Zines what are zines again? Also me with my zines. in here.

I was interviewed for our local weekly paper about my involvement in my local arts community over the years, specifically about the zines that I make. I will also be part of a panel at an event on Friday to talk about the same. So I thought it would be a good time to share a little more about the zines I make.

What are zines?

Zines are usually low budget publications that people make on photocopiers. They often swap them with other zine makers, give them away to their friends, or sell them online. Zines can be about anything you can think of. They were basically paper blogs before blogs existed. People still love zines because you can touch them and they have a very personal and real feeling to them that the Internet just cannot replicate. Zines also have an ethics around them, a culture, and that is another reason people love zines so much. The values and ethics found in the world of zines are things like underground or alternative art, being authentic, enjoying whimsy, the gift economy, being raw around the edges, rebelling against the publishing industry, and so on.

What kinds of zines do you make dflo?

Well I am glad you asked. I like combining more high end book art techniques with cheap materials. So I like to fold oragami pockets into my zines, or bind them in interesting ways, or create little tiny books, and so on.

How long have you been making them dflo?

I have been making zines for more than 20 years!

What else did you do regarding zines dflo? I heard you had a bike powered book mobile and it was even featured on Flavorwire?

I ran this little zine publishing and distributing cooperative called Slumgullion . I had friends that did this with me, and they are all locally and even nationally successful artists now. We created Slumgullion as a way to support each other in making our art , our little books, and so on. Some other friends made the bike cart for us out of an old bed fram and some weird shelving. The book mobile actually went through several updates over the years, but the version in this article is the original one. I actually made it a LOT cuter later , haha

This is the Flavorwire article go look!

Here is the cuter version

This is me loading it up

The picture is super small but its all I have right now!

At the farmers market

I would go to the Farmers Market or to First Friday and set this cart up and sell our books and zines. After many years of setting up at events using a normal table kind of set up, I was amazed to find that using this book cart made all the difference. I never made a huge profit or anything but that wasnt our goal anyway. We just were making community and trying to break even. I was able to do both using this cart. I always priced my zines so that I could earn back twice the cost of making them. I also never made huge batches , so in case one didnt sell i didnt end up with a wasteful box full of zines forever. So if I made 50 zines and spent $10 making them, my goal would be to earn $20 so I could make another batch of 50 of that zine if I felt the demand was there. Doing this project for about 4 years or so taught me a lot about business and retail. I also managed a lot of people during this time, lead meetings, large community events, fundraising, and taught classes. Eventually this project merged with another group and we co-founded a community art center that still is going strong to this day.

Some of my zines

I will write more about my zines in the next day or so because the article will come out and I will want to share it with you. Meanwhile here are some of my more recent zines.

This is from an event last summer.

The zine called Dog has pockets in it. I did an art call for anything dog themed. I stuffed the pockets with the submissions. I made about 30 copies of it and sold it as a fundraiser for my injured dog, to get him surgery. My dog and my kid are on the cover. Here is a little closer look at it

I would like to make a zine like this of Steemians!

Ok thats all for today! Thanks for looking and I will share more in the coming days! I might even take pictures from the event if i remember

xo

dflo