"There is nothing more satisfying than working on a project that you have total control over," O'Hara says. "If things are not going that well in your day job or your personal life, having something like a zine is endlessly rewarding. It helped me come socially out of my shell. I've taken loads and loads of great photographs for it. It can be physically tiring and financially difficult but for the most part I've been lucky in that we still have an audience despite our irregular schedule and ever-changing musical taste."
O'Hara, who moved to London last year, quickly plugged herself into the music scene there and kept chickfactor alive on paper and in virtual form, even if the logistics of the move did require the sacrifice of an entire year's worth of issues. Though the zine's first few years of operation relied on hand-folding and a cheap mom-and-pop printer in Tecumseh, Mich., chickfactor has evolved to the point that it can be difficult to distinguish its production and promotional leanings (check out the online chickfactor shop) from its more lavishly budgeted corporate cousins. For O'Hara, that's not the point: Her idea of what a zine is isn't dependent on the publication looking particularly homemade or reaching a relatively tiny audience.
A recent back cover from a paper version of chickfactor, the brainchild of Washington City Paper alum Gail O'Hara.
(Chickfactor)
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"It's hard to say what makes a zine and what makes a magazine," O'Hara says. "I think chickfactor is a magazine, just as valid as Time and Newsweek. I guess what makes mine a zine is that there is no company behind me. It's just me."
Rowe summarizes the movement of zines onto the Web thusly: "Fanzines became paper zines became webzines became blogs. That's where we are now." But he's not just being blithe. He sees in the current blog craze something akin to the paper zine craze of the early '90's. "The same spirit is there," Rowe says. "Everybody feels powerless to one degree or another and is looking to get some kind of reaction. They want people to care about what they think. It's heartening seeing blogs, even if a lot of them will go away as the novelty wears off."
Breier and Smith, whose Xerography Debt includes a regular column on the history of zines, find the antecedents of Leeking Ink and chickfactor and all of their kin much further back, in the 19th century broadsheets often named Tatler or Spectator and devoted to a wide range of political and literary subject matter, a sudden surge of home publishing made possible by the growing availability of the tabletop printing press.
Collective Consciousness
Perhaps in the end, though, it's less crucial to identify what zines are exactly or when they appeared than to talk about the kinds of communities they create. And thanks in large part to the Internet, those communities are more than ever relentlessly interdependent. It's as if the place of Factsheet Five has been filled by everyone rather than someone. Take as examples Xerography Debt -- churning out and Web-archiving a couple of hundred brief reviews from a couple of dozen reviewers each issue -- or Rowe's Web site, www.zinebook.com, which acts as a clearinghouse of zine review sites, zine anthologies and zine editors' personal favorites. Rowe's site even dares to ask and answer my quixotic question: What's a zine? ("They're Tinkertoys for malcontents," writes Rowe. "They're obsessed with obsession. They're extraordinary and ordinary. They're about strangeness but since it's usually happening somewhere else you're kind of relieved.") O'Hara's chickfactor site takes the more common and less time-intensive approach, providing a page of links to her own favorite zines. In fact, it's hard to find a zine, online or on paper, that isn't assiduously pointing its readers to other homemade publications.
"The back-of-the-zine review is now viewed as almost an obligation," Breier says, "in the same way that communities have always existed in the back of books, through bibliographies and acknowledgements, helping to lead you on to the next book, the next writer."
"That's one way that the word 'underground' really fits the world of zines -- the privacy and the sense of a subculture," Rowe adds. "It's like an underground river that's always flowing, and every once in a while a mainstream journalist drills a hole down and all this water spouts up. It can be difficult to keep up with all the zines -- you have to read nine to find one good one -- but that's what people do. They read the online zines and when they hear about a print zine that sounds interesting they send off their well-wrapped cash. Just to keep it all going."
Scott W. Berg is a frequent contributor to Weekend. He has never produced a zine, but there's still time.
