#I GOT BUSY WITH ZINE ART

[noctlas332]

one | two three | four

more artfights !!!

and actaully heres another one but the characters owner doesnt allow art of their oc to be posted

[preluvz]

Happy (belated) Valentines Day!! This was way overdue to the point that its now Happy White Day too;;;; but either way yayyyy Tsukkiyama!!!

[art--harridan]

[Image description: A digital drawing of Amanda Young from the Saw franchise. She's wearing her outfit from the third film, but has her hair from the first. She's wearing the reverse bear trap, which leaves only the top half of her face visible. Her eyes are open wide and staring directly at the viewer. Eyeliner runs down her cheeks. In one hand she holds overflowing needles which are falling from her loose grasp. In the other she has a tape recorder. Her arms are stiff, as if she's a posed mannequin. Bandages are wrapped around both of her wrists. These bandages, the tape recorder, the needles and the reverse bear trap are all coloured a bold light blue. Amanda is coloured bright white with grey shading, while the background is a darker grey. It also has a subtle spiral pattern to it.]

[maplesleep]

Handed these stickers out at Animazement 2024, hope everyone liked them!!

[slavhew]

any thots on shinra and izaya? :3

IM SO SORRY I FORGOT TO ANSWER THIS GJKGD

I wanted to type up this like, long heartfelt post because these two make me insane in the membrane. I love them platonic and romantic both because either way at the core of their relationship there is a tragedy of two people who could've been inseparable, and then separated.

And I think it's a TRAVESTY that they didn't animate the breakdown Izaya had at the thought of Shinra dropping him. It makes the scene where Shinra waxes poetic about Izaya being fragile in the last arc make sense the way it just doesn't in the anime.

I dont think anything speaks on my thoughts better than my Actual thoughts during my last Durarara phase so! Have the raw screenshots :] ft. Friends

TLDR:

[mintjeru]

keeping myself busy by posting wip screenshots

[avocodas]

Haganezuka Zine anyone?

[fernsnailz]

my comic from the @neverturnbackzine! truly one of my favorite zines i've been a part of :]

some extra insight/fun facts about the process of this piece below the cut 💥💥💥

posting pieces from collaborative zines is always something i struggle with because i look back and think of how i would do things differently now, but i learned a lot working on this comic and even developed some style techniques that i still use!

Fun Fact 1: the panel where shadow Fucking Disintegrates That Guy is technically traditionally drawn! i couldn't get it right in clip studio so i just started frantically scribbling in a notebook and got it eventually lol

highly highly recommend scribbling stuff out in a notebook, scanning it on your phone, and then dropping it into a canvas to edit later if you ever have trouble sketching something.

Fun Fact 2: a lot of the overlay/background effects were made in Kid Pix Deluxe 3D. i created a whole collection of various textures/abstract effects for this comic that i've been using in my art since last year. you can even find them scattered through my team dark zine lol. here's a few of them:

similarly, the background at the bottom of page 2 is actually a warped photo i took of a bunch of headphone wires. this is the original:

Fun Fact 3: i made this comic during a very busy and wild period of time last year so this is what the final panel looked like for a while before i fully finished it LMAO

ok yay thanks for reading bye

[miru667]

The whole Once-ler family is working full tilt!

Here's my full piece for the VK Onceler Zine! I was very lucky to get to be a part of it...🥹 I used concept art as my inspiration this time: [link] Keep reading below for my process vid and all my director's commentary!

Thank you for being curious! Here's a video of my WIPs:

Deadlines were TIGHT for this zine! We were given only 2 months (compared to the 6 months I had on the previous onceler zine), so to make sure I could finish on time, I decided to do only base colours and lighting, with almost no shading anywhere. Still, trying to balance all the colours took the longest for me, as you can see in the vid. xP

Also idk if anyone noticed, but for the face I chose to use an already existing onceler doodle: [link] Why? Well, why not! I really liked that doodle and I didn't want it to go to waste. 😆

Things that I enjoyed sneaking in:

