A history of the zine.
By Jorja Garcia
A few weeks ago, in order to procrastinate a Contemporary Civilization assignment, I spent yet another night engrossed in the multitude of zines, manifestos, and mini-comics at the Barnard Zine Library. Located on the second floor of Milstein, the library uniquely propels student voices, garnering its famous reputation as “The Barnard Baddie of Libraries.” I certainly felt like a Barnard Baddie as I scraped together my own zine from miscellaneous magazines and scrap paper, using glue and tiny scissors from the library’s free collage corner.
I was introduced to the Zine Library during my first month of college, when I attended a workshop led by comic artist Sarah Shay Mirk. I received a free copy of Mirk’s How the pandemic made me rethink gender and created a zine myself. This zine, a commemoration of relationships from my hometown of Oxnard, California, only exists in my camera roll now. However, its significance to me—a reminder of my roots even as I attend school 3,000 miles away—remains just as strong. I had made zines before, but this one sprung my relationship with the medium in the context of Barnumbia: a place where I have learned the importance of pursuing ideas not already congruent with the institution’s.
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Creating a zine can be a daily exercise, like letter writing to yourself, a friend, a stranger; or, it can be a once-in-a-while stress reliever, a reaction to an observation at a bar or a campus library. Zines can capture ideas both bite-sized and fully fledged. On Instagram, Lafat Bordieu uses the zine to extract new meanings from seemingly meaningless cosas que me encontré en la calle (things I found on the street). Ellen O’Grady, meanwhile, highlights the poetry of Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish in their illustrated zine version of his poem “The Prison Cell.” Zines can transcend the individual and the current, entering conversations central to humanity.
The form of a zine—one that literally cuts the conventional magazine in half—allows for lower stakes and decreased institutional oversight. Unlike this very piece, for example, which will undergo a series of edits before publication, zines welcome that which is in progress, unkempt, and often unaccepted elsewhere.
The first hands to assemble these self-published scribbles were science fiction fans raving about their favorite heroes in “fanzines” of the 1930s and 1940s. Since then, the underground rock and punk scenes of the 1960s to the ’90s have helped cultivate the DIY counterculture aesthetic associated with zines today.
At little to no cost, due to self-publishing and an eagerness for dissemination, zines evolved to thread connections among communities thrown into the dust and swept across the streets. As an alternative to the elite and confining perspectives of large publications, zines became a mode of tracing the origins and ongoings of counterculture movements, including their oft-marginalized communities. Zines like Search and Destroy in San Francisco and Punk Planet in Chicago traced local punk scenes. The Sex Pistols produced their own zine titled Anarchy in the U.K. Riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill and Le Tigre made their own zines to spread their disruptive confidence. Shotgun Seamstress highlighted underrepresented Black-punk voices, while Disease Pariah News disseminated important information during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Similarly, Joey Terrill’s Chicos Modernos served as a vital educational resource on AIDS for Chicano and Spanish-speaking populations in Los Angeles.
But as countercultures like punk gained traction, zines also sometimes gave punk a taste of its own medicine, critiquing its lingering facade. Perhaps it is fitting to call punk a white sepulcher, as the racism and sexism bubbling within did not go unnoticed by zinesters like Mimi Thi Nguyen.
Having formerly frequented largely white punk rock moshes, Nguyen pushed against the staggering whiteness in the underground with her 1977 zine Evolution of a Race Riot. Published in Berkeley, California, it contains entries from women and people of color recounting their experience in the overwhelmingly white and male punk scenes across North America. Their stories capture their isolating interactions and the subsequent anger and frustration with being, for example, the only Asian, Black, or Latino person in a space. When such scenes fell short as safe spaces for racial minorities, zines offered an alternative arena.
