Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
In the 1980s and 90s when personal computers appeared with relatively
easy-to-use word processors and desktop publishing software, and copy
shops were popping up all over the place, a bunch of highly creative,
funny, weirdly obsessive people started printing and cutting and pasting
and making small-circulation personal publications,
not-quite-magazines.  They called 'em zines, and there were so many of 'em
that a zine of zines appeared, Factsheet Five, operated by Mike Gunderloy,
who was obsessive about these independent publications as their publishers
were about their own diverse fascinations.  Factsheet Five asked the
question "Why Publish," and it seemed there were as many answers as
zinesters with a little time and savvy and something (or sometimes
nothing) to say.  Zines exploded as independent distributors got 'em into
bookstores and newsstands:  bOING bOING, Maximum Rock n Roll, Ben is Dead,
Going Gaga, Fringe Ware Review, Unshaved Truths, No Drama, Blow, Fifth
Man, Karma Lapel, Tail Spins, Media Diet, Zine World, Mommy and I Are One,
Top Shelf, Poppin' Zits, Holy Titclamps, Beer Frame, Wrapped in Plastic,
Kiss Machine, Broken Pencil, Hell's Half Acre, Fuck Science Fiction,
etc. etc.  Zines are created for love, not profit, and they range in style
from total DIY (do-it-yo'self) to 'way professional.  If you read zines
instead of Time, Newsweek, and the Gnu Yorker, you begin to see a whole
different-from-mainstream, realer than real, reality.  Sorta like surfing
the web, which brings us to another point:  a lot of zinesters moved
online and started creating ezines or webzines and/or weblogs (more
usually called blogs) because the barriers to entry were even lower, and
you could reach more people online.

When we decided to do something about zines at inkwell, and set out to
round up the un-usual suspects, we didn't have far to go:  we had a hole
pile of current and former zine publishers and bloggers who were already
members of the WELL, and were more than eager to jump into the fray.  So
we have a rich panel of articulate, fairly garrulous experts:  Cory
Doctorow, inveterate blogger at http://www.boingboing.net, science fiction
author, and craphound <http://www.craphound.com> extraordinaire; Gareth
Branwyn, former editor of Going Gaga and bOING bOING, currently author of
several books; Heath Row, publisher of several zines and currently
community organizer for Fast Company magazine, a monthly periodical that
focuses on leadership- and innovation- related aspects of the new
economy; Jerod Pore, publisher of Poppin' Zits
<http://www.well.com/user/jerod23/zits/zits.html> and former jivemeister
for an electronic version of Factsheet Five; Jon Lebkowsky, former
publisher of Unshaved Truths and Fringe Ware Review, and current blogger
at http://www.well.com/~jonl; Mark Frauenfelder, editor/publisher of bOING
bOING, former associate editor of Wired Magazine, current blogger at
http://www.boingboing.net; Mitsu Hadeishi, who blogs at
http://www.syntheticzero.com; and Tiffany Lee Brown, former assistant
editor of Fringe Ware Review and current editor of the ezine Signum <
www.signumpress.com>(Tiffany's off-WELL at the moment, so we'll be posting
her comments, received via email).  We also expect to be posting comments
emailed by a bunch of zine publishers... and if you're reading this off
the WELL, you can comment, too: just send your comment(s) to
inkwell-hosts@well.com.

We'll start by asking our panelists to drop in and post a little more
about themselves...
  

    
I interviewed Paul Krassner (publisher and editor of the ur-zine The
Realist) on the phone a couple of years ago. I asked him why he was
going to stop publishing The Realist. He said that the Web made The
Realist irrelevant. The obscure stories and satire that made The
Realist special were plentiful online.
  

    
So does he have a web site?
  

    
My intro: I'm definitely the punter in this august gathering. I grew up
reading most of the zines mentioned above, not publishing 'em. I've done a
whack of chapbook projects and stuff, and I've contributed to loads of zines
over the years, so I guess that's my cred.

