Thoughts on making zines after 7 months

Last weekend, I took part in a panel discussion about making zines with Tero, H-P and Jukka at this year’s Finncon. We had a wonderful 45 minute discussion: many good things were said but a lot remained unsaid due to limited time so I wanted to share my thoughts on zines, especially from the perspective of a new zine maker.

What’s a zine?

When I tell people I make zines, the first question always is: what’s a zine? Zines, short for fanzine and parallel to magazine are a grassroots media format that started in the early 1900s from American political activism and spread especially in the science fiction fandom from 1930s onwards and later found popularity also in punk scene.

American zines trace their origins to the amateur press movement of the early 20th century, when amateur printers purchased their own presses in order to produce small works concerning a specific topic or interest. Components of the amateur press movement can be seen in an often overlooked precursor to zines, the “little magazines” of the Harlem Renaissance. While not unique to the Harlem Renaissance, during the 1920s, individuals or small groups of Black artists and writers used the little magazine (a short, small distribution magazine) to undermine the established literary system. These self-published works, often local in scope, featured lesser-known voices of the Renaissance along with those of greater prominence. - Zine History & Culture, University of Virginia’s Library

Zines are prominent in counter culture as they enable people who don’t have access to spread their ideas via publishers or traditional media. In the age of the Internet, that dynamic has changed a lot and indie web movement shares a lot of similar ideas with zine culture.

My zine inspiration

I’ve been following a few zines and zine creators for a few years. Julia Evans’ Wizard Zines are fantastic programming zines that have been a huge inspiration for me to start making my own. JP Coovert’s tabletop roleplaying zines and his enthusiasm to share and encourage everyone to make their own zines has been another big source of early inspiration.

In Youtube and Instagram, there’s a ton of visually stunning zines being shared by incredible illustrators. That’s been a double-sided sword for me. For a long time, they’ve been a bit of a barrier for me: I’m not an illustrator and in the beginning, I felt that I should also be able to make those beautifully illustrated zines to make it worth the while.

That couldn’t be further from the truth though. If you’re in the same boat I was in, this is me telling you: make a zine. Stop worrying about how it looks and just go and make one. And read a ton of other zines to see that there’s so much variety out there (see recommendations at the end).

My first zine: Roll the Zine

Somewhere around the Yule holidays (likely after a few drinks with aforementioned Tero), I decided to start practicing. My “ultimate goal” was to make those software development zines but I wanted something less stressful with less expectations to start with.

I had recently started writing about games with more focus to figure out how to write interesting pieces about them (for example this year for Helmet gaming challenge) and I love board games so picking up board and card games as my zine theme emerged from there.

When I was working on the first issue, I was looking at one of my board game projects dubbed Roll the Rest (a variant of sorts of Reiner Knizia’s High Score) that I had a printed a C cassette cover for.

Hence, Roll the Zine. On its website, I currently describe it as follows

Roll the Zine is a board and card game focused zine and a love letter to creativity, gaming and DIY culture. It's an exploration of media, imperfection and putting something out there.

I’ve now published 5 issues and they are all quite different from each other as my skills and my idea about zines have evolved. I want to keep experimenting with the content, layout and presentation. I’m very systems-oriented guy so establishing a format and repeatable system is natural and highly desirable to me and with the zines, I want to fight that.

Human curation and recommendation algorithms of the web

I advocate for human curation. It’s always been valuable but it has become extremely important in the era of social media platforms and search engines that decide what you see through recommendation algorithms that emphasise controversy, rage bait and hate.

Roll the Zine is a zine that lives and breathes that idea.

I write about board and card games I enjoy to share them with other people. My experiences, my thoughts, my preferences. The goal is to share those so others could discover them and add new games to their enjoyed collection.

Community

Zines are historically very communal. Some of them are collections of articles and art by people who read them. Others include commentary and letters from readers to writers.

I really want to get there with my zines in the future. So far, it’s just me putting ideas together, turning it into a pdf and printing them out. I’m participating into the community with my zine and writing though: Of Dice and Meeples is a monthly Amateur Press Association (APA) to which people who write about board games submit their zines and articles.

If you are interested in board games and want to write something for Roll the Zine, get in touch! Email address is in the info box after this blog post.

Connection through the century

Fanac’s archive has a ton of scifi zines from 1930s onwards. I have never felt any kind of connection or similarity with people who lived a hundred years before me but reading through these zines I felt such thing.

As I was reading through the early issues of Comet or The Planet, it felt like I was reading stuff written by people like me who share similar interests of science fiction and are contributing to the fandom.

Recommendations

If you’re into board games, check out my Roll the Zine as well as Of Dice and Meeples APA (and the people who submit to it).

For science fiction, Fanac archive is a wonderful collection.

For software developers, Wizard Zines is a fantastic one.

To find zines of various topics, Sherwood Forest Zine Library is a great place.

Half a year retrospective

I’m so glad I started finally making these zines. It has given me a new creative outlet, led me to a bunch of great discussions with people who enjoy either zines, board games or both.

I have learned so much about the tooling: for brainstorming, for crafting the pages, for turning a pdf into both digitally readable and printable versions, for printing and much much more.

I keep A4-folded-to-8-pages blank zines on my desk and in my backpack at all times so I can experiment and draft whenever an idea for a potential zine pops into my head.

In addition to the 5 published issues of Roll the Zine, I’ve been experimenting with other zine ideas. I have half-finished Saoirse Ronan Appreciation Zine and Florence Pugh Appreciation Zine in my virtual desk drawer. I’ve been drafting a couple of technical zines.