Why I Still Make Zines in 2020 (And Will Continue To)

[image description: a person wearing jeans and a gray sweater holding a small pamphlet.]

Last year when I made my first zine (with my friend and co-creator, Harmony Cox) I usually got one of two responses. 1) What’s a zine? 2) People still make zines?

The answer to the second question is easy: YES! There’s still a thriving zine culture, though it did shrink after the advent of the internet, and especially after computers became commonplace in the home. But zine culture never actually died and now that the internet is no longer a novelty, it’s growing again.

So what is a zine? Basically, anything that’s a DIY, handmade pamphlet-style publication. The traditional aesthetic is that they’re collage art and xeroxed, however, the beauty of zines is that there are no rules!

If you want to sew your zine binding instead of stapling, do it. If you want your zine to be in color instead of only black and white, do it. A zine can be dozens of pages or an 8.5x11 folded down to a tiny booklet. Zines can be a single issue or many volumes. No topic is off-limits––there are zines about politics, poetry, and everything in between. Most zines have a theme, though they can also just be a collection of someone’s thoughts. There are no rules.

Zines came about in the 80s and 90s and gained popularity largely in the punk rock, skater, and anarchist/socialist/radical leftist political circles. It was a way to create, organize, and widely share information among underground communities that didn’t typically get favorable news exposure. Zines were typically traded hand-to-hand in communities. In essence, zines were self-published material before self-publishing was cool.

In the zine culture that persists today, makers generally try to hold on to the same spirit of the original zine-makers. Meaning, it’s a proudly analog medium. There may be some zine-makers who post the content of their zines online, but none of the ones I know do. Harmony and I collectively decided that we didn’t want to put Kill the Gatekeeper content online because the whole point is to experience the words alongside the collage art and hold it in your hands.

Many zine-makers today see making zines as a way of intentionally slowing down amid a fast-paced society. Handmaking a zine is a cathartic, meditative act and is an intentional middle finger to the pressure of the world to go go go. I enjoy making zines because there’s no way to rush the process. It’s not something you can “hack” to be more efficient at. The way to make a zine is to sit down and write the content and if you choose to do collage art, you have to sit there and flip through magazines, cutting pieces out, and deciding how you want them to fit together.

I find that making zines requires my full attention. I can’t multitask when I’m making one. Even talking is hard! When Harmony and I get together to make an issue of Kill the Gatekeeper, there are often long stretches of minutes where neither of us speaks because we’re deep in concentration. Zines are manual, time-consuming, tedious labor, and that’s the point.

And given the communities that zines originally took off in, in keeping with the spirit of those original zine-makers today, the content tends to be either deeply personal and/or political. There’s generally a subversive element. Though it’s not a requirement by any means (again, no rules!), people tend to put things in zines that they’d have a hard time finding a home for elsewhere. That’s actually why Harmony and I decided to write critiques of the publishing industry for our zine. What publisher is going to want to publish content that’s critical of their industry and standard practices, however problematic they might be?

At their heart, nearly all zines fight gatekeeping––other zines just usually aren’t as explicit about that as Kill the Gatekeeper is. There are many ways to fight gatekeeping and making zines is one of many, but it’s one I immensely enjoy. Is making zines practical? No. Is it efficient? Absolutely not! But is it fun and rewarding? OH YES.

So I’m going to keep making them and I hope you’ll continue reading them. If you want copies of Kill the Gatekeeper volume 1 and/or 2 (you don’t have to have read volume 1 to appreciate volume 2; they’re standalones), you can grab your copy here.