Zines

There's nothing like delving into a genre of life for which you have no experience. It opens new horizons and makes one desirous of a longer day with less time relegated to sleeping. This week:

Exploring the Online Zine World

And what better place to start