Zine Fair Afterthoughts

This week's Phoenix article on last weekend's zine fair made me a little upset for reasons I haven't determined yet. Either I'm upset because the number of text zines that I picked up were ignored for the zines that seemed to be published more as fetish objects than things to be read/distributed, or because it hints with some accuracy that the future of zines is zinesters publishing only 10-20 zines with more unnecessary cover enhancements than Marvel comics had during the nineties (remember all-foil covers, fellow collectors?) to be distributed primarily through trade to the other zinesters who pay for table space in the same event.

And this "elegance of form" supposedly being brought to the art isn't so new if you count the mimicking section of the zine world, which got into the silkscreen cover fad a long time ago. Most got out of it too, thankfully, but not before producing some of the ugliest covers in my collection, ever. That phase taught me that production overkill can hurt a product. Sometimes this "elegance" can be a mask for sub par work between the hand-sewn covers.

I guess it wouldn't have been as cool if the writer used the word "gimmicks" instead of "elegance of form."

Of course, not having read the zines brought up in the article, I'm willing to concede that some of the elegant/gimmicky ones may in fact be amazing reads. In fact, I saw beautiful work from Persnicket Press, another husband-wife, poet-printer team with two zines and one poetry chapbook produced with a letterpress. But even if all small press books in the fair were like Persnicket's, this is not the model I would like to see for every publication in the future. Certainly not my haiku books.

When I did my chapbooks, my intentions were to reach a larger, wider audience, to possibly reach people not in the tight-knit, relatively small-numbered, and usually broke, artist circles I travel in. If you waste your time to only print ten books, no matter how beautiful they look, then I don't see your point for even coming all the way from wherever you live to rent a table. The postage is cheaper, my friends.

I also find it just plain weird that people supposedly put out and buy zines to offer of seek alternatives to popular media, yet some are now complaining that zines just don't look cool enough or they have too many words. Now we're trying to add the same whistles and bells the same way popular media would.

Maybe in a few years, the technology will come out that enables us to create our own video games. We can just sell those at our tables and finally be on the same page as everybody else.