Making Zines is Important

various PHX zines

Atomic Elbow issues

On twitter today it seemed like everyone I follow was talking about making zines (or 'zines short for fanzine or magazine depending how you feel about it). I really like reading and buying zines. I love writing for The Atomic Elbow, and the other zine work I've done. I don't often think about how much of the creative life I've lived intersects with zines, and how embedded they are in all creative communities.I'd like to do a formal piece highlighting some of the unique instances of zines crossing into the larger world, but that will take some time. For now I'm just going to embed a link to a little twitter essay I jotted down about my personal involvement with zines (click it to read the whole thing)...https://twitter.com/OneWordLong/status/962067459611095041And here is another link, to a blogpost about How to make a microcomic in under 5 hours for less than $20, that found thanks to Kawai Shen. I don't know Shen, but their page has a lot of good content on it, and this post from Cute Juice Comics in particular is a great primer for getting started in making zines. Incidentally, DIY comics and zines have an important shared history, and you can learn a lot from both.