Zines 101
This blog post is here for when I don’t have enough room in the event description or thing I’m writing to define zines. It’s probably going to end up being revised endlessly, because what zines are is hard to pin down.
Zines are DIY publications. They might take the familiar shape of magazines, booklets, or pamphlets, or might a more unusual shape like a map or a poster. What is distinctive about them is the ways they are DIY. They value the handmade, the amateur, doing things for yourself or together with people you know. They also operate on a different economy from the normal commercial one - and Holly Casio has a great zine essay here about why the economies of zines are important when we are trying to distinguish them from Artists’ Books and other forms of self-publishing.
Although it can be helpful if someone calls what they are doing a zine, it’s not just a question of self-identifying. Some things that people call zines aren’t really zines - Kayne West’s “zine” is an easy example of this. And some things that people don’t call zines are so closely related to zines that it makes sense to think about them in the same breath. Dr Leila Nassereldein makes a compelling argument for the term DIY Publications over zines, particularly in the context of institutional collecting, in this blog post about their critical archives project at the British Library.
Zines have many different histories and sit in a wider landscape of self-publishing as a radical, creative or personal act. Whilst the word zine is often identified as coming from science fiction fanzines in the 1930s, we can trace the histories of zines themselves through the Harlem renaissance, Riot Grrl and Queercore punk culture, the Black Panthers, Victorian women’s scrapbooks and political pamphlets of the 1700s. We can also locate them in a wider global context, for example alongside the Little Magazines movement in India. Zines are full of multiplicity, of diverse voices, stories and histories, and so it’s important that we hold on to their multiple radical lineages instead of looking for a single zine origin story.
Whilst zines aren’t about a single topic, there are ‘genres’ of zines that you might hear people refer to. Examples of these are:
Fanzines - zines around fan culture, about a particular singer, band or music scene, a tv show, film, book or any other form of media
Perzines - short for personal zines, these are zines which deal almost entirely with the life of the zinemaker. They can sometimes feel closer to a diary
Here are some online resources to find out more about zines:
Sherwood Forest Virtual Zine Library
On the Zine Spectrum
I’ve returned to revise this Zines 101 post to add my current thinking, and working definition, of zines.
Attempts to briefly define zines at the start of articles, books, presentations, workshops, will often emphasise the same things:
‘A zine (pronounced zeen as in magazine) is most commonly a hand made, photocopied, or otherwise cheaply produced small circulation, self-published leaflet/comic/literally any other collection of printed paper you can imagine. Zines have historically been a way for groups and individuals to express opinions and ideas that may fall outside of the remit of traditional publishing and self publishing has offered us an alternative. In making a zine you are effectively your own editor, publisher, distributor and boss!’ [1]
‘Zines are noncommerical, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish and distribute by themselves. While shaped by the long history of alternative presses in the United States, zines as a distinct medium were born in the 1930s….As the “fan” was by and large dropped off “zine” and their number increased exponentially, a culture of zines developed.’[2]
‘A zine (short for “magazine”) [3] is a hand-made and self-published mini magazine or pamphlet that is traditionally produced as a form of small-run creative publication rather than for mass circulation or profit.’[4]
Key features of these definitions are: an attempt to give the reader a sense of the material zine (ie. similar to a pamphlet or booklet); some attempt at historicising zines (most often in reference to the ‘first zines’ being made by science fiction fans in the 1930s); an emphasis on DIY values; a reference to zines being made by marginalised people or groups; a relationship to mainstream media; small print runs/small circulation.
But these definitions are more about offering a brief introduction to zines to readers not experienced with them than tangling out any of the complexity of when something is/isn’t a zine. Partly this is because offering some kind of fixed definition of what a zine is/isn’t seems counter to some of the core values underpinning zines, and zines will nearly always offer exceptions to any absolute rules you might place on them.
When does ‘What’s a Zine?’ become important?
In my experience, as a zine librarian, organiser of a zine fest, working on my PhD research with a zine collection and other adjacent writing, ‘What’s a Zine?’ matters when I’m asking ‘Is this a zine?’ in reference to a specific DIY publication. More often than not, the answer feels blurry – something is kind of a zine, maybe calls itself a zine but doesn’t totally feel like one, maybe doesn’t call itself a zine but feels like one.
How to differentiate between zines and other DIY publications? What does it mean to describe zines as distinct genre of DIY Publishing?
The question ‘Is this a zine?’ matters: at the zine library and zine fest certainly, we are trying to make and hold space for zines (specifically); at Wellcome they consider their zine collection to be distinct from other collections (eg. their artists’ books, graphic medicine or pamphlets); I’m writing about zines and the people who identify what they are doing as zine-making specifically, not DIY publications broadly; ‘What’s a Zine?’ also matters when we’re talking about things like ‘Zine Studies’.
Rather than thinking of putting DIY publications on a linear spectrum from Not-A-Zine, to Sort-Of-A-Zine, to A Zine – I’d like to borrow from contemporary visualisations of the autistic spectrum. Instead of seeing the autistic spectrum as a line, from not autistic to a little (high functioning) autistic to very (low functioning) autistic, these visualisations use a colour wheel to convey what it means to be ‘on the spectrum’, with different qualities, characteristics or experiences reflected in the different colours.
So, what does the ‘zine spectrum’ look like? What qualities or characteristics are key to zines?
Different DIY publications and zines have different profiles on the spectrum:
The advantages to these profiles are that there isn’t a clear threshold between when something is, or isn’t, a zine – which more accurately reflects my own experience of reading and working with zines and other DIY publications. Particularly “spiky” profiles for DIY publications might offer insights – why something feels like a zine, and is or isn’t. This spectrum ensures that central to our understanding of zines are the practices and qualities that are consistently emphasised as central to zines.
These profiles might offer a useful tool for zine collections or indeed for researchers writing articles, or me writing my thesis. I’m thinking here particularly about the growth in compilation zines that can often be favoured by collections because of a feeling of ease/comfort when something has been compiled by a ‘professional’.
[1] Cherry Styles (Salford Zine Library), What are zines anyway?, (Zine, 2016), no page numbers.
[2] Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (LOCATION: PUBLISHER, 1997)
[3] Not technically true, but repeated enough times I guess to make it kind of true – zine was a contraction of fanzine, as Duncombe described in the quote before, but I guess fanzine has its roots in magazine so...
[4] Deborah Lupton chapter – Health Zines: Hand-made and heart-felt.
