Another journal

Thinking about how, even if stamps were 22 cents and you were maybe using your student status to get cheap or free copies, setting your horror review zine at 50 cents a copy in 1987 is still mostly about the love of the game.

I’m so curious about what era someone slapped the $1 price sticker on this. My copy? I picked it up for $10 and it came in a heavy-weight sheet protector, yet the staple was still in (and un-rusted, somehow?! I immediately removed it). Worth it, honestly.

I used to have trouble falling asleep as a kid and I spent a lot of those hours staring up at my TMNT poster through through visual snow, doing the math for how many ads I’d need to sell to break even printing a comic book that was X pages long. I am not great at math but the simple building blocks of X pages total minus Y pages of story, leaving ? pages for ads, then break that down, etc., etc., I could do that.

I’ve mentioned I’m getting back into zines, collecting my newsletter as little 16-page black and whites. I haven’t done the math on these until now. I’m printing them at home and my laser printer is basically free tbh, stamps are going to be 78 cents in July. A four-sheet (16 page) zine is little over a penny in paper if I get the cheap stuff. A dollar would put me probably in the same comparative range as what Scareaphanalia was going for in the ’80s.

And I did actually put them up to buy but with another dollar of shipping on top of that dollar. I have learned, from my Itchio, that a dollar is a weird price to ask people to pay, maybe $2 is less weird. Whatever! Chase saw a 20 page laser-printed black and white zine for $40 the other day. Like you do you but also, lol what.

I do want to figure out that true dollar-zine. Like, same format as this horror review one that has my brain churning. Two sheets, stapled at the top corner, easy to fold and put in a normal business envelope, one stamp, one dollar total, just for the love of the game. But I’ve not got a reviewing soul, really. And that format, in its monthly distribution, is so ideal for newsletters and discussion of relevant and recent things.

Another zine that caught me by the throat, at the same book fair, was from Deep Listening. A mixed-media combo focusing on archives and distribution, each riso-printed zine is accompanied a flash drive. The zine has images and page spreads from queer publications, and the USB has pdfs of the originating issues, as well as page layouts for the zine itself. Talking with their creator, Sasha Fuentes, I kept thinking about The Trans Literature Preservation Project from Transfeminine Review. Physical media is a kind of distribution we can own (setting aside obscenity distribution laws) more easily than via the web–especially via any social media.

Another recent zine get (before the fateful book fair) was Appalachian Transsexual by Kyrsten Nerys Hodge. You can either get the beautifully pink 40-page (!!!) zine for $5 at her shop or go download the PDF for free, which I adore as an approach. I actually ended up with both of her zines, which is good as I’m trying to learn to love poetry in English and I very enjoyed her poetry in these.

There’s a great site that archives the covers of various cinema magazines, including Scareaphanalia. Moviemags is, like most archive sites, very fun to browse through. An enjoyable place to start is their classic monster collection.

I scanned my copy, obviously, and sent the cover in to add to their archives. I’ve never put things up on Archive.org before, but there’s one up over there and I will figure out adding mine.

Zines have been on the mind for a while, obviously. I spent like all week before last making a zine of all the campfire crafting recipes in Fallout: New Vegas. It’s up at Itchio and 100% free, with both reading and printing versions. For fun, here’s the nice little embed from Itch:

Something something, archiving and sharing and how the line wavers between the two.

Here’s a meme:

I saw an engagement-type post recently that was like “what were you doing in 2008” and I went and looked at my Flickr, which I’ve kept since 2005 and works like a sort of backup memory for me.

In 2008 I’d been out of college for three years, was making a sculpture a day for a bit, went to Wyoming for the first time, tabled at a comics fest for the last time, and we paid $650 for a two bedroom apartment where I had an entire room just for craft and making things. This was also the year I first shaved the sides of my head, realised that less hair was much easier to deal with, and never looked back. I think I’d moved to full time at the job I’d hold until we left Oregon completely (a horrible job but one that cemented my logistics and spreadsheet real-world experience, moulding me into the mix of product management wetworks I am today).

The key thing is though, I was still making minicomics and zines. As my life became one that included 20-24 hours of commute a week, I started writing more and reading lots (thank you, Project Gutenberg) and comics didn’t like, fall by the wayside but they faded out like all the little guys in Labyrinth at the end. It’s not like I stopped doing comics but I did stop printing them out or doing anything with them. I still had a long-arm stapler though.

And I did keep buying zines (I’ve even had subscriptions to some!) and have enjoyed watching the push and pull of “zine” changing from “thing I photocopied” to “nice printed and bound thing” while also seeing the return of the good ol’ one page zine.

Eventually, I got (back) into bookbinding, via fanbinding. Specifically, fanbinding fic I’d written with a friend of OCs from our D&D game. Bookbinding is fun as hell but sometimes you want something a little faster, which is where pamphlet binding comes in. Last winter I made my family group pamphlet books of short stories only available online. A pamphlet bind is like a high-end zine, tbh. Sewn instead of staples.

What’s funny is, through all of this, I’ve always laid out my various ebooks, like my flash fiction collections the same way you lay things out to be printed. I could not tell you why, tbh. Then I encountered a post by veronique about the joy of zines and turning ephemeral/digital things like blog posts into zines.

“Well dang, wait,” I thought, “that would be so easy to do.” I did still have that long arm stapler.

And so, here’s the past four years of Flash Fiction February collections, in physical form.

It’s wild how much more real this very real amount of work (daily writing, editing, illustrations, laying out the text block) feels in a physical form.

They do feel more like a “chapbook” than a zine though. So I tried laying out the first two essays from my newsletter, along with the pictures and book recommendations. It worked out swimmingly, and I then filled the two blank pages at the end with puzzles.

I don’t know what I am going to do with these? LAPL actually has a robust zine collection and maybe I’ll whack out a bunch of the FFF collections and send those in? Maybe I don’t need to do anything with them right now, maybe it’s just the joy of making. I have a bunch more newsletter essays that I can lay out and print out and be delighted by.