-the golden spiral! Vaguely, at least! At the very least I hope your eyes can follow the order of thneed production, from the fallen tree at the window to the tuft harvesting to the thread spinning, to knitting the thneed and then drawing up plans for bigger and better things, and then ending with him pulling on his iconic glove to show he's going to take control now

-15 cents, a nail, and a great great great grandfather snail, as well as a tin pail since that's where you're supposed to deposit your payment

-combining things from the 2012 movie and concept art, the 1972 movie, and the 1971 book (e.g. that funny wrench he uses to fix pipes)

-Miss O'Schmunce-ler! You can see from the vid that I added the bracelet pretty late, because it was a late decision to have a Miss O'Schumunce-ler somewhere. I chose her to be the one picking up the pencil in the end, since she's pretty good with a pencil in the movie hehe. You guys can pretend the arms holding the phone is Miss Funce-ler.

-a thneed, a seed, and a (grickle grass) weed on the floor. The thneed is just the first of many that will soon create a giant pile. The seed lies forgotten in the corner. The weed is foreshadowing the future.

-hinting that Lorax and Once-ler were actually good friends, like they were in the Lorax musical stageplay. 🥺 I kept this part of the script in my mind for this piece:

This was aftermath Once-ler talking to the Lorax, reminiscing on their good times...and also being stupid and inconsiderate because the Lorax was in fact there all along as his friend, trying to warn him of what was going to happen. 😔

So in my zine piece we're witnessing a peaceful time before all the real biggering really starts. I like to think that in this scene, the Lorax had been sitting on the Once-ler's lap, holding his gloves for him and having a nice chat together with maybe some harmless bickering, but then the Once-ler gets a phone call so he cuts their convo short and rolls his chair over to the window to answer it. Putting business over friendship as usual, of course. Inspo for the lap sitting comes from this fanart by Emi that I love: [link]

What else...the parts that I'm proud of the most are the stool (I spent 2 days just drawing this stool), the curtains, the fact that I was able to include every truffula colour, and the Once-ler's pose. I was close to giving up on that pose because I had no idea how to draw it but I'm glad that I tried again. I wanted to show him at ease during a stage in his life that we never got to see much: the happier and more innocent days of his biggering when he only had a small shop. 😊

That's all, I think! Thanks for reading if you did! Once again it was an honour to be part of this zine!!

[prototypesteve]

Valid. With or without validation. (A before there was an A.)

Asexuals, aromantics, and everyone else on the aspec are valid, and were valid even before we had a name for what we were.

In May of 1971, I was born different. There wasn’t a name for it. (The committee who wrote the Asexual Manifesto wouldn’t even form for another year and four months.) I was valid, but there wasn’t even a way to say what about me was valid.

In June of 1989, I graduated from High School. I was barely 18. I was still different. But in all those years, I’d never encountered the words aromantic or asexual. (Instead, I heard words like frigid, weird, secret f-g, psycho, virgin, and sheltered). In Career And Life Management class, where sex education was a brief module, they didn’t even mention X on the Kinsey Scale. We were told it was 1 to 6. Period. (I didn’t check, because I was X on the Kinsey Scale, which meant I didn’t care about things like the Kinsey Scale.) They managed to find a way to invalidate me without even naming the things they were invalidating!

By April of 1993, I graduated from college, still different. Now I was hearing kinder guess-names for what I was: Busy, focused, fussy, pure, a late-bloomer, and undecided. But I still hadn’t heard words like aromantic or asexual. I was at an art school. I heard all the other words. I saw people living all the other words. I saw bi couples, I had gay and lesbian friends and instructors, I had a pansexual classmate, and knew someone who was almost certainly pre-transition trans. I was aromantic and asexual but I had no way of finding those words, or being rescued from my confusion by those words. By this point, I didn’t even need validation, anymore. I just wanted understanding.

But I got sent out into the world, to go start my career, and figure out apartments, cars, taxes, utilities, setting up a business, and a million other adult things that took “housed-or-homeless” priority over “figuring out what was ‘wrong’ with me”. So, even though there were murmurs on the right talk shows, or screeds in the right ink-and-paper offline zines about asexuality and aromanticism, they weren’t in mainstream or sidestream discourse. I had to settle for “different, busy, and single-minded about his career”.

