Abstract: One of the more enduring historical questions about zine culture is their political legacy. That is, to what extent were the values of zine communities from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s — whether elaborated via subversive “high weirdness,” jagged aesthetic, or DIY delivery systems — able to produce measurable social change? Put differently: did zines matter? Stephen Duncombe asked this in the present tense in his landmark study of 90s zines, Notes from Underground (1997) — a question Janice Radway revisited nearly 20 years later via the “afterlives” of zine makers (2011). This talk extends Radway’s call to better understand how makers created “far-flung, loosely structured networks” and how those networks function through the venues of what Radway calls an indigenous research apparatus — the archives and collections of zine communities that advocate(d) and organize(d) their activities. This presentation concerns one such research apparatus, Factsheet Five, the largest and most significant review publication in zine history, which brought together several counterpublics in one serialized space. Drawing from experiences gleaned via the Factsheet Five Archive Project, this presentation argues that historical research of marginal print communities such as zines require a mixed methods approach that explores the past through traditional archival research (in this case, the NY State Archives) as well as the present through digital ethnography via new media as disparate as Instagram and Wikipedia.
Today I would like to share some early lessons of a yearslong project I’ve been gradually working on called The Factsheet Five Archive Project. Factsheet Five was arguably the most important publication for underground publishers in the late 1980s and early 90s.
[F5]
As a pre-www meta-zine or network zine, it was one of the most visible places these publishers could send their creations for review or coverage and as a result, its growth helped turn zines as disparate artifacts into a recognizable subculture.[1] Though it began as a doubled-sided newsletter in May 1982 with a circulation of 50, at its peak in the 90s, it grew to 15,000. By its final issue, #64, published in the summer of 1998, it was reviewing thousands of zines per issue and was nearly indistinguishable from other alt-focused glossy magazines.
Most folks in the room probably know what zines are, but perhaps it is helpful to slow down and anchor this talk with a basic definition and some context for this project.
[Duncombe 1]
In the first and most widely cited scholarly book on zines, Notes From Underground: Zines and Politics of Alternative Culture, Stephen Duncombe approaches a definition of zines practically: the best thing to do when asked what they are is to “hand over a stack … and let the person asking the question decide” (1).
[Pass around time]
Duncombe begins his book by walking us through some of the cultural milieu of zines – as personal and politically self-conscious but also existing on a different plane than mainstream culture. That is, alternative in the true sense of offering something different from consumer capitalism. His definition, which is the most cited definition of zines I’ve encountered, is grounded as such:
[Duncombe 2]
“zines are noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute themselves” (6).
[Duncombe 3]
Throughout the book, Duncombe walks us through various taxonomies of zines and major themes outlined via chapter titles –identity, community, work, consumption, discovery, purity, danger, and ultimately the politics of alternative culture — all extracted from his analysis of zines and interviews with their makers. His data comes from several sources: his own participation in the zine scene leading up to writing the book, as he notes, but much of the corpus of Factsheet Five, which was still being published at the time when he was researching and writing his book. When looking to understand the motives of zine makers, for instance, he cites Factsheet Five’s published correspondence and often refers to insights from the rotating “Why Publish?” column, which was written by different zine makers.
[Duncombe 4]
At one point early in the book, Duncombe even speculates on the geographic distribution of zine making activity in the United States in the year 1991, basing his estimates on the 1,300 zines that were listed and reviewed in Issue 44. He also dedicates significant space to interviewing the differing editorial philosophies of its two main editors: Mike Gunderloy and R Seth Friedman.
[NYS Archives]
Much of his data from Factsheet Five — and arguably zine culture more broadly — came from research he did at the New York State Archives in Albany NY.