My most zine-like activity is blogging at boingboing.net. Mark invited me
into bb a few months back while he was on vacation, and I've since become
addicted to it, endlessly posting, checking feedback, tinkering with hit-
stats and referrer logs. The instantaniety and trackability of blogging is
fiendishly addictive: with dead-tree zines, you only know how many copies
you've given away, not how far they've spread or what your readers thought
of 'em. Over at bb, we get ~1000 hits/day (a steadily increasing number,
too). Checking referrer logs finds tons of people re-posting the links from
bb and linking back to us, and I'm getting grandiose visions of our links
spreading to endless millions of people.

I've done e-zine-ish stuff for a really long time. In the early 90s, I was
the moderator of the Internet area on Magic, a sprawling Toronto BBS, which
consisted of posting long rants and how-tos; I graduated from that to being
the Internet reviewer for the late lamented Science Fiction Age for half a
decade, reviewing ten links every eight weeks -- the world's slowest, most
expensive blog.

I'm also a pretty prolific sf writer, with a couple of novels and a short-
story collection under negotiation as well as a nonfic book on peer-to-peer
networking. Last year saw publication of my first book, The Complete Idiot's
Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (co-written with Karl Schroeder).

In my spare time, I've got a full-time job as Cheif Evangelist and Co-
Founder of OpenCola (www.opencola.com), a pretty kickass company.

Let's see, I think that's got everything covered. I enjoy long walks on the
sun, beach-sets, and moving seas.
  

    
Hi, I'm Mitsu Hadeishi, I write http://www.syntheticzero.com .  As it
happens, way, way back in 1981-82 I published a paper zine called Synergy
for just three issues --- it was cartoons, stories, essays, photographs, and
poetry from friends of mine and friends of friends. Since then I moved to
the virtual realm, trying to find a place for community and communication in
various modalities on the Net.  Most recently, and the reason Tiffany Lee
Brown suggested me for this panel, I started my weblog in September of 1999
which I've been publishing regularly since.  Weblogs have turned out to be
exactly the thing I'd been looking for: a way to not only talk about things
of interest to me, but to connect with other people from around the world
with diverse interests that intersect mine in interesting and sometimes
surprising ways.  In addition to writing my own blog, I communicate heavily
with writers of other weblogs, and we've formed a number of informal and
more formal groupings, friendships, email lists, and so forth.  Like zines,
webloggers read each other's work and cross-pollinate and reference each
other heavily; we also sometimes do collaborative projects.  Overall, my
experience with reading and writing weblogs has been the most rewarding of
any online experience I have had since I began playing with online
communication in the 80's.

Some of my fellow compadre weblogs include: http://www.lemonyellow.com
http://www.alamut.com http://www.nqpaofu.com http://www.caterina.net
http://www.sylloge.com http://dns123.presol.com/pub/ruthiesdouble/
http://www.geegaw.com http://hine-digital-art.com/hypogee/hypogee.html
http://bovineinversus.com http://metascene.net/weblog.html 
http://www.calamondin.com http://dagmar_chili.pitas.com
http://www.kokonino.com/ht/ http://www.invisible-city.com/weblog/
and many others, check out http://www.syntheticzero.com/deeper.html for
a larger list.
  

    
Jerod here.  I started publishing in '81 on material retrieved from
dumpster dives.  I would barter the publications for admission to
punkrock entertainments, or sell them outside when filthy lucre was
required for said entertainments.  One such title, _Burning Knives_
really struck a chord with some people, and I get the odd comment about
it 20 years later.  I also typed amphetamine-fueled micro-rants on the
back of legal tender, examples of which were reproduced in _.zap!!_,
the apa for alt.zines that Heath Rowe put together.  I'm still
publishing _Poppin' Zits!_, the content of some back issues is
available at
<http://www.well.com/user/jerod23/zits/zits.html>.

