Fuck Quirky: Zines are Dead, Long Live Zines

As any good quantum mechanic will tell you, things react differently when they’re being observed. In the ten years I have been making zines, I’ve watched the interaction between the mainstream media and the zine community with a participant’s nervousness. I’ve had members of the mainstream media express frustration with the reluctance of many zine makers to be interviewed. This is not simply a kneejerk reaction, or underground snobbishness. There are several reasons for the friction, and to understand those reasons some history is in order.

What Doesn’t have Punk Roots?

For better and for worse, the punk fanzine spawned the modern zine. As a gutter subculture with no moral or financial backing, no glossy magazines emerged for the fans of 3-chord malice. So, punks made their own, with the same disregard for professionalism that made their music so alien and new.

Other ignored gutter subcultures have been guilty of self-reportage in the past, most significantly science fiction and comics. But the Eighties glut of computers and copiers made zine production accessible like never before. An international mail network -- with Mike Gunderloy’s review zine Factsheet 5 as the hub -- grew to encompass countless obscure interests that had not been covered in mainstream outlets.

This brief history hopefully gives a some context to what I’m about to say: Zines have come to exist because of a lack of perspective presented in mainstream media, and the people who make them are often those who know their perspectives are not being represented. On a personal and conceptual level, zines oppose mass media’s presumption of presenting a comprehensive view of the world -- an antagonistic relationship where the two parties ignored the existence of the other. For a while, at least.

Keeps Them Off the Street

In the late Eighties and early Nineties journalists in search of human-interest copy started doing pieces on zines for their papers. It’s a natural. Dailies, like the Toronto Star, love to generationally-inform their parental subscribers and present them with young people who have controversial things to say. These stories usually have a picture of the zinester sitting amongst her pile of zines or in a regretful pose, along with some quotes about why she took up her crazy hobby.

Is all press good press? If you are interested in making waves in the mainstream, probably. But if you dislike the mainstream, in fact, if you have put a lot of time into participating in a community that thinks the status quo sucks ass, then probably not. The zinesters I’ve talked to usually feel like they’ve been misrepresented or trivialized by the mainstream press. Journalistic conventions are what make this difficult to avoid, for a number of reasons.

Journalists prefer to use verbal quotes rather than zine excerpts, despite the fact that most zinesters are better writers than speakers. There is very little chance (and to be fair, space) for the zine community’s history to be recounted, and so zinesters are presented without context -- the lone gunman syndrome.

Usually, a way to purchase a zine (and often the reason why a zinester consents to a story) will not be included because it breaks the rhythm of the style. When it is included, the orders that come in are often few, and are simple consumer purchases -- Here’s my dollar, Here’s my address. This is in contrast to a chatty letter from someone who knows that a considerable perk of doing zines is the letters and the feedback. A person who does a zine will almost always prefer a trade over the token dollar or two because with that trade comes the possibility of making a connection with a like-minded person.

At least you got your picture in the paper! is something your mom would say, and our culture’s mania with celebrity makes mainstream media exposure highly valued. But the zine community, while affinity-based and cliquish, is basically non-hierarchical: anyone can do a zine, and everyone who does one is more or less equal. Media attention directed towards one zine throws that out of whack.

Mass media needs to implicitly answer the question, why is this newsworthy? Therefore, a zine with an easily summarized topic will be covered more often than a zine about an average person’s life, even if the latter is of much higher quality. The poorly-written Temp Slave gets far more ink than the influential Cometbus, confirming most zinesters’ suspicions about how mainstream media always gets it wrong. It’s sad to think that for many people Temp Slave is their only exposure to zines.

In most cases when a zinester gets an interview they can expect a few orders, a moment of fame in a forum that they don’t necessarily value, and a vastly simplified explanation of the things they write about, including a playing up of their weirdness. More or less it’s a zero-sum proposition, which accounts for the reason why once is often enough for the average zinester.

The Zine Book Phase

After a few hundred of these stories, mainstream media outlets felt safe labelling the decade-old community a new phenomenon. The Zine Explosion! was declared, and several books on zines appeared.

One kind of zine book consists of reviews of zines, which list many that are no longer published (such is the nature of zines, they do not necessarily live on indefinitely). Another kind is anthologies, some of which misguidedly reset the text into distinctly unziney pages. Some zinesters have compiled their material into books, with varying degrees of success. A few books analyze the history of how zines emerged by those who have actually made zines themselves (the best is Stephen Duncombe’s Zines: Notes from the Underground, Verso 1997). None have been bestsellers even though they hypothetically have a built-in market. But a demographic that distrusts hype and corporate brands, not to mention a hesitance to spend more than a dollar or two at once, is not easily targeted. Certain key elements in what makes zines appealing, such as the immediacy and the potential for personal contact with the writer, have been killed by the aloofness of big publishing.