It would take until late 2022—over 29 years after I left college and 51 years after I was born—before I started noticing social media posts about “aroace” characters who didn’t feel love.

Now I had a name for my difference.

I knew exactly what I was, because everything I read about asexuality and aromanticism perfectly matched and explained the experiences I’d had, and the feelings I’d felt, since I first noticed I was different at age 12!

I’d been valid all that time. I saw the other posts saying we didn’t belong in this or that community, and the names should be broken up into more categories, and we were taking up space at pride festivals, and this was a made up thing that didn’t exist prior to… oh, fuck it, it didn’t matter. I was aromantic and asexual on the day I was born in 1971; before those two words were available to ordinary people. I was real, I was who I was, and I was valid, and even though I wasn’t allowed to know what I was for another five decades full of trauma and loss and hurt, I always was who I was, and so I always was valid, regardless of whether or not anyone else agreed.

And so are you.

[unforth]

Alright not to like liveblog my breakdown on main but yesterday was a really bad day after a really bad, like, 4 months, and I've hit a bit of a breaking point and one of the only things in my life that can give is running @mdzsartreblogs , @tgcfartreblogs , @svsssartreblogs , @erhaartreblogs , @tykartreblogs , and @cnovelartreblogs , so that is what has to give. It's been a 99-out-of-100 days thankless job. A small number of people do say thank you and yall I appreciate you so much (HUGE shout-out to the artist I met at Flamecon who gifted me a zine when I said I ran these blogs, @bonesblubs you rock) but I have never done an act of fandom labor simultaneously this labor intensive yet this invisible before and, uh. It sucks. I spend an hour or more a day on this every day, if it's under 2k hours since I started the first of these in September 2020 I'd be shocked. And I do it because I love it but doing it means I don't have time or energy to do other things I love. And I really don't want to just quit, but I can't keep this up.

In a last-ditch effort to try not to just give up, I'm making the following changes:

1. Only watching one tag per fandom for the MXTX fandoms. I am going to check *only* #tgcf, #svsss, and #mdzs. Artwork posted to any other tag, I will not see unless a mutual reblogs it.

2. Reduced tagging (even more). I'm only going to tag characters and maybe overarching au type (eg, "modern au," "fantasy au"). I'll no longer tag creatures. I will continue to tag the same common trigger warnings I already tag.

3. If a work's appearance doesn't make it obvious what it is AND the tags aren't clear, I'm not going to reblog. I can't keep spending 5 minutes or more trying to figure out what I'm even looking at, scared that if I guess wrong the artist will get mad at me for mistagging their work. If I do reblog, I'll tag only the artist name and/or whatever else I can identify for sure.

4. I am no longer going to follow #link click. The fandom is just too big. I've started dreading checking it. If I was more into it and less busy I would make another spin off just for it but neither of those is true. (The art is so good, I hate to do this, but. If you love link click, highly recommend the main tag, lots of great stuff there.)

5. I will no longer tag any non-cnovel content in the art/post. Like, if someone draws, idek, Xie Lian and Marinette from Ladybug, I'm not gonna put any tags for Marinette, just for Xie Lian.

6. Basically if I run into something hard to tag or confusing or unclear, my new policy is I'm not gonna fricken bother.

I think those are everything but idefk, I cried for 3 hours last night and got 4 hours of sleep so I'm mostly fueled by exhaustion and desperation right now and my memory is even more fried than usual.

How artists can help. This is obviously all optional. You do you. But since some people might want to know what would make my life easier, I'm sharing. I'm not claiming I feel entitled to dictate how people fandom or anything like that.