I swear a new issue will be out.  Real Soon Now.  It will have
articles on the cult of Franklin Covey time management, the curse of
the Simpsons, Rabid Fear - Rabies and local public health agencies and
whatever else I get around to writing.  And I will finish putting up
the back issues any day.

I was there are the beginning of the zine _MRR_ (which spun off from
the radio show) and at the first and second resurrections of _Factsheet
Five_, along with its second and third deaths.  Between death #2 and
resurrection #3 I kept the corpse embalmed with the pre-web gopher &
e-mail only version _Factsheet Five - Electric_.  

I'm compelled to make a few historical nit-picks about Jon's intro. 
Zines as we know them began in the 1930s.  An argument was published in
one issue of the Seth Friedman version of _Factsheet Five_ that pegged
the origin of fan publications to the early 19th century with
short-lived semi-literate publications that were the genesis of much of
the mythos associated with Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett and other
frontiersmen admired by the not-quite-as-daring semi-literate
publishers.  Regardless, the modern zine started with the science
fiction fans of the golden age of pulps.  The word "zine" was coined in
the late '30s or early '40s as a space, time and resource saving
contraction of "fanzine" that itself came from "fan magazine."  Much of
the argot of those early publications is peppered with similar terms: 
fen, fanac, f2f, 4E, gafia, etc.

Just as in the early '80s, the zines of the '30s were helped by
widespread introduction of cheaper publishing technology, and rampant
un- and under-employment of overeducated protopublishers.  A similar
explosion happened in the '50s and '60s with the addition of political
and cultural rebels to SF fandom's almost exclusive world of self
publishing.  In the '70s the music fans of all stripes broke away en
masse from corporate approved and sponsored "fan" publications, helped
in part by punk rock.

That mix was wonderfully synthesized by Candi Strecker (who publishes
_Sidney Suppley's Quartlery and Confused Pet Monthly_) in a cartoon for
_F5_.  She drew the Factsheet Five as superheros, representing the big
five of self publishing:  The SF (and other) fanboys, the political
proselytizers, the punkrocks and other music aficionados, the
Dicordians and associated religious weirdos, and the SubGenii and their
allied cultural rebels.
 
So zines were a rich and vital part of various parallel cultures for
over sixty years prior to massive media's official pronouncement of
1993 as the year of the zine.

Oh, and I think _MRR_ published a couple of issues before Mike
Gunderloy literally cranked out that first mimeographed edition of
_Factsheet Five_.  Though it could have been the other way around.  I
remember their respective genesis being within months of each other.
  

    
I learned about zines from an issue of the WHOLE EARTH REVIEW from the
mid-80s that had a review of FACTSHEET FIVE in it. It was a life
changer for me. I was an engineer at Memorex in Santa Clara at the
time, about 25 years old, and I couldn't wait to get home everyday to
work on my mini-comic, TOILET DEVIL (named after the sign language term
that that famous talking chimp used when it was mad at somebody).
Between drawing my mini-comic and logging onto BBSes with my Apple 2, I
was in self-publishing heaven.

Next, I put together an issue of a zine with a friend called IMPORTANT
SCIENCE JOURNAL. My friend was a big fan of Alistair Crowley, and I
wasn't, so the zine was pretty schizo. I'm glad that we only printed
like 3 or 4 copies. I hope that they're all decomposing at the dump.

Right before we moved from LA to Colorado, Carla and I started BOING
BOING. We did it because we thought it would be fun to write and draw
and send it out to people and see what bounced back. We met so many
great people through Boing Boing, including Gareth, who soon became our
senior editor (Gareth had a fantastic zine called GOING GAGA, which he
sort of stopped making when he came ot Boing Boing), and Jon
Lebkowsky, who added a healthy dose of Austin high-weirdness to the
mix.

