Defining a zine
(This is a live document, an eternal draft, if you like. I’ll be expanding, revising, deleting and denying sections over time as my thoughts organise and develop.)
One of the challenges of scanning and indexing a zine archive is the edge cases. Most of the zines in my “boxes of zines” are clearly zines. And most of the items that aren’t zines but have slipped in there are clearly not zines. But then there’s the stuff that is but also isn’t, or isn’t but also is. How can I decide if they should be included in the final archive?
Zines as a category of publications emerged over the 20th century due to increased accessibility of print reproduction technologies, most significantly but not exclusively the photocopier, and the establishment of an affordable, flat-rate international postal service. And as is often the case for emerging things, the terminology came later.
More than a fanzine
A simple etymology would be magazines, then fan magazines, then fanzines, then zines. But fanzine has a quite specific meaning - a magazine made by fans of a thing. This is quite reductive. Many of the zines in my collection are not about a thing written by a fan of that thing. Many are things in themselves. A poetry zine that contains only poetry (and no articles written by people who love poetry) is still a zine, no?
So while a significant number of zines are fanzines the term zine is not usefully a contraction of fanzine.
Are zines magazines?
Physically, yes. They tend to be pieces of printed paper bound together to create a readable publication. But a magazine (when it’s not being used to store ammunition for a weapon) is a periodical publication with issues coming out in sequence. Not all zines are periodical and not all are numbered. Some are stand alone entities, like books.
Are zines books?
Yes? But then what is a book, exactly? I worked in a bookshop for a while and the definition of a book is broad as all hell, mostly coming down to anything distributed with an ISBN, and you can put an ISBN on pretty much any printed object - maps, posters, pamphlets - and much else besides. A tiny number of items in my collection have ISBNs, because the creator decided to buy a range of numbers so they could be distributed in bookshops.
Physically we think of books as having a significant number of pages bound with a spine which bears the title of the publication. Not many of my zines meet that criteria but some do.
But the books definition collapses when you reverse it. The vast majority of books are not by any definition zines because they are published by publishers, not individuals.
Are zines self-published?
This is getting closer to my preferred definition. A zine is a publication that is not published by a company. Mostly they are made by individuals, but often groups of people come together to make zines. When this happens they may call themselves a press or a publisher, because they are, and publish under a brand name, but this will be distinct from a commercial publisher.
Or will it? This is one of the tricky lines to draw. Conde Naste is clearly not a publisher of zines. Some kid photocopying 50 copies is clearly a publisher of zines. But what about publishers than emerged from zines? The first issue of Escape, which came directly from the 80s UK comics zine communities, is probably a zine. The last few issues were definitely not zines. Was Slab-o-Concrete publishing zines? When Pete Pavement first used the name he certainly was, but by the end he was an indie book publisher. Spiritually all his books were zines, but should we include them in a zine archive? To do so feels like it opens the floodgates in a not-useful manner.
This happens a lot with the US mini-comics scene. Zines in the US had much wider audiences than in the UK and so could scale up to fairly decent print runs. Meanwhile indie comics from the likes of Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly were printing similar numbers for the bulk of their lines. From my perspective as a comic shop customer the latest issue of Eightball or Palookaville was clearly not a zine, but Factsheet Five would review them alongside all the other zines because outside of the myopic comics scenes they were spiritually and economically on a par.
And then there’s the people who moved to an indie publisher. Wither Jessica Able’s Artbabe, a self published comic that was picked up by Fantagraphics. Should I only include the issues she self-published, even if there’s no substantial difference between them and the ones from Fantagraphics?
Are zines a business model?
Or maybe an anti-business model? Traditionally in publishing you make something and someone with financial capital offers to publish it on your behalf, taking the risk in return for some of the rewards. They might be a transnational corporation, they might be your Uncle Bill, but they are not you.
I would say a zine bypasses this. The photocopier allows for an early type of print-on-demand, reducing the initial financial outlay. Orders come in direct from readers and the postal service was shockingly affordable by todays standards. For the cost of a few beers you could run off 20 copies of your zine and send a few out to review zines, waiting for the orders to trickle in. If you were running a periodical you could offer pre-orders or subscriptions to cover the next issue’s costs. I never made a profit from my zines but I never really lost money either.
Zines enables communication between individuals and within communities using publishing without capital investment.
Are zines uncommercial?
A common criticism of material published in a zine is it can’t be any good because if it was it’d published by a proper publisher. And in many cases this is fair. The vast majority of zines are, by most critical standards, not very good. In many cases this was the point - everyone’s first zine is crap, because you have to start somewhere. But your second one is better, and the third better still. If you stick with it you might even become “good”.
And so, in comics at least, a lot of publishers would keep an eye on zines to see who was developing into a commercially viable talent. My old chum Frazer Irving ironed out the creases in his work in zines and then one day we were looking through his portfolio and realised he was ready for the big time. The next year he was earning a living working for 2000AD.
But uncommercial is about more than quality. Something can be of the highest quality but not be commercially viable simply because it doesn’t have a large enough audience to justify commercial production, and I would argue many of the best zines come into this category.
The beauty of a zine is it can reach a handful of people and still be as viable as if it were reaching thousands. So if your words or art or ideas are only of interest to a small community, but that community happens to be spread over the world, you could reach them through a zine.
This is why so many of the important zine communities catered for niche interests and minorities who were ignored by commercial publishers, sometimes out of prejudice but often because there was simply no money to be made from them.