When zine books receive attention, the coverage usually comes with commentary on the zine phenomenon. Naturally, this demands talking heads who can comment on the whys and wherefores. Zine writers are often unwilling to play this part, or they are too focused on their political agendas to be credible. So, the editors of review zines and organizers of zine fairs are contacted for their opinions. They appear to be closer to the journalistic ideal of objectivity. Due to the fast-paced media environment, the same reliable people are called upon again and again. A few have emerged as spokespeople.

While this is quite natural in many ways, there’s a basic flaw. Is it possible to be a mass media spokesperson for a community that feels disenfranchised by that very media? The problem became more complex when the spokespeople began parlaying their exposure into a permanent niche. After quitting their day jobs, they became more concerned with presenting a topical view of "their" subject, rather than the bafflingly diverse one that would be truer to the spirit of the community. Thus began the quirkification that now exists.

Quirk Mechanics

Sure, zines are quirky. But the problem is the singularity of that view. If a woman you know is an intelligent, deeply committed, slyly funny, and terribly cute person, it’s untruthful to present her as simply cute even though that will be what the cameras see first. Further, once quirky zines were privileged with attention, zines that are too complex or sincere fell by the wayside. Zines exploring sexual abuse and anarchist philosophy don’t get a lot of attention regardless of their substantial readership. These zines exist to address the issues that the mainstream media has a tendency to ignore, and why would they pay attention now? It’s no coincidence that the ironic and clever zines mostly done by straight white boys with no messy issues are enjoyed by straight white boys in the mainstream media.

Which is not to belittle quirky zines that have impressively negotiated the mainstream coverage issue. The guy who does Dishwasher (sound bite: he wants to wash dishes in all fifty States) was invited to be quirky-filler on the David Letterman Show. He sent a friend instead to impersonate him, and got away with it. The guy who does Infiltration (sound bite: he explores off-limits urban territory) showed up for his television interview in a Ninja costume. Both gestures betray the anti-celebrity streak beneath the quirky facade: not everyone wants to be famous.

Small is Beautiful

Doug Holland started his zine-review magazine, Zine World, a few years ago despite the existence of the old standard Factsheet 5. It had undergone several changes since it was taken over by R. Seth Friedman -- it was bigger and glossier but came out less frequently. This made Doug, who did a zine himself, feel out of touch with the zine community. He also felt that the reviews in Factsheet 5 weren’t as brutally honest as they should be.

They weren’t exactly in competition with each other. They were on opposite ends of the zine spectrum. Factsheet 5 was magazine-sized with a full-colour cover, a large newsstand distribution, and a high media profile. Zine World is a digest-size b&w affair, like most of the zines it reviews.

Despite its lack of flash, the quality of the reviews in Zine World, is far better. It has developed a loyal readership and when Factsheet 5 stopped publishing, it was obvious that the zine network would live on. Zine World’s distribution is lower than it could be because, unlike Seth, Doug refuses to send zines to stores on consignment; he insists on cash up front. I was curious about the policy, being different from the unlimited growth strategies of most entrepeneurs, so I decided to get in touch with Doug for an interview.

It was not easy. Doug tried to get me to do it via e-mail at first, and then eventually set a date once I explained it would be more of a brainstorming session for this article. We talked about the final issue of Factsheet 5. At about the same time mainstream interest in zines was dropping off, Seth packed it in, pricing the Factsheet 5 name and database software at $70,000US. While we agreed Seth had put a lot of time and effort into the venture, we were amazed at the amount he wanted for it, especially considering that Factsheet 5 had been built on the uncompensated efforts of countless zinesters. But it seemed to be symbolic of the difference between Zine World and Factsheet 5.

Instead of the expansionist business plan of Seth, Doug does everything small. When I asked him about his policy with stores, he shrugs and says that it’s primarily because it’s a hassle the other way, not to mention a money-losing proposition. Unlike Seth, he’s not positioning the zine as a "Guide to the Zine Revolution." Instead of splitting the focus between the zinester community and a potential mainstream audience, he has decided to provide a service to the former.

At the time we met, he had decided on a name change (another business mistake) to A Reader’s Guide to the Underground Press. A similar change suddenly occurred to me: after the press frenzy around punk in the late Seventies ended, the kids playing punk rock started to call it "hardcore." Under the new monicker, the hardcore scene flourished for twenty years, blissfully below the radar of mainstream media, before breaching the surface again with Green Day.

The mainstream media is done with zines -- everything it picks up it must also eventually drop. Now when it ignores zines it does so smugly, with the self-satisfied pity that the trendy have for something passe. But for most people who do zines, their attention was an irritating moment -- a bizarre blip. Now that they’re gone, zinesters can get back to their abnormal lives.

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