More and more people started getting BOING BOING. Our 14th issue had a
print run of 17,500. Then our distributor went bust owing us over
$20,000. We stopped newstand sales, did one more issue, then the Web
sort of made paper zines a waste, unless the fetishist aspects of paper
were important (like CRAPHOUND, which would suck as a webzine).

Now, David Pescovitz, Cory, and I are doing the BOINGBOING.NET blog.
(Naturally, Cory blogged this topic on BOINGBOING.NET) Doing a blog is
a lot different than doing a zine, but very satisfying all the same.
  

    
Email from judith:

(chiming in from the g-pack, hi Mitsu!)

we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that Mike Gunderloy, of F5 fame, is
blogging at http://www.larkfarm.com

other zine/weblog crossover:  
http://www.invisible-city.com/zines/index.htm

interesting topic.  can't wait to see what develops.
  

    
Welcome, Mark, Cory, Mitsu, and Jerod... and thanks for chiming in,
judith.

Google answered my question about Paul Krassner on the web... there's a
'Virtual Realist' page at http://www.nancysnetwork.com/pkpage.htm
  

    
I, Gareth Branwyn, being of chemically-addled mind and crippled body,
was editor of the zine Going Gaga in the early '90s. I produced eight
issues which took various physical forms (bagazine, cassette zine,
insta-zine (whatever got sent in, got laid into the issue)). Through
Gaga, I hooked up with Mark and Carla of bOING bOING. Since our zines
were so similar, and M&C were so much fun to work with, I threw in with
them, Going Gaga become a column within bb, and I became Senior
Editor. In the early '90s, Mark, Peter Sugarman, Jim Leftwich and a
bunch of other too-cool-for-their-shoes characters and I created Beyond
Cyberpunk, which was one of the early hypermedia zines. In 1996, I
published the book _Jamming the Media_ which was sort of a "my weird
and wonderful adventures in fringe media" memoir with how-to articles.
The book was a tremendous failure and I haven't had the nerve to write
another one since. Since then, I've been running
http://www.streettech.com, the "sucks-less hardware review site," doing
my Jargon Watch column in Wired, and otherwise selling my soul to the
highest bidder.
  

    
Hey, Gareth, welcome. Did you bring the champagne and truffles?
  

    
 I wanted to step in uninvited and introduce myself as well.  I'm
Rafe Colburn.  I have been running a blog over at rc3.org since 1998,
which some people seem to like.

 It's a little known fact that a friend of mine and I published an 
obscure online hacker zine called Informatik in 1991 and 1992.  The
archives are here:

 http://rc3.org/archive/inform/
  

    
Yep, we didn't include him in the credits, but Rafe's popped up as an 8th
panelist.
  

    
Are there some great paper zines around? Or did everybody move to the
web? I know that a lot of zine publishers lost distribution when Fine
Print went away, but I see that Desert Moon still exists:
http://www.dmoon.com/

Did anybody ever make any money publishing zines?
  

    
(IJWTS -- great panel assembled here.)
  

    
Here's a crazy webzine-related piece: The editor of a blog asked Apple's PR
people for some info on internationalization in OS X. Apple's PR agency blew
him off because he wasn't "credentialled," so he posted the news to his
site. Now the PR agency is threatening him with legal action.
  

    
Here's the link, BTW:

http://www.contenu.nu/article.htm?id=1145
  

    
Interesting.  Deborah Branscum's take (at http://buzz.weblogs.com/) is the
same as mine -- Edelman is putting their foot in it with their
heavy-handed credentialism, but the NUBlog fellow was being a snot. The
way he handled the exchange surely reinforced the very prejudices he
decries.
  

    
I've corresponded with Joe from NUBlog before and he can be blunt to the
point of abrasiveness, but Edelman's flamethrower legal threats are way, way
out of line.
  

    
 The legal threats are idiotic.  But Joe is as big an asshole as you'll 
find.
  

    
Email from Jeff Potter (taking the bait):

Hi all...Zinester here. I heard about this panel and thought I'd stop by.
Jon L just baited the hook nicely, eh? : ) "Are there some great paper
zines around?" Ha! I'll bite!