Zines are not labour
This is a funny one, as zine production clearly involves significant work and effort. But I would argue that this work is not done for financial compensation or reward. It is done in service to the zine and the communities in which the zine exists.
If you are required to produce a zine, say as coursework for an academic qualification or promotional activity for a business, then that is not, by this definition, a zine. We might call it a faux-zine, or an un-zine. It may have all the physical attributes and contents of a typical zine but the manner in which it was commissioned, indeed the very fact that it was commissioned, voids its zine-ness.
A zine is made as an end in itself. It serves no purpose other than to exist as a zine. It’s existence may provoke change in the world, such as inspiring others to make their own zines, but it’s production is self-contained and autonomous.
That is not to say that publications made as labour do not have value. That would be absurd and render vast swathes of creative activity obsolete. All we are saying is those publications are not and will never be zines.
Zines are networks
No zine stands alone. OK, zines can stand alone, but they tend not to have any readers. And that’s fine. A zine with one reader is still a zine.
But on the whole zines exist as nodes on a network, as part of a scene. A zine in the classic mould would have a section reviewing other zines, and these reviews would mostly service a pointers, not critical appraisals. These pages would position the zine as part of a network of other zines, defining itself by association.
Beyond self-identification, the reviews section invited readers to explore the network. When I came across a new zine that I liked the second thing I did after reading it was to send off a bunch of cheques and SASEs (self-addressed stamped envelopes) for any zines I didn’t recognise and liked the sounds of on those pages.
Of course the networks were not discrete. They overlapped and you could argue quite convincingly that there was only ever one zine network because you could conceivably travel across the reviews pages between every zine ever reviewed by another zine.
Not every zine had reviews, mind you, especially those that were less periodical and more discrete book-like objects. But they still existed on the network thanks to review zines, even if they were effectively dead ends. (Although even if they didn’t include reviews they’d often come with fliers for other zines. The medium of the network was as much the envelope as its contents.)
Zines can be mail art (but mail art isn’t always zines)
Mail art and zines overlap a lot, particularly in their networked structure, and from a distance are basically the same thing, but there are some nicely chewy distinctions.
Mail art is a sibling discipline to zines, being artworks that use the postal service as a medium for collaboration and production as much as a means of distribution. If you’re not familar with the concept here’s a video of Mark Pawson showing some of his archive of 1980’s mail art. A definition of mail art could begin with “multiples of an artwork that are intended to be sent by post and are constrained by that intention” and many pieces of mail art could easily be classified as zines.
A very ziney form of mail art is what Mark calls an “assembly magazine” where contributing artists make work to the same dimensions (usually an A4 sheet), make a required number of copies or versions (which may or may not be unique) and send them to an assigned collator. The collator then collates the pages into a magazine which is sent back to the contributors and maybe any not-contributing subscribers. (Eagle eyed readers will be thinking this is basically an Amateur Press Association, and they’d be right.)
An example of mail art that is not at all zine-like would be one-off objects like rubber-stamped prints and decorated envelopes. These can be awesome, but they’re not zines.
The big question is whether all zines are mail art. I would like to think that they are, but it’s not a hill I’m comfortable dying on. For one, zines are not exclusively distributed by post. They are stocked in shops, sold at markets and zine fairs, traded at gigs and festivals. Selling or trading zines face to face could even be the norm for some communities that were more geographically localised.
Zines are content-agnostic
This is important to me as many of the “zines” in my collection are identical in form to a standard comic book. Rol Hirst’s The Jock has a cover, text on the inside front page, 20-ish pages of serialised comic story, 2-3 pages of letters from readers and capsule reviews of other comics in his network and a back cover. He is copying the format of commercially published comics, which in many ways is the point. Like many people whose comic zines are in the collection, he wanted to do a comic just like the comics he admires, and so he did.
What makes it a zine is not what’s inside it but that it fits the criteria I’ve outlined above. A zine can be about anything and contain anything.
There is no zine aesthetic
This shouldn’t need stating, but I see this a lot in the post-internet zine revival era. A dominant zine aesthetic did evolve due to technological and mechanical constraints at specific eras. Type-written text dominated when typewriters were common. Photocopying dominated when photocopiers became accessible. Letraset was a thing up to the mid-80s because desktop publishing didn’t exist yet. The “DIY zine aesthetic” comes from working with the limitations of the tools available to you and making the best of them. And of course there were plenty of zines that didn’t look like the dominant aesthetic of their era because they didn’t use those tools.
A zine doesn’t have to look like it was made in a 1980s bedsit by someone on the dole and to do this deliberately with a 2020’s computer leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I mean, it’s fine, do what you want. A retro-looking zine is just as valid as any zine. But a zine doesn’t have to look like that.
Not the end
This is very much a work in progress and an attempt to answer a question to which there probably isn’t a clear answer, because the most important thing about zines is that they don’t fit into clear categories. They are awkward irritants that exist because they need to, not because there’s an allocated space for them.
But there’s a great pleasure to be found in attempting to define the indefinable because even if I never come to a neat conclusion the journey will force me to think deeper, challenge my assumptions and consider new things.
If you also have absurdly nuanced thoughts about what a zine is and isn’t, the sort of thoughts where people look at you funny when you try to articulate them, and have been prompted into further thoughts by what I’ve written above, drop me a note at pete@peteashton.com