A critique of punk’s whiteness is important to punk and, by extension, the zine’s very essence: As Kevin Jagernauth says in Evolution of A Race Riot, punk remains “something that we [people of color] can identify with and abandoning that would be like abandoning ourselves.” Here, the zine becomes a tool for reinstating the presence of marginalized communities and demanding new spaces through candid conversations of intersectionality within the punk scene and beyond. Nguyen and her collaborators kickstarted a coalition for those with marginalized identities to support themselves and future generations of punks. They demonstrate the desire for humans to collaborate and amplify their own existence as a form of resistance and an effort towards reclamation. If anything, zines demonstrate the necessity for people to write their own stories, and, most importantly, to be heard by one other.
I encountered Nguyen’s zine during one of my procrastination sessions in the Barnard Zine Library. The Library is a portal of pages exclusively written by women, trans, and nonbinary people. Its ever-growing collection integrates new voices from Morningside Heights and beyond. The zine lovers (like myself) create community by adding their own zines to the collection, holding workshops, and running the unofficial Barnard Zine Collective. The library even holds free events like an annual Scholaztic Zine Fair in late April.
As one sifts through a plethora of pages, magazine clippings, receipts, colored pens, and even lipstick prints, the Zine Library recalls worlds of intimate histories otherwise left in the attic. Jenna Freedman, the library’s director, notes that it has received donations of well-kept-and-cared-for boxes filled with zines and other archival materials. This personal touch makes zines all the more cherishable. As if an old sweater, jewelry box, or quilted blanket were all packed into its creases. While sifting through these boxes, I’ve noticed the frequent use of “I” and “we,” another indicator of the form’s personable affect.
In our conversation, Freedman explained that the use of direct address is crucial in constructing zine introductions, one of the zine’s most essential aspects. Freedman, who has been a part of zine, punk, and feminist spheres since the ’90s, said that in her own zine-making process, she typically writes the reader’s address last. As an opportunity for a powerfully intimate first connection with the reader, it makes sense that zinesters handle the introduction with so much care. While some are simply written like a letter with a classic “Dear __,” others are packed with fervor. For example, in BE YR OWN PUNK by Margot Terc, the introduction reads: “There’s so much set up against us. And yet. We survive, we thrive, we always make it work. That is the punkest thing I know.” Introductions invite readers into the conversation. In Freedman’s words, “A zine should inspire you to make your own.”
Freedman made the initial proposal for the Zine Library in 2003, but today remarks, “I don’t matter, honestly.” This statement, though perhaps overly humble, nonetheless speaks to the way that the Zine Library makes room for plenty of student-led programming, taking its visitors where they want to go. Grace Li, BC ’‘24, for example, taught us how to make cyanotypes in the Library this past September. Even the space’s theme of the month, “We’ve got a zine for that,” is concerned with students’ needs. In January, the theme was “protest” zines amid the suspensions of the Columbia chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, resulting in zines such as For Laura. For Laura is an anonymous work resembling a burn book that expressed widespread dissent for Barnard College President Laura Rosenbury’s censorship of pro-Palestinian voices and promoted the boycott of her presidential inauguration. (Zines like these often lie under the television in the Zine Library for free.)
Reflecting on the Zine Library’s role in student intervention, Freedman only hopes that zines can “continue to be whatever students need them to be, aesthetically and emotionally.” The Library remains a zone at Barnumbia where students can actively search for uncensored and intensely pertinent stories; it aches for your involvement because it can’t continue to exist without you.
Though many of the zines in the Library can function as valuable tools for research, a duality exists in the collection: Some zines are deliberately intertwined with academic dialogues and others (thankfully) not so much. “Sure,” Freedman explained, zines “are a unique pedagogical tool that connects emotionally with a reader.” However, the essence of a zine is rooted in ideals of punk such as a “messy care-space” and “craft.” For Freedman, when reappropriated as a class assignment, the self-initiative that makes zines a destabilizing force in academia may be lost.
Nonetheless, Freedman’s role involves instructing students and faculty how to use zines in the classroom. Certainly for myself, making a zine is more enticing than penning a 10-page paper in classes like Introduction to Sexuality Studies. When I took this course last semester, we looked at zines as primary sources of queer theory and were encouraged to create one as a final project. Many of these final projects, including my own, reconsidered the academic language of authors like Michel Foucault and Jay Prosser.