I've been doing my "Out Your Backdoor" since 1991. It's a zine that covers
the topics of a mag like "Outside" only it takes out the fantasy
consumerism and gives these cool activities and gadgets back to the folks
who really do em. At the same time, it takes the theory in a mag like
"Anarchy" and applies it in everyday life. And it's delivered in plain old
stories about crazy everyday stuff. Oh, one last thing: it doesn't pander
to anyone or preach to any converted. It's an All Ages zine---so that we
have leftwing, rightwing, old and young all having a blast together. I say
it's about Modern Folkways.

I put out my last issue a couple months ago and just went nuts. It's the
hugest ever and this time I wrote it all. So it's a perzine. Yet it's all
nonfiction how-to. It almost LOOKS like Outside mag...with a dash of
Harper's, say. THAT WAS FUN, I TELL YOU! And I had a huge array of diverse
ads.

That's another cool thing about me. (Oops, this is getting bad.) No indy
label ads. I think that's kinda cool. I have ads from dozens of real
businesses who don't advertise in other zines, basically.

So, to answer another of Jon L's questions: My zine has always run in the
black! It's always threatening to take off, but I only publish once a
year, so my momentum dies every time.

Paper is great. You play with stock, ink, typography, binding, size. I
have had the BEST graphic artists do issues for me. I get to see these
gorgeous spreads. Sure, some websites are "neato," but paper can be
several steps up.

I have a huge website. http://outyourbackdoor.com ....with 500 stories,
forum, store, PayPal. I love doing wide-ranging fancy things there. It's
just a simple text site. I need to cover the web bases better. I'm gonna
rig up a shopping cart. But even at its best, the web is narrower than
print, less diverse. Responsible job-having family folk can't be as candid
online as they'd like. They'd lose their jobs. The better they wrote the
less attention they'd get for losing that job. Only a few martyrs ever get
any press, ya know. Just the popular kids. Paper zining can build up more
strongly on an in-crowd basis before painful leaks occur.

I like the crowd paper runs with. At one point I had national distro plus
these 3 statewide distro's putting my zine out to grocery stores and gas
stations. It sold just fine! I like sneaking my zine into the dentist
office, the barber shop. The local Barnes&Noble gave me the bureaucratic
runaround and said they wouldn't stock it...so I gave em a few issues
anyway, on the sly. You know you got a good book when you have to steal it
INTO bookstores! I've also done readings, events, postering, travel. I
want to start doing more booths someday. You don't get that social action
with websites.

Speaking of books, I've been branching into bookzines. I'm really proud of
them. All my 23 titles are unique and fit niches in need. (Like, there are
no books of firsthand mtbike culture...so I published a superkiller one.)
However, the bookzines have sunk like a rock. Well, I do have one hit. It
really surprised me how after I excerpted all the books in my last zine
that hardly any of my readers ordered any. My webvisitors rave about my
site but they don't order books. Actually, the books are in the black,
too, but not as much as I thought. I've heard that Americans read mags,
Euros read books.

About blogs...I know a guy who surfed several of the hot ones for a year.
He said they were all about everyone's mood-swings, medications, cat,
cubicle job, car, commute, hair-do, sucky boyfriends. Water-cooler chat.
Woe to him who rocked that boat.

That's my overweight two bits... Aren't those pithy one-line replies
great?
: ) Rock on, dudes! --Jeff Potter  (jp@outyourbackdoor.com)

Jeff Potter
  ****
*Great Lakes Press * http://www.glpbooks.com
   (#1 publisher of engineering license reviews & discounts on techbooks)
*Out Your Backdoor * http://www.outyourbackdoor.com
   (friendly zine of modern folkways and cultural rescue...with bikes)
  

    
 You sound like the hardest working guy in the 'zine business!

