Introduction

For our final unit at Freestyle we were all assigned the Zenith project. This project was aimed to be the ultimate project of everything that we had previously learned and created. There were no limits to what we wanted to do and the timeline in which we were going to do it. I was unsure as to what I wanted to do until I watched a YouTube video titled “How to Make A Zine”. I had never heard of a zine before and I was intrigued. I was sent down this rabbit hole of DIY culture. I decided that this was going to be my project where I’d create zines myself, but also educate others about the history and importance of them through my research paper.

If you’re interested in reading my paper-

What is a zine?

It’s defined by Merriam-Webster as “a noncommercial often homemade or online publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter”. The first noted individuals to make zines were science fiction authors in the 1920s. They were frustrated because they weren’t being published by mainstream publishers. They banded together and started making these homemade pamphlets and sharing them with one another. After that the zine world has been home to a lot of minority groups who shared the same struggles as those sci-fi writers. One could argue that zines reached their peak popularity during the 1970s as they were a large part of the 1970’s punk rock movement. Today zines still live through people who are passionate for DIY. More recently they have started to make the move towards digital, something that I attempted to do in this project.

 Why are zines important?

Zines are important because they give people, who’d normally be rejected in mainstream media, a voice to share what they want.