1. Put the tags for the character(s) and ship(s) early in the tag list.

2. If you make art for a fandom that isn't one of the big ones (right now the only big danmei fandoms on tumblr as far as I can tell are the MXTX fandoms and maybe 2ha) I am begging you to use my tracked tag #cnovelartreblogs

3. Do mdzs art? Tag #mdzs. Do tgcf art? Tag #tgcf. Do svsss art? Tag #svsss.

4. Not only artists, but everyone, *please* stop tagging fandoms not discussed and/or depicted in your post. It's gotten to be stupid common for people to blanket the danmei fandom tags with posts only about one fandon (like, svsss-only works also being tagged mdzs and tgcf and 2ha for some damn reason). This isn't about just my sideblogs tbh this is just fandom etiquette that seems to have been forgotten or never learned by many. Tagging unrelated fandoms isn't "reach," it's annoying. People go into the #mdzs tag to see mdzs, not whatever not-mdzs stuff people have decided to tag for ~reach~, and seeing the same post in 8 tags, none of which it's related to, is so damn irritating, and makes scrolling the tags looking for content that IS relevant take that much longer. Knock it off.

Okay. I think that's as much as I'm prepared to meltdown where everyone can see. Thanks in advance everyone for your understanding, and apologies to everyone about to see this 8 times as I reblog it to each sideblog.

At least I'm not tagging it to everywhere. 🤣🤣🤣

[u3pxx]

when's it my turn? wouldn't i love love to explore that shore up above? out of the sea wish i could be part of that world ⛅🌊🐚

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW GLAD I AM THAT I GOT TO DRAW SOME EMAMAYA FOR @onceuponaturnaboutzine!!! i've wanted to draw these two in a high-effort drawing for a long while now and this zine just gave me the perfect opportunity, truly a dream come true! ✨

like this art? it's a print, here! | like what i do? support me on ko-fi!

some initial sketches for what their designs are! just some big inspiration from the disney movie and also splatoon unintentionally, WHEEZES. also, i just thought it'd be hilarious if phoenix was maya's fish sidekick instead

i also originally had a more busy composition but it was just too cluttered and i couldn't find a way to make it work so i decided to just focus on a single moment instead of several!

[sinn-bee]

Hi I'm very fascinated by your dragon svsss au and I got a question if you're still open for them! It's regard SY!SQQ, bc in the first pic that you uploaded of the au he's noticeably more clothed than LQG and in the last comic you made the joke that he's wondering where his clothes are. Now to my question: is this different to how Shen Jiu used to dress because Shen Yuan had some modesty concerns from his former life or did he always cover up more? Or is Liu Qingge just unusually exposed in comparison to the other dragon Peak Lords? Anyway I hope you have a good day!

First of all sorry it took so long to answer your ask oTL (Got busy and distracted)

To answer your first question, SY!Sqq wears the same kind of clothing that SJ!Sqq did, he does feel kinda weird about being so exposed for a while but gets to learn Very Quickly that most everyone dresses like this. So yeah he has modesty concerns but learns to hide his embarrassment very quick because if everyone else is doing it, it isn’t as weird!

Lqg is more exposed than the other peak lords 😂 I’ll get back to that in a second.

SO. Some worldbuilding lore~

“Dragon fashion is designed to transition easily between forms and allow a tail to move freely, and dragons don’t care much about nudity or exposure-

Clothes expand at the waist and are slit at the sides to accommodate a larger, more serpentine form, and come off quickly and easily if you want to get really big.”

-excerpt taken from a dragon au fic my friend Corrin (/ partner in crime for making this au) wrote (it’s not posted yet, it’s Moshang, and it’s part of a zine coming soon)

Draconic peak lords, having ascended to full dragon hood, can shift between forms easily and so as mentioned above prefer to have less clothing that is easier to move around in. Normal draconic cultivators mimic those styles to some degree despite not being capable of shifting forms fully.

So less clothing = Shifts into other draconic forms more often. Lqg likes to hunt and travel and be in a draconic form a lot so he…doesn’t care much for clothing.

Yqy you’ll notice is very clothed and that’s because he just doesn’t ever shift to other draconic forms for sad reasons, and also to cover up as much of his scales as possible.

The other fun clothing headcannons (is it headcannons for an au??) I have are that the style and complexity of clothing also depends on the ranking of the peak and draconic hierarchy. Like Sqq has more jewelry and gems and Sqh has much simpler clothing and no gems. Lqg has gems because they’re a gift from Sqq.