 Your friend seems to have missed a lot of blogs if that's the impression
he got.  There are plenty of blogs out there that are extremely topical
and interesting and have almost zero meta crap about the author (not that
meta crap is a bad thing).  For example, check out Ethel the Blog.  It's
mainly political stuff, but he also covers music, literature, and a bit
of tech stuff, too:

 http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/ethel/blogger.html

 It's probably my favorite, in terms of posting stuff that either gets
me riled up or making me think.  The maintainer (Steve Baum) is 
wickedly hilarious, too.
  

    
The blog Mark, Cory and David are maintaining at http://www.boingboing.net
focuses, not on personalities, but on the kind of neurotica and
technophiliac weirdness that the bOING bOING zine was about.

The personal journal stuff is still appealing, I think, if the person
who's journaling has something to say or a life that's interesting in some
quirky way. Though I'd done blogs of a sort in the past (such as the
TAZmedia webzine at the fringeware.com), it wasn't til I ran across
filmmaker Doug Block (tempted to type "Doug Blog"!), who was finishing
work on his documentary "Home Page," that the concept came together for
me... and Doug was focusing more on personal bloggers like Justin Hall. I
think the more personal blogs were a big deal around '97-'98, when "Home
Page" was finished and released, and there was other stuff going on, like
the Digital Storytelling festival that the late Dana Atchley put together.

I know there were zines that were more personal, but I was never as
interested in them as in zines that were about culture, literature,
technology... and were more diverse.
  

    

I'd like to hear the panelists' thoughts on the differences, and maybe
synergies between, zines and the net.  It was through the pre-web internet
in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I became familiar with and connected
to the world of zines beyond my own local scene.  What are the panelists
thoughts on the influence of the net on the zine explosion.  Or maybe a more
accurate phrasing would be "explosion of recognition by the wider media."

Also, though surfing blogdom is my favorite net activity to date, I miss the
sheer tactile, hugging joy, no - ECSTASY, of finding a new copy of a
favorite zine in the mailbox.

And what are the panelists' thoughts on link-copying, not slagging it as
lazy, but rather as an interesting and distributed way to tell "what's hot"
and "what's popular" as one surfs around blogdom.  Can blogging be seen as a
modern cultural radar of sorts?  I'm amazed to find how the major magazines
will often print items regarding both news and pop culture that seem OLD by
blog time.
  

    
>surfed several of the hot ones for a year.  He said they were all about
>everyone's mood swings, medications, cat, cubicle job, car...

Actually it sounds like your friend wasn't surfing weblogs, but was rather
surfing web diaries, a phenomenon that preceded weblogs by a couple of
years.  Web diaries or web journals are entirely personal sites, and many of
them are very popular, but they tend to be quite different from weblogs.

Most weblogs, in fact, contain little personal information; a lot of them
are just annotated link lists (this is the "canonical" format for weblogs).
The ones more interesting to me, however, are those that contain not only
lists of links with brief comments, but also contain the author's personal
thoughts and insights, sprinkled with some tidbits from their personal life
to give them a more concrete and embodied flavor.  My favorite weblogs
(some of which I listed in my introductory post, above) are of this style;
a combination of personal journal, personal commentary and thoughts, and
references to interesting developments in art, science, technology, and
other things.

Link copying I think is great --- a good way to propagate memes and there's
nothing wrong with it at all, I believe.  Although I try to provide original
content and research on my site, I also copy interesting links I come across
on other sites --- why not?

Heather Anne (http://www.lemonyellow.com) tells me that she really loves
the tactile and other properties of the printed page, though she was
talking mostly about books in her case.
  

    
I think one of the interesting differences between blogs and zines is that
blogs are essentially a collection of pointers *away* from themselves, while
a zine is, itself, the place you wanna finish up. There are exceptions, of
course. Most of the zines I read/have read have some zine reviews, but with
the exception of FS5, I never picked up a zine to find out about other
zines.