Making Zines!

I've been making zines. Kind of obsessively. I have no idea what triggered this, and that's fine. I tend to strike while the iron is hot, or I try to. If I don't do it that way then I don't get shit done.

Zines. I've made about six of them in the past week. Mostly sketchbooks and comics. Stuff I already had lying around and decided to paste up into little books, print on my shitty old laser printer, trim with my shitty old paper cutter, and staple into zines. Maybe add some dashes from paint pens on the covers.

I've written about this before, but I consider my first encounter with the concept of a zine to be from around 1980 when I got my wee child hands on some mini-comic sized DC origins comics. I remember thinking "wow... you can make comics this small?" Later, around 1987, my friend in high school introduced me to some proper small press zines and APAs. Proper zines... 8.5x11 sheets of paper with photocopied pages folded and stapled into digest sized books. A revelation!

I created lots of them in the 90s. Traded with other zinesters. Had a grand ole time. Then the internet came along and changed literally every fucking thing in the world.

Anyway... I've been making zines again. The only real difference in my methods this past week is that I'm pasting up in Photoshop instead of with scissors and tape.

The first one I made is the 24 page Hymla the Horn sketchbook. I had just finished drawing two dozen or so drawings of this plump barbarian wench in my square sketchbook, so the drawings were all in a square format. I printed these on 8.5x11 and then just trimmed them down to their final 4x4 size.

Once I held this on in my hand I knew I had once again been bitten by the zine bug. I had to make more. After all, I have a metric ton of material lying around I can use to create these little books. Let's have some fun, then.

Next up, I created another square format book collecting various recent sketches and drawings. I called it Swim With the Fish based on a drawing of the same name. This one was also 24 pages, as were most of the ones I made this week.

Then I created one called Space Run, which is a bunch of doodles of weird space people and ships.

After that, I kept going. I made I Am a Robot... Can you guess what's in it? Oh, there's a follow-up called My Metal Head but I don't have one printed out right now to photo. Also about robots.

So the most recent one I put together I just finished a few hours ago. It's called Yria. That's that name of the implied setting of Black Pudding (explicit in issue 7). It features a 16 page comic about Zarp, my little red devil character. The idea here is that I'll do an issue now and then featuring comics that take place in this world. Fun, right? This one is a digest sized zine, larger than the others.

Yeah, so this has been a hoot. I would like to put all these up for sale on my website soon. I just need to sort out the shipping method and costs. I know you can drop a single mini comic into a standard envelope, which would be the price of a single stamp. But mailing all of these at once would cost a bit more. I'm thinking somewhere around $5, media mail, in the USA.

I'll post about it when I can. Anyone interested in getting these can keep their eyes peeled. Each copy is unique because I'm adding a bit of paint color to the cover and signing them. Plus, as is the nature of hand-made zines, each is necessarily unique because you're printing and trimming by hand. Also, my old laser printer has spotty blacks... which I kinda like. Gives it a bit of texture.

More later. If you are a zine fan, let me know about your zines or your zine collection! I love that stuff.