The other reason for being so scantily clad is that draconic cultivation takes a Lot of time and effort, some more so than others, so people who have beaten their way to the top and ascended to dragonhood like to show off their scales and draconic features. Ahem Sj cough cough

Thank you so much for your curiosity! I like being able to infodump about my au especially since posting the comic and art for it takes a while 😅

[mlim8]

Loved, Happy, Wanted

My contribution to the Superboy Superzine @superboysuperzine - I meant to post this like 2 months ago when they said we were allowed to post these lmao but... yeah. I got busy. 😅

We got the update that our zine allowed us to raise $3500 to Project Hawaii!

Please enjoy this zine piece that I wanted to make like 7-8 pages long because I love my longing pauses and tension but Alpaca was kind enough to give me 6 instead of the max of 5 LMAOOOOO - I wish we could get more SuperBrothers content *sobs* It was so much fun being a part of this ahhhh, physically holding work that I helped to make was a really cool experience!! There are also SO MANY OTHER AMAZING ART AND FIC PIECES IN THIS!! EVERYONE WAS SO CREATIVE AND LOVED KON SO MUCH!!

[damnfandomproblems]

Responding to 3 anons in #5796

"I agree with this tbh. Like adults are the ones making things unsafe for minors in fandom spaces. YOU are the ones who approach minors unprompted. Minors are just minding their own business in fandom, then you all come along and bother everyone."

Predators that are adults are not synonymous with all adults in fandom. It's not the fault of the vast majority of fandom that kids purposefully bust into adult spaces and arbitrarily believe the creeps saying they're "safe" adults. It's the fault of your parents for not reaching you worth a damn and the predator. And yes, kids do fucking barge into adult NSFW spaces. None of the the ones that say they mind their business actually do.

"I agree with this post, cause like... the ones doing the most harassing are adults. I am a minor, and it makes me feel unsafe in fandom spaces. Especially when I see adults drawing nsfw of characters who are MINORS! aging them up does not excuse that gross and creepy behavior. Just stop and give us a space where we don't get pushed into a corner and called annoying. Leave our fandom spaces!"

It's gonna be really funny when you age out of your favorite characters and have a moral dilemma over the fact that you don't stop thirsting over Bakugo or whoever the fuck the minute you're older than him.

And aging up is...how time works. That's like saying no one can view anyone sexually, fictional or real life, because they were once a child. Do you realize how stupid that sounds? If you don't want to be sat at the kids table, learn how to behave rather than screaming at the main table because Aunt Milly told an off color joke and Grandpa Joe has a naked Princess Peach tattooed on his arm.

"I see people getting mad about Fandom Problem #5796, but that kind of is just proving the point? You all act like the minors are the biggest problem in fandom, but you are the ones constantly inserting yourselves and making it about you.

I see adults say things like:

- "Fandom wouldn't exist without adults."

- "Who do you think created fandom? Not minors!"

- "Minors wouldn't have content if it weren't for adults."

All are ignorant of the idea that minors are the foundation to fandom. Fandom would not exist if it wasn't for minors being interested in it and starting groups for people to join. Often times, the best artists and writers in the fandoms are THE MINORS.

Adults make the space uncomfortable by inserting themselves and putting NSFW fics and art of minor characters. Then they get pissy when a minor points out it makes them uncomfortable and go "stop invading our space!"

You are the ones trying to push minors out when we just want to have fun! Just leave us alone!

-A minor"

Minors aren't the biggest problem, no. But by food are they the loudest. You say you just want to have fun but minors have on mass harassed people that were leaving them alone simply because they didn't understand the concept of dead dove don't eat.

And no, you are not, nor have you ever been, the foundation of fandom. It has always been adults, from the very beginning when Sherlock Holmes novels gained an international fan club unlike the world had ever seen to the 1960s housewife Spock/Kirk shipping Trekkies starting conventions, mailing lists, having coalate parties for zines, and laying down the foundation we have today. Adults were the ones that got sued my lunatic writers in the 90s, and they're the ones that, 90% of the time, are buying the services or media for you to consume in the first place.

