Zine

What Is a Zine?

A zine is a form of self-publishing in which the people making the publication control its content, design, production, price, and circulation. Most zines are produced outside mainstream publishing and made for expression, communication, or community rather than profit. They may be sold at cost, traded for another zine, given away, or distributed through mail order, shows, record shops, infoshops, libraries, zine fairs, and small independent distros.

No single subject, visual style, or political position defines a zine. A zine can be a carefully printed art object or a few photocopied pages stapled together minutes before a show. What connects these different forms is independent production and a direct relationship between maker and reader. Small circulation is not necessarily a limitation or a failed attempt to become a magazine. It can be the entire point.

In an interview with DIY Conspiracy, Alex Wrekk, author of the long-running zine-making guide Stolen Sharpie Revolution and creator of International Zine Month, offers a deliberately physical definition:

Zine, Fanzine, Perzine, and Comp Zine

Zine is the broadest term. Fanzine, the older word from which it developed, usually describes a publication made by fans of science fiction, comics, music, sport, or another shared interest. In punk, the two words are often used interchangeably because music fanzines helped establish the form within the culture.

• Perzine: A personal zine built around the maker’s experiences, reflections, diary-like writing, or autobiographical comics.
• Comp zine: A compilation edited from work by several contributors, often organized around a subject or open call.
• Political or community zine: A publication used for analysis, agitation, practical information, movement debate, or documenting a local struggle.
• Art, comic, photo, or literary zine: A zine centered on visual work, sequential art, photography, poetry, fiction, or experimental writing.
• Split zine: A collaborative issue in which two or more zinesters each make a distinct section, echoing the split-record format common in punk.

These categories overlap. A single issue can be personal, political, artistic, and rooted in fandom at the same time.

A Brief History of Self-Published Media

Before the Zine

Zines were not invented by the printing press, and Johannes Gutenberg did not discover printing. Movable type existed in East Asia centuries earlier: Bi Sheng developed ceramic movable type in eleventh-century China, while printers in Korea used cast-metal type by the early thirteenth century. Gutenberg’s combination of reusable metal type and a mechanized press in mid-fifteenth-century Europe nevertheless helped printed material circulate on a far larger scale.

Pamphlets, broadsides, chapbooks, little magazines, and other independent publications are important ancestors of the zine, although applying the modern word to all of them would be anachronistic. Reformation polemicists such as Martin Luther used inexpensive print in the sixteenth century. Revolutionary, abolitionist, labor, suffrage, anarchist, socialist, and other political movements later relied on self-published matter to circulate arguments that established institutions excluded or opposed.

Samizdat is sometimes used too loosely as a synonym for radical self-publishing. More precisely, it refers to uncensored texts copied and circulated clandestinely in the Soviet Union and other Communist states, particularly in the decades after Stalin’s death. Typewritten carbon copies, manuscripts, and photographs passed from person to person despite the risk of surveillance and punishment. Samizdat belongs to the wider history of unofficial publishing, but it is not a general name for nineteenth-century pamphlets.

Twentieth-century avant-garde artists also treated small publications as creative works in themselves. Dadaists used collage, typography, found images, and deliberate disruption, while later little-press and Beat writers bypassed conventional publishers through mimeographed magazines, pamphlets, and small-run books. These practices supplied techniques and attitudes that later zinesters would recognize, even before “zine” became a widely used word.

Science-Fiction Fandom and the Word “Fanzine”

The direct history of the fanzine begins in organized science-fiction fandom. Fans in the late 1920s and early ’30s used amateur publications to exchange letters, fiction, criticism, jokes, club news, and addresses. Rather than treating readers as a passive audience, these publications invited them into an ongoing conversation.

The Comet, published by the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago in 1930, is often cited as the first science-fiction fanzine. In Britain, Novae Terrae began in 1936, became New Worlds in 1939, and eventually developed into a professional science-fiction magazine.

Russ Chauvenet coined fanzine in the October 1940 issue of his publication Detours, distinguishing fan-made publications from professional magazines, or “prozines.” Earlier fans had often called them “fanmags.” The word spread from science fiction into comics, film, folk music, rock, and countless other interests. Paul Williams’s hand-stapled Crawdaddy!, launched in 1966, became an influential early rock fanzine before growing into a professional magazine.

The Underground Press

During the 1960s, alternative newspapers used relatively affordable offset printing to report on antiwar organizing, civil rights, gay and lesbian liberation, feminism, student movements, counterculture, and local struggles neglected or distorted by mainstream media. These papers were generally larger, more regular, and more newspaper-like than zines, but they helped build an alternative distribution culture.

The Underground Press Syndicate formed in 1966, with its first gathering held in 1967. Member papers could reprint one another’s material, allowing reporting, artwork, and political arguments to move between cities without relying on a centralized publisher. That networked approach anticipated the international exchange later sustained through punk zines, distros, and mail.

Punk Fanzines and DIY Culture

Punk did not invent the fanzine, but it made the form inseparable from DIY culture. In New York, Punk began publishing in early 1976. In Britain, Mark Perry started Sniffin’ Glue and Other Rock ’n’ Roll Habits in July 1976 after seeing the Ramones in London. Its urgent typewritten pages, handwritten additions, rough photographs, and unapologetic enthusiasm showed that documenting a new scene did not require professional credentials.

As punk spread, hundreds of homemade publications followed. Zines reported on bands and local shows, printed interviews and record reviews, announced addresses and benefit gigs, debated politics and scene ethics, and documented activity that mainstream music journalism either ignored or sensationalized. They let participants describe their own culture while it was happening.

