Matthew Johnson couldn’t come to the Boston Zine Fair last weekend: he was locked in the Worcester County jail. In his stead, he sent delegates to watch his booth and sell the last five issues of Poor and Forgotten, the small Xeroxed pamphlet he’s been putting out since he started serving time.
Poor and Forgotten costs a dollar per issue, but according to a sign taped to the table, Johnson “prefers trade because there isn’t much to read in prison.”
Boston’s second annual Zine Fair, organized in collaboration with the Papercut Zine Library and held this past weekend in the Massachusetts College of Art gym, brought together more than 40 zine makers from across the country. These are the young people who think blogs just aren’t enough. And while most of their work does not bear much likeness to the ferociously political, radically oriented zines of their hardcore ancestors, many are bringing something new to the table.
Because blogs have made it so cheap and so easy for people to distribute information, this new generation of zinesters has infused the medium with a keen sense of production aesthetics and elegance of form. Simply speaking, many zines are becoming beautiful — a strange development indeed for an industry once associated with cheap printing and snaggletoothed staples.
According to fair organizer Janaka Stucky, a former zine maker who now runs a small publishing firm called Black Ocean, interesting writing is no longer enough: readers can get that with a mere click of the mouse. Supporting the zine industry, on the other hand, requires a lot of effort: one must scour catalogs, order from small distributors, and wait patiently for things to arrive in the mailbox.
“People are doing smaller runs,” says Stucky. “But they’re doing, like, handsewn binding, or they’re silk-screening their covers — because what’s still important to us as a DIY culture isn’t just the information that’s held in it but the production and the handmade aspect.”
Take, for instance, Elsie Sampson, a student at Westchester Community College, who has spent the past year putting out the charmingly detailed zines Chinese Sweatshop and Chinese Kitchen. For the cover of her Philly Zinefest Diary 2005, Sampson uses gift-wrap, intricately cut cardboard, and soft yarn binding. The whole thing comes in a plastic bag filled with a random assortment of goodies (ours contained a tiny colored pencil, a wooden number nine, and ticket stubs).
While Sampson may offer an extreme example of the new aesthetic, a lot of zine makers showed signs this weekend of heightened appreciation for things like typesetting and color coordination.
As the product gets prettier, the make-up of the zine world seems to be changing as well. Music is less central now, according to Stucky, and the emphasis on gutterpunk authenticity has settled down. The creators’ ages now skew more into the mid 20s than the late teens, and way more of them than before are college educated.
If you must, call it leisure-class takeover or gentrification. But zines still haven’t lost all their snarl, as illustrated by a short comic book called Hexxxed, which was printed on tiny sheets of yellow scrap paper and held together with a single staple.