And I'm sorry, but the best artists and writers in the fandom are never minors. Exceptionally talented minors are exceptional for a reason. The rest of you sit somewhere between "average and has potential" to "would make My Immortal hide its face in secondhand embarassment." Art and writing are skills, and anyone under the age of 16 likely hasn't been writing fiction long enough to run with the heavy hitters. Considering the state of the US education system, this is an even more laughable stance.

Many minors have great potential, but acting like your the best in show when you just made it out the gate is the height of hubris.

Posting as a response to a previous problem.

[bao3bei4]

why zines? how zines?

i was on a panel at fanworks con 2023 about zines today. it was a lot of fun! i decided to turn my portion of the talk into a post for my friends who couldn’t make it to the panel.��

this post includes my thoughts on: 

why make a zine

how to generate ideas for zines

how to finish your zines

how to build an audience for your zines

so why zines? what are they? [ZEENS, rhymes with beans], pronounced that way because it’s a shortened form of the word magazine, are basically just that: self published magazines. but why make a zine over, say, a blog post? or any other piece of art. 

i have basically three reasons. the first is that making little books is cool. it’s genuinely awesome to make physical zines and have the product of your labor in your hand. it’s a great feeling to finish a project and feel a concrete reward, and a lot of times we don’t get that in our lives.

the second reason is that zines give you absolute editorial control. you can put anything you want on a page. whatever layout, whatever order, whatever fold, whatever content. you name it, you can do it. this is something other venues rarely give you. for artists, it’s phenomenal. and for the rest of us, it gives us the ability to become artists for a little bit, as we lay things out.

the third reason is that zines can be absolute shit. in fact, the more shit they are, the more diy and punk they are. they have an incredible lineage of stolen copy paper and anarchist politics. all that to say, is that there are no standards. the zine ethos is say what you wanna say. it’s tremendously freeing to go fuck polish and respectability, i’m making my project.

because of these three reasons, i want to encourage you to get started making zines by describing common challenges and worries and giving you several practical tips for each on working past them. so, in order, they’re “i don’t know what to make a zine about,” “i struggle to finish projects,” and “no one will read my zines.” let’s get into it.

first up, “i don’t know what to make a zine about.” i think this one is pretty common, even for experienced zine creators. sometimes you’re in the mood to make things but you have no clue what. a lot of people suggest to just go with random words or whatever pops into your head, but i’m picky! i find that unsatisfying! so here are some tips for people in the same boat. 

ONE: what’s distracting you? work with it. because anything can be a zine, let the things you’ve already done serve as inspiration. photos you’ve taken can be formatted into a zine. is there a game sucking up your attention? make a zine about it. the song stuck in your head can turn into a lyricbook, forgotten works in progress or sketches can be resurrected, cannibalized, or even published as incomplete zines. if you’ve been busy with real life, maybe the recipes you’ve been making—even if, especially if, they’re struggle meals, can turn into zines. interview your most interesting friend. summarize a book you read recently. even if you’ve just been doomscrolling, that’s a zine too! i got a zine last weekend called bay area newsreel which was collecting recent articles about local news from leftist perspectives gathered up into a handy volume. your attention is a gift, so look at what zine fodder it’s accumulated for you naturally. 

SECOND: add a twist. sometimes i have an idea but it isn’t quite right. it just seems too straightforward. so i try to develop along a single axis of content or form. what this means is basically go against your instincts, or rather, your first impulse. that first idea is very hard to walk away from, but doing so often gives you an idea that gets you unstuck. so for content, add a different perspective. for me this is often a theoretical approach. when i was stuck on my scum villain zine, turning it into freud zine let the words start flowing. next, on form: present it differently than your first instinct is to. if my first thought is “essay,” i try to figure out how to chunk out the information into modules or how to add interactivity or what kind of illustrations to add. if my first thought is “this could be a fic or comic,” i try turning it into an essay. saying things a different way often gives you a new perspective on the content as well. 