A punk zine was also part of the infrastructure around the music. An interview might introduce a band in another country; a review could lead to a letter, trade, tour contact, or record order; and a distro list could connect readers with music, books, patches, and other publications. The paper object moved through the same international DIY network as demo tapes, records, flyers, and correspondence.

The Photocopied Zine Explosion

The Xerox 914, introduced in 1959, was the first commercially successful automatic copier to use ordinary paper. It did not make copying universally cheap overnight, but the spread of office, school, library, and copy-shop machines during the following decades gave many more people access to fast reproduction. By the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s, photocopying had become central to punk zine production.

Layouts could be typed, drawn, reduced, cut apart, rearranged, and glued or taped to a master sheet. The copier flattened type, handwriting, photographs, halftones, found images, and correction fluid into a reproducible page with an immediately recognizable black-and-white texture. A4 sheets folded to A5 became common where metric paper sizes were used, just as US letter paper folded to half-letter became common in North America.

Production was only half the story. Zinesters placed contact addresses in their pages, traded issues through the post, sent review copies, and built catalogs and distros. Publications such as Factsheet Five reviewed thousands of zines and helped readers find one another across otherwise disconnected scenes. Small ads and review columns in punk publications performed a similar function.

Zines in Anarcho-Punk, Queercore, Riot Grrrl, and Straight Edge

Zines became especially important wherever people needed to challenge not only mainstream culture but also exclusions inside punk itself. In the UK anarcho-punk scene, they carried political essays, scene reports, artwork, communiqués, practical organizing information, and arguments about war, animal liberation, squatting, feminism, and punk’s own contradictions.

Queercore was partly imagined into existence through self-publishing. G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce produced the Toronto zine J.D.s from 1985 to 1991, using the term “homocore” before “queercore” became standard. The zine connected queer punks who were alienated by both homophobia in punk and conformity in mainstream gay culture.

In the early ’90s, Riot Grrrl zines joined personal testimony with feminist critique and practical organizing. Publications associated with Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and individual participants addressed sexism, sexual violence, body image, sexuality, mental health, friendship, and creative autonomy. Their cut-and-paste pages let people speak in their own voices and helped ideas travel between local groups without requiring a commercial media platform.

Straight edge and hardcore zines likewise circulated interviews, scene reports, political discussion, and debates around sobriety, veganism, animal rights, and participation in punk. The positions differed from publication to publication, which is precisely why the zine mattered: it preserved disagreement and local specificity instead of presenting a scene as a single unified doctrine.

Important Punk and Hardcore Zines

No list can represent the thousands of publications made across different countries, languages, and local scenes. The following titles are useful points of entry rather than a fixed canon, and their publication dates often overlap:

Maximum Rocknroll grew from a Bay Area radio program into a print publication in 1982 and became an international hub for scene reports, reviews, columns, and letters. No Answers and the later HeartattaCk, both connected with Kent McClard, helped frame arguments within US hardcore across different periods. Razorcake belongs to a later generation: it began publishing in Los Angeles in 2001, rather than during the ’80s or ’90s.

How Are Zines Made and Distributed?

There is no required method. A zinester can write and draw directly onto paper, assemble pages from typewritten text and pasted images, work entirely with digital layout software, or combine all three. A single sheet can become an eight-page mini-zine through folding and one cut; longer issues may be stapled, sewn, glued, bound, or left loose inside an envelope.

1. Create the pages: Write, draw, photograph, collage, interview, collect contributions, or combine several approaches.
2. Choose the sequence: Arrange the pages so they read correctly after folding and binding, a process known as imposition.
3. Reproduce the master: Photocopy, scan and digitally print, Risograph, screen print, mimeograph, letterpress, or use another accessible process.
4. Assemble the issue: Fold, trim, staple, sew, or bind it by hand or with the help of a local printer.
5. Put it into circulation: Trade it, mail it, sell it at cost, hand it out at shows, place it with a distro or shop, table at a zine fair, or donate it to an archive.

The social exchange matters as much as the printing technique. Letters, trades, contributor calls, review copies, and face-to-face conversations turn isolated publications into a network. A zine may reach only a few dozen people and still create relationships that last for years.

Are E-Zines and Webzines Still Zines?

Usage varies. Some people use e-zine or webzine for any independent online publication, while many zinesters reserve zine for a physical object. Under Alex Wrekk’s definition above, print is essential. A website may share a zine’s independence and DIY politics, but paper, scale, binding, sequence, and hand-to-hand circulation create a different reading experience.

The distinction does not require print and the web to be enemies. A zinester can publish on paper while using a site for orders, excerpts, updates, or accessible versions. Digital repositories such as the Internet Archive’s zine collections and personal scanning projects such as Brob Tilt’s Zine World give dispersed and fragile publications a second route to readers. A scan cannot reproduce the material object completely, but it can preserve content and make otherwise unavailable issues discoverable.

Why Do Zines Still Matter?

A zine does not require permission from a publisher, advertiser, platform, or algorithm. Its maker can address a tiny audience, leave contradictions unresolved, experiment with form, and circulate work that commercial media considers too local, abrasive, personal, or unprofitable. The result is not automatically radical simply because it is printed, but the form gives people unusually direct control over how their words and images enter the world.

That independence is why zines continue to thrive alongside websites and social media. They preserve scenes from the inside, create space for marginalized voices, carry practical knowledge, and turn communication into a tangible exchange. The pleasure of making, holding, trading, annotating, and passing along a physical publication remains something a feed cannot duplicate.