On the other hand, there is an argument that casts doubt on the idea of the academic zine as a productive tool for cultivating critically new voices. Indeed, zines are useful because of the space they can give to new, less established ideas. An assignment that requires students to rehash decades-old paradigms through the zine may very well be undermining the medium’s essence. A zine should at least attempt to criticize, make fun of, or even mock the language of academia at hand, just as Nguyen criticized punk. In Professor Branden Joseph’s class Zines by Artists, students are asked to explore how “a zine can adopt and interrogate the voice of an expert.” The way that a zine is used can display whether a course actually pushes you to think beyond current institutional boundaries as opposed to simple regurgitation. In the end, as Freedman explained, “If you’re not making [a zine] for yourself, it’s not really a zine.”
Just as zines continue to permeate pedagogy and academia, they are also gaining traction in museum collections, like the Brooklyn Museum’s recent exhibition “Copy Machine Manifestos: Zines by Artists.” This exhibition, now closed, was co-curated by Joseph. The Brooklyn Museum’s Library and Archives also house plenty of zines that remain open to the public.
Upon entering the exhibit last month, I was inundated with zines alongside other paintings, videos, and photography. My eyes darted across the room as I finally saw, in person, zines I’d only ever known through a screen. However, I simultaneously felt a significant distance from them. Enclosed behind glass cases, I was unable to actually touch, let alone flip through, the works. It turns out the zines were still out of my reach. The experience reminded me of the downsides of bringing these zines into the curatorial scene, even as they become accessible to a wider audience. A crucial feature of the consumption of zines, their ability to be held, was now restricted by the necessity of preservation. But zines are not valuable due to the quality of paper they are printed on: It’s about the physical act of holding something in your hands. It’s about feeling the creases, scribbles, and happy accidents that make a work all the more human.
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The publication accompanying the exhibit features an essay by Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson titled “Cool Older Siblings: Queer Zines as Queer Theory.” In the essay, which considers how older siblings can use zines to help their younger siblings develop relationships with feminism, queerness, and sex, Wilson presents a suspicion: “I’ll admit my discomfort with the idea of a museum exhibition of zines. Because the zine is always a super-local and anti-institutional phenomenon, and because it seems nonsensical to try to create a timeline or overview of a movement so vast and unruly. Zines are akin to scribbles on drawing pads shown to friends, or mixtapes given to lovers, or marginalia in books scattered throughout the world’s libraries. How can anyone possibly claim to have surveyed even a sliver of what is out there?” Wilson’s point applies not just to the zine exhibition, but also to this essay.
Wilson gets at perhaps the defining feature of zines: They are, by design, anti-institutional. They are not rigid, and they are not one thing. They don’t linger. They jump around, go from hand to hand, and play hide-and-seek so you can’t chain them down. You have to want a zine, go out and find one, make another yourself, and await them in the corners of small businesses, local bookstores, coffee shops, and record shops. You have to hand them out to friends, get postage for long-distance ones, and give them out to strangers. At first glance, a zine is simply pieces of paper scribbled on and stuck together. The cheap printer paper is easy to tear apart or drown in mud. Nonetheless, zines are created with care. They are unique because they are as ephemeral as each second that passes by, yet shine as infinite and bright as the stars. They capture the beginnings of miscellaneous and creative thoughts that expand into new vortexes of individual personhood all the way to broader humankind; fundamentally, they capture the irresistible itch to create and be heard.
So go steal some printer paper. Fold it once hot-dog style and then twice like a hamburger. Fold another hamburger. Unfold the page and form a mouth by cutting along the two middle short edges of the rectangles. Fold it into a booklet (you’ll figure it out). Write about the raccoon you saw in Riverside Park that reminds you of your pet from back home. Write about the rat that made it up to the top floor of McBain. Write about how Columbia’s gate closures make you feel angry and trapped. Cut out and add some images from a magazine. Include a doodle if you feel confident in your artistic ability. Include one even if you don’t. Now you’ve got a zine.
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