Comments on The Zine: 1970ish-2008

I bought a few zines the other day -- over the internet. No, it's not the same. I think the death date is more like 1998 than 2008, though. The birth date, realistically, is more like 1975, or whenever Sniffin' Glue and Punk started publishing.

Oh Paul, don't just blog about how sad you are... make a zine about it!

I don't think so... I live in New York and it is useful to have a zine or other small magazine to bring on the subway, to supplement books and ipod. If light rail service really takes off in Seattle (fingers crossed, I am moving back soon), the same might be true there, and little mags will start up. (The print version of The Stranger will also benefit.) Maybe in terms of angstiness the zine is dead, but there are a lot of zines out there doing cool things.

Ah zines, you died before I knew thee.

Back about 1998, while getting a Fine art minor at WSU, a digital arts teacher had us make a small zine as an assignment. Maybe it was the small town university setting, or it was too late, or that we had no tangible example of what she was talking about, but nobody made a zine in the way one might expect. In the end, we all imagined it like the 8-track.

Maybe in them big cities they lived longer, but I think the internet killed them off well before 2008.

Zines died years ago along with phat pants and dot-matrix printers.

Anyone that says zines are dead was never really up on them in the first place, just like the people who say vinyl is dead.

Paul.... you should check out Art Books Press in Ballard. http://www.artbookspress.com/

Also http://www.nieves.ch for zines by Kim Gordon, Ari Marcopoulos, Mike Mills, Geoff McFetrige, Andro Wekua... it's not dead, it's just evolving.

(And now I'll shut up and get back to work.)

ugh, can we stop declaring things "dead"??

but seriously, i think a big group of people who would have made zines, or did, started writing angsty blogs and so now we still have physical zines, but they're more like artist's books.

that said, i'd much rather read a handmade angsty zine than an angsty blog.

Is the number of retail outlets selling zines a reliable metric? Back in the 1980s and early 90s, I bought zines by snail mail, just as I do today.

By the way, Wall of Sound records on Pine also sells zines; I picked up the latest ong ong there recently.

I don't know about "zines" being dead, but MY zine died circa 2001 when I started college.

Although you can still find references to it on the internet, which is annoying. I wish it would really die.

Paul,

A serious suggestion to pass along to the Stranger's webmaster: If you want to make SLOG more zine-like to soothe the nostalgia of aging zinesters, how about giving commenters the choice of different fonts, for that punky cut-and-pasty flavor?

bah. definitely not dead. i'm working on one as we speak. there's always room in the world for something humble that people can carry around in their backpack or stack by the toilet.

(paul deserves extra props because he's the guy who used to pay out zinemakers like me who sold their stuff at elliott bay)

@9: Declaring things dead is what pop culture writers do.

I'm with @13: zines are still around. I've been doing them since '96 and haven't seen much of a change. I'm still doing one. Check out MRR or Razorcake: there's still a good number of reviews of zines. I've never sold mine at a store, just give them away for free. I don't see the number of places where they're being sold as a reliable metric either.

I do love me some Ong Ong, and there's one of those coming up real soon, I hear. I love how Lucy, the editor, refers to it as a 'fanzine.' It's so retro it's brand-new.

Also see the zine_scene LiveJournal community, with over 3000 members.

Were zines ever really alive. I mean outside of disaffected hippies and pretend anarchists did anyone really care what some doofus with access to a copy machine had to say?

At least a far number of blogs are written by grownups.

I seriously don't know why these businesses don't relocate to the north or south side, where storefront space is ample and cheaper, and people (increasingly outpriced from Seattle) and cities could really use some independent character.

I guess it's because they are just skipping that and moving to Portland where much of that is also true...

Writing my 'zine changed my life. If you've got an entrepreneurial spirit like me, you can sell that shit like Real Change. In the late 90's, I did a 'zine that ultimately got me booked in Benaroya, City council Arts council, and Bumbershoot 2 years in a row. It's might be an old medium, but it's still a viable one.

The city of Seattle still has my poetry on their site.

http://www.seattle.gov/council/licata/poetry2003-2005/p_9903b_ns.htm

Actually, zines started much earlier than hippies. The first ones were done as early as the 1930s (and possibly before). There were many of them. I remember fondly receiving mimeographed and spirit duplicated (dittoed) science fiction and comic book fanzines in the 1960s and 70s.

They were a means of communication between science fiction fans (and later, comic book fans starting in the early 1960s). The genesis of 1980s and 90s zine culture can be traced directly to those early rumblings.

And don't you forget it.

There's a great collection of zines that has just been established at the Duke University libraries. Check it out:
http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/bingham/zines/