A zine can be anything. For every one individual in the world, there is one zine. For everything and for absolutely nothing, there is a zine. You will have to go a layer deeper into a topic in order to find the zines about it, or the people making the zines. That's how we like it. Don't give the zine a chance to circulate all that widely, you would expose it to the impurities of consumerism/commercialism.
You become a publisher when you create a zine. A publisher who answers to nobody! A publisher who gives no fucks! Right on!
The latter part of this article covers zines that I've made. Totally okay to leave here if this is where your interest in zines ends. Copy/paste "wow really cool idea about zines and caves" in the comments if you don't read any further.
I was handed a zine at the first house show I went to during spring break in 2016. I didn't know anything about zines, had never heard the word before. It was one sheet of copy paper folded into an 8 page booklet (the way you most often see zines.) Nothing particularly special about its contents, but I felt very cool holding it in my hand. I felt like a stranger had just interrupted my self-consciousness to give me a little sliver of his own skin, and because of this exchange, I was accepted into something curious and foreign.
The next spring, I was invited to take part in a show that my friend was hosting. Shoutout to this friend, Blanca, for teaching me how to make zines. In their garage, I performed a couple of my poems for a crowd of about fifteen and passed around copies of my poem zine. The one compliment that got back to me about my zine came from a young, scary rapper who said, "this is lofi as fuck," and he totally got it. I made it in microsoft paint. It's obvious.
Another great thing about zines, you can be as emo as you want to be, probably no one will read it.
Around this time, another friend of mine, shoutout Mikey V, was writing one haiku a day. He challenged me to do the same, and I participated for about a month. It was a time in my life that I'm very fond of, so much later in 2021, I put a few of the best from the haiku collection into a zine in a larger format: one sheet of copy paper folded once in half, makes 4 pages of the booklet.
I have one more to share with you. Another 8 page book out of a single sheet. I made it in preparation for the zine workshop that I hosted a couple years ago at Pleb Lab, shoutout to you if you were there! Only one copy exists. It's not really cool enough to get reproduced. Idk it's kinda cool I guess.
That's a little bit of my zine history. Do any of you collect or create zines?