#The cultural zeitgeist IS pretty important to foster kthanx

[needmorekimch1]

That comment about webcomics at the end was like an isekai truck hitting an open wound. But for real though everything about zines here is plain to see if you pay attention to the culture surrounding this topic, and similar patterns happening in other similar mediums.

Webcomics used to (and still technically do) have zero barrier to entry to draw one at any level of artistry, but you did have to code your own simple site which took some basic coding skills. But with the rise of artist centered websites, you could upload them to an online artist community like dA, or free comics platforms like Smackjeeves or Comic fury or etc.

But deviantArt got sold and redesigned and fell out of wider relevancy, and the social media platforms we all migrated to were divided and not designed to actually get your comics onto relevant eyeballs.

Meanwhile Smackjeeves and other free comics platforms were driven out of the cultural consciousness by heavily commercialized platforms like Tapastic and Webtoons. (There are still some older ones around like Comic Fury!! Please go give their patreon your support!)

Now you can still put your webcomics on these newer sites for free, but smaller comics will be completely overshadowed by commercially-driven and standardized-formatted comics with relatively high quality with fast release schedules. Obviously they're all still "webcomics" but since the takeover by webtoons and tapas in the webcomics sphere of influence, I keep seeing/hearing artists say they don't know if they want to make webcomics cause they can't compete in the attention economy and subsequently can't make a living off of their works. (Also a personal gripe about these newer platforms, the artists are incentivized to make their comics formatted to be legible on phones??? because the phone apps are fostering an audience of readers that want to read comics on their phones?? The smartphone economy is wack.) The creativity of artists is stifled and molded to fit these new standards that make them more digestible for a very specific style of marketing. And artists are discouraged from thinking of webcomics as just another medium to

And arguably even the people reading the comics suffer, because the artist is being pressured by these sites to work themselves to the bone to produce comics at a high rate, the quality of the webcomics ALWAYS begins to suffer as time goes on, and some webcomics even start to gate off access to later updates behind a paywall. This is how commodification works.

Everybody suffers from the medium leaning more and more into becoming a commodified "product with the highest quality" and subsequently higher price point.

Smaller niche mediums always came into existence out of necessity and desire to exist in any way they can. The more we slip away from those roots that made it a desirable concept in the first place (affordable and accessible and easy-to-make) the more the term itself is diluted and the faster it drives itself to irrelevancy, until the concept itself vanishes from everybody's mind and subsequently we ALL lose access to a medium that used to be widely available.

Don't do that to zines, don't forget it's roots. Something like those simple instructions to make an 8 page zine out of a sheet of paper is how you keep a medium alive and well for all future generations of inspired youths. Not by gatekeeping OR diluting the term with semantics, but by never forgetting the word and it's roots and history.

It's the same for ttrpgs that can be played with pencil and paper, it's the same for passion-driven indie games on itch.io, and it's the same for ao3 fanfictions and the like, and you can go on and on with the examples. Don't get it twisted.

the whole point of a zine is that it's cheap to produce, amateur and homemade. if you're being asked to apply to participate in a print project, it is not a zine. if the final product is being printed and bound professionally, it is not a zine. if you are being asked to enter into any kind of licensing agreement more complex than "my work can be reproduced as part of this publication" it is not a zine. nine times put of ten if the final product costs more than $5 you have left zine country. im so serious about this.