Hello there! I hope you are enjoying the coming of Spring wherever you are. It’s a welcome change after a long, cold, dark winter here in the UK!
This post is about zines and a zine I recently made. Hope you enjoy!
Zines
I don’t know when I first discovered zines, but the oldest one I have of mine is from 2008. It was called “Dashboard Moon” and I don’t even remember what it was supposed to be about. The front cover was made with a potato print.
From there, I became obsessed with zines. They offered a way to self-publish without a traditional publisher, and offer a space to explore ideas that might not otherwise see the light of day.
I made The Blues zine, loosely inspired by the blues, printed on… blue paper with blue screen printing.
Another, called Holy Moly, with a hole punched through the middle.
Then there was Funny Buggers, a collection of character designs made of unusual scanned textures.
Looking back, these zines were more helpful than maybe I realised at the time.
First, they helped me figure out some ideas by putting them in one place and working in a series. I could see with “Funny Buggers” that I was getting interested in character design. Zines of short stories helped me develop my writing voice and experiment with narrative.
But zines also allowed me to play with the form of what books could be. “Funny Buggers” had a holographic cover and “Holy Moly” had a hole through it. I still love to think about books as objects, which is why I really enjoy working on books with pop-ups or flaps or googly eyes.
Mostly though, zines served as an apprenticeship for making ‘real’ books. Thinking about pacing, layouts, format, etc.
My zine making obsession came to a halt in 2014. I suppose creating kids books took over for a while.
Collapse
I didn’t even really think about zines much for those last 10 years.
But recently, a few things swirled around to get me back into them.
I got into making DIY paper and appreciating the tactility of paper
Social media became too weird a place to develop ideas
Maybe I was a little burnt out thinking about books just for kids
So, I started thinking about zines again. What if I made a zine with the DIY paper? What if I made an unusual narrative format zine? What if I made a zine of all the sketches for projects that never get seen? What if I made a zine in a day? What if I made a zine with no pictures? It felt exciting to be excited about making something different and unknown.
This is the first in what I hope to be many new zines!
It’s called Collapse and it’s kind of about collapsing context. The images are all repurposed from other projects, resized, reimagined, and reinterpreted in this little booklet, along with found typography. It’s also printed on tracing paper, so the pages are literally collapsing on top of each other. And each copy I made, I shuffled the pages, so no single zine has the same page order.
“Collapse” isn’t so much a critique of collapsing context online or in the news, it’s more an observation of the wider phenomenon. It has always happened in the modern world and it can be really interesting. Personally, I love it when things overlap in meaning, like watching TV on mute with the radio on.
It’s also about a love of visual ephemera, too - stickers and graffiti and sweet wrappers and cartoons. And there’s a nod to Ray Johnson and maybe Corita Kent too. Both of whom also liked to play with collaging text and image to create new meaning.
So there you go, after a 10 year break I’m back in the zine game, baby! I’ve got a bunch of ideas for others I’d like to do this year if time allows.
Hopefully this post serves as a glowing endorsement for making zines and inspires someone else out there to get zining*, too!
Thanks, and bye!
Thank god you did Funny Buggers to trigger your character design interest, your characters are amazing! I was already obsessed with your paper experiments, they are *gorgeous* (won't get tired of saying it) and now zines?? Collapse came out sooo cool! Really like the yellow thread detail.