[Gunderloy]
More specifically, he used the Mike Gunderloy Factsheet Five Collection, gifted by its namesake in April 1992 when Gunderloy quit editing the magazine due to the crushing labor it required of him.[2]
[Aul]
Although not processed by archivist Billie Aul until 1997 (the year Notes from Underground was published), Duncombe relied heavily on this collection, not only to presumably access back issues of Factsheet Five (some of the issues cited went as far back as #15 from 1985), but also to analyze at least some of the tens of thousands of zines sent to it for review.[3]
[NYS Archives Trip]
At a basic level, I am using the Factsheet Five Archive Project to continue the work Duncombe started. I’ve spent 3 days at the Archive in Albany in 2019 taking hundreds of pictures and scans, emailed with Duncombe, and even had conversations with a few of the zine makers cited in his book. In short, I am attempting to tell a multimodal history of zine culture, reconstituting the scene that emerged in part from these 64 issues, poking and prodding at its reviews, editorials, correspondence, art, and serendipitous encounters. But it’s also attempting to do something different from Duncombe with a different and perhaps more unruly sense of the term “archive.”
[F5 Archive]
Mostly the project exists as a WordPress blog and an Instagram account I’ve been running since 2022, though I have also used some of my findings to contribute to the Wikipedia page for Factsheet Five. It builds from the work of my dissertation, which explored the archives of a different meta-zine, Broken Pencil, which Patrick will discuss more in a moment. However, there is a key difference: when doing that work, I owned the corpus of all issues of Broken Pencil which were generously sent to me by then-editor Alison Lang since I was a contributor. In addition, as Patrick will mention, Broken Pencil was also digitized, indexed, and OCR’d in ProQuest, which made it helpful for searching and finding patterns, especially when a specific question would pop up through my more immersive handling.
Wrangling the data from Factsheet Five, however, is more challenging. Its 64 issues are scattered in various irl and digital archives – different modes, different libraries, different basements, different booksellers.
[Archive data]
Here’s a breakdown: Issues 1-28 are scanned by not OCR’d based on my visit to Albany in 2019. The Internet Archive has scanned and OCR’d copies of Issues 25-49. I’ve accessed and scanned Issues 50-64 via ILL and own several purchased from eBay, but haven’t scanned them just yet. As a record collector, I feel a bit like a completist, so this can be both frustrating and exciting.
[NYPL]
Issue 5, for example, was inexplicably missing from the Albany archive, but I managed to track a copy down at the NYPL during a random visit to NYC in 2023. I’m also often on the lookout for particular issues on eBay.
[F5archive.org]
Some of this makes the project painstakingly slow and disjointed. At present F5archive.org has 11 blog posts and Instagram has 40 posts with 471 followers. I’ve addressed Factsheet Five’s origins and pre-origins (including where its name came from and what Gunderloy was doing before publishing it) and dipped into the final issue as well as the infamous 45th issue, where a middle editor came and went under unfortunate circumstances.
[High weirdness]
I guess in conceptualizing what I’ve been up to with this project, it might be apt to call it something likr methodological high weirdness. High weirdness is a phrase originated by Rev. Ivan Stang in his book High Weirdness by Mail – a title Erik Davis has in turn has borrowed for his recent book on the psychedelic spirituality movements born out of American counterculture of the 1970s (a counterculture that has mutated through the various strands of zine culture, as Davis points out).[4] What I mean by it here is that there’s nothing necessary consistent about it — I mix embodied and digital archival research; collecting back issues of Factsheet Five from eBay and ILL; exploring Wikipedia Talk pages, and corresponding with former editors, contributors, subscribers, and readers of Factsheet Five through my Instagram account. As I do so, I am slowly and inefficiently telling this story as pastiche. The question that lingers is what does the story add up to? How does it help explain why zines mattered, matter, and will continue to matter?
[Duncombe 5]
Duncombe himself tried to answer this question. In his conclusion to Notes From Underground, he addressed the political efficacy of zines, arguing that it is mixed. His assessment came just as the commercial web was rising to popularity – a phenomenon he comments on in the final pages of his book. He argues that zines do matter in that they are “pre-political,” offering an alternative – a “free space… within which to imagine and experiment with new and idealistic ways of thinking, communicating, and being” (196), but not actually act out. Zines, as a product of counterhegemonic culture, do matter. However, in terms of changing anything politically within the mainstream, he makes it clear that zines are not enough:
“So long as the politics of underground culture remain the politics of culture, they will remain a sort of virtual politics. As such, I have little hope that underground culture can effect meaningful social change, the very change it cries out for through its articulated critiques and very form. Individuals can and will be radicalized through underground culture, but they will have to make the step to political action themselves” (192).
