in 1991, but it was stoked by nervous apprehension on the part of business that a 125-billion-dollar market was passing them by. In December 1992 Business Week voiced these fears—and attendant desires—in a cover story: "Grunge, anger, cultural dislocation, a secret yearning to belong: they add up to a daunting cultural anthropology that marketers have to confront if they want to reach twentysomethings. But it's worth it. Busters do buy stuff." As the underground press of this generation, zines were "discovered" as well. Time, Newsweek, New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today all ran features on zines. Looking to connect with the youth market, marketers began to borrow the aesthetic look of the zines and lingo of the zine culture. Some went as far as to produce faux fanzines themselves: the Alternative Marketing division of Warner Records produced a "zine" called Dirt, Nike created U Don't Stop, and the chain store Urban Outfitters printed up Slant —including a "punk rock" issue.

As zines became more popular the walls of the old bohemian ghetto crumbled. New life and new ideas made their way inside and the norms and mores of the zine world were challenged. For some, the disdain for commercial and professional culture was supplanted by the realization that zines could be a stepping stone into the mainstream publishing world. For others the reaction was the opposite: the call was to raise the drawbridge and keep the barbarians at the gate. Writers searched for more and more obscure topics, and thicker layers of irony, to separate themselves from the mainstream. Accusations of "sell out" became as commonplace in zines as bad poetry.

The attention span of the culture industry is fleeting, but what motivates individuals to write and share that writing endures. And so zines will endure as well. The medium of zines, however, may be changing. With the rise of the Internet, and the lowering of financial and technical barriers to its entry, zines have been migrating steadily to the World Wide Web. But there will always be a place for traditional paper zines. After all, the telegraph, telephone, radio and television never did away with the newspaper. It also doesn't really matter, for zines are less about a material form and more about a persistent creative and communicative desire: to do-it-yourself.

—Stephen Duncombe