THIRD: copy! make your take on the same thing as someone else. it’s not stealing—well, ideally it isn’t. make your original take and give credit where credit is due and ask permission if necessary. but engage with the medium!!! making zines without reading zines is the same thing as trying to write a paper without citing sources, or a novel without reading your contemporaries. that is, you can do it, but it’s hard. zines are a genre into themselves so figure out how to situate yourself in their ongoing dialogue. an example of this from my own practice is that i own a zine about queer gods and mythological creatures from chinese history. reading it i was like. why don’t they talk about this. why don’t they talk about that. and that became the basis for my own zine, guaitai the strange and the queer which focused on queer chinese history and literature instead. different zine, same inspiration. 

all of my ideas suppose you have SOMETHING going on. what if you truly have nothing. my advice? adapted from my “how to write an essay” blog post, is to read a book. read an article. read something. and then post about it. and then turn your posts into a zine. don’t start entirely from scratch — give yourself a scaffolding. so first. read something and tell someone about it. i wasn’t lying about calling myself a consummate poster. it’s a big part of my thought process. 

second up, what if “i struggle to finish projects.” i’m no stranger to having a bunch of half finished half started projects lying around. but here are some zine-specific tips i have for addressing that.

FIRST! go smaller; go shittier. reduce the scope of your projects. make one pagers, lists. once when i was feeling stymied, i made a physical zine about movies i’d watched that month, just listing them with a couple bullet points on each film. i eventually turned it into a bigger digital zine where i listed movies i’d watched over the past several months with more thoughts on them, and nicely formatted. but that was something that came out of reducing my scope from “i need to write a manifesto on a movie i’ve watched recently” to “well i can just tell people about it” to “i can say two things about it.” and something actually got finished.

SECOND. your friends are a great tool for accountability. something i like to do is zine jams with my friends. nothing fancy, it’s just we’ll sit down for an hour and go we’re going to make something in this hour. or, for a bigger scope, we might work separately but commit to making a zine that weekend. it’s nice to have community and it’s nice to feel a little bit of a friendly deadline. i recommend this even if you DON’T have problems finishing zines. it’s a good time. 

THIRD. a lot of times if the words aren’t coming easily, it’s because i’m not trying to say the right thing. keep in mind that your zines don’t have to be “content.” this little paper zine i made about movies wasn’t made to share online; in fact, it’s not available online. i didn’t make it according to what other people would see or be interested in. you can and will burn out on making “marketable” content. corollary to this: sometimes what i have to say is something i DON’T want to share online. it might not be that it’s boring, it might be that it’s too personal. and i share a lot online, i write personal essays after all. but some projects i stall on because they’re really just for me, and i’m again, focused on making content. so this piece of advice is about rejecting the tyranny of the imaginary audience. 

and the next challenge is about embracing that audience! what if no one reads your zines, something that’s entirely possible. well there’s plenty you can do about that.

FIRST. cultivate zine community. read other people’s zines! talk to them about their zines! this greatly increases the chance that they will do the same for you. don’t go in expecting reciprocity; do it for its own sake, but it’s a great place to start. try asking people at zine fests if they’d be willing to trade with you, for instance. 

SECOND. write for yourself. it’s cheesy but it’s true. you really have to. if you’re not proud and happy with what you’re making on its own merits, what’s the point. now because this is a cop out tip, i’m not counting it as a tip on its own. 

so SECOND PART TWO. make your zines more accessible. if they’re not free, make them free—yes, you deserve to be compensated for your work, but it’s up to you to decide if you want a bigger audience first. if your zines aren’t short, make them shorter. make them short enough that you can post their entirety on social media or something else easy for your audience to consume. it’s a big ask sometimes to get someone to download your pdf! if they’re physical, hand them out to people you meet. remove all the barriers to entry.

THIRD. related to this, change medium. if you’re not making physical zines, try printing them out. if you’re not making digital zines, try digitizing them. both of these offer access to new audiences and new people who might be more interested in one form than another. 

i hope these thoughts encourage you to make a zine! if you do, please let me see it. i love reading zines.