As the means of production and especially distribution of zines mutated throughout the next 20 years, one interesting effect of Duncombe’s book is that more researchers have published about zine culture.
[Zine studies]
Books like Alison Peipmeir’s Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (2009), Teal Trigg’s Fanzines: The DIY Revolution (2010), Adela Licona’s Zines in Third Space (2012), and Lisa Darms’s The Riot Grrrl Collection (2013) draw from archival research to consider the politics and culture of zines. Meanwhile, studies in health and social sciences have been using zines a participatory research method, and pedagogical research shows that zines are being used in the classroom and beyond, thanks to pieces like those written by my comrades here.[5]
[Zotero]
At present, the Zine Studies Group on Zotero that I manage, has logged almost 2,400 items of scholarship.
[Copy Machine Manifestos]
Worth mentioning too is the art exhibit, “Copy Machine Manifestos,” which showcased artist’s zines at both the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Indeed, reception studies scholar Janice Radway credits Duncombe for legitimizing zines as an area of research, giving rise to what she calls in her 2011 PMLA article “zine studies.”
[Radway 1]
Radway’s research agenda turned toward zines during the last 10 years of her already impressive career, looking specifically at what she called “the afterlives” of zine makers and particularly of women.[6]
Citing Mike Gunderloy’s admission that most zines lived “half-lives” – meaning they didn’t stick around for very long — Radway asks: “If most zines disappeared only a few years after their inception, one has to wonder what they accomplished. In what sense might they have had cultural or political effects?” (141). To approach this question, Radway returns to Duncombe’s conclusion that zines offer a failed politics. Yet Radway speculates that a different methodology should yield a different conclusion: “Had Duncombe tracked zines and zine-ing over a longer period of time,” she supposes, “he might have evaluated their political effects differently and been more encouraging about their promise as a form of social and political action” (143).
In looking at the afterlives of zines, Radway posits that:
[Radway 2]
“Zines did not simply die in the early 1990s as their creators moved out of adolescence and young adulthood. Rather, they continued to live on in a number of different venues and forms, as a result of the actions of a significant number of former zinesters who were profoundly changed by their zine-ing. One consequence was that many developed a commitment to extending the reach and effects of zines into the future” (143-44).
Let me offer The Factsheet Five Archive Project as a product of such an afterlife. When I started this project, I guessed that maybe I was once reviewed in Factsheet Five, but much to my surprise, once I received some back issues via ILL, I noticed I was reviewed not once but twice.
[Mud]
Although my primary discipline is composition and rhetoric (AKA Writing Studies), I probably wouldn’t consider myself a writer or academic at all if it wasn’t for zines. I made my first issue in 1993 and have always self-published in one form or another ever since.
It is in this sense that I frame The Factsheet Five Project, as both a means for not only narrating a history of zines, but also for opening conversations on the effects this history has had on the present.
[IG folks]
Many of the folks who graced the pages of Factsheet Five went into careers in publishing, the arts, and more and I’ve been able to make contact with some of them via the project’s Instagram, including Chris Dodge (one of the first zine scholars who created a zineography), Boing Boing co-founder Mark Frauenfelder, Plotz zine creator Barbara Kligman, writers Hua Hsu and Jonathan Lethem, comic writer Chris Cajero Cilla, famed persecuted underground cartoonist Mike Diana who did Boiled Angel, critic Howard Rheingold, Quimby’s founder Steven Svymbersky, and a handful of others.
Just this past Friday, I was in Autumn Leaves Bookstore in Ithaca, which also is the home of anarchist publisher PM Press. Chris Dodge is a freelancer and tipped me off to having worked with folks at the store, so I asked the person ringing me out if they knew him. It turned out the person I was talking with was founder Ramsey Kanaan (who also founded AK Press). He told me he wrote for Factsheet Five when he lived in the Bay Area in the 90s and we had a great chat about his take on underground publishing that was cut short only because I had my young kiddos with me.
It is these moments – when the history races to the fore– that make the Factsheet Five Archive Project so interesting to me. Ultimately it seeks to better understand how makers created “far-flung, loosely structured networks” and how those networks still function through the venues of what Radway calls an indigenous research apparatus:
[Radway 3]
“a method of community self-definition, a kind of boosterism and subcultural cheerleading, a recruitment tool, and a critical review literature on the do-it-yourself world of underground communication. Often this literature contests the authority of academic expertise about zines. It acts on, further enables, and thus perpetuates the networking and community formation at the heart of zine-ing. Zine community formation is at least not evanescent, then, even if it is fostered in a mediated way” (144)
In considering Factsheet Five Archive Project as one such research apparatus I am interested in how it can use methodological high weirdness to reconstitute a community that is many ways still active through its afterlives. There is of course much more I want to consider here, but I’ll end with some quick impressions this project has left with me:
- High weirdness as a method encourages serendipity and chance – which the blog and IG (not to mention zines) certainly accommodate. For instance, sometimes I will decide to post based on a new issue I bought from eBay and sometimes it is from deliberate questions I’ve been working on.
- Yet there are some practices that would better serve the project, and one of them is OCR’ing all issues. Again, right now the only the issues that are available on the Internet Archive (#25-49) and a few others are searchable. Often when folks reach out to me or I reach out to them, I can gift them a review of their zine or search for mentions. Of course, with more infrastructure, I could also make this database public and that’s another possibility with the right resources.
- Making the text OCR’d and indexed would also allow more possibilities for corpus analysis that Patrick with share with us later. These more distant reading approaches, of which I know little, would add yet another helpful method for zooming out and looking at relationships that cannot be since through more immersive close reading.
- And yet, grappling with a more strategic and purposeful reading of Factsheet Five can also yield some interesting observations about zine culture. For instance, Jolie has been using some of this corpus to explore how zine distros in the 90s morphed as zine culture began to become more visible and digital. On that note, I will now pass the mic to Jolie so she can tell you more.
[1] Network zines, as Stephen Duncombe defines them, “concentrate on reviewing and publicizing other zines, music, art, computer BBSs (bulletin board systems), and other underground culture. They serve as nodal points for the bohemian diaspora” (11).
[2] This was when he was simultaneously walking away from the magazine while also planning a book with then co-editor Cari Goldberg Janice, called The World of Zines: A Guide to the Independent Magazine Revolution, published by Penguin on Jan 1, 1992.
[3] And aside from this archival work, Duncombe interviewed Gunderloy and his eventual editorial predecessor, R Seth Friedman, to get at the difficulty of provoking change without becoming subsumed by the system – consumer capitalism — they were resisting.
[4] “…little publications filled with rantings of high weirdness” is how Stephen Duncombe described zines.
[5] For a fascinating genealogy of zine studies see Anne Hays’s “A Citation Analysis about Scholarship on Zines” from The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (2020).
[6] Although Radway became emeritus at Northwestern in 2022, she was planning to write a book about this. In a 2013 interview with editor James Hay from Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Radway noted: “the actual working title of the larger project is Girl Zines and Their Afterlives I’m still playing around with the subtitle as I figure out what the project is really about. The concept of “afterlives” applies both to girls and to zines. The project centers on the zines produced by young women in the 1990s. The focus on the term “girl” comes from the fact that many of those zines were generated in and around the Riot Grrrl movement, which was associated with punk and particular sub-sets of the punk scene. I am especially interested in what has become of the zines created in response to this movement as well as in the fate of the young women who created them. I’m interested in why these zines continue to be interesting to a range of people and thus live complex afterlives in the discourses and practices of others. At the same time, those former girl zinesters are now adults living complex afterlives which many feel were directly affected by their experience as zinesters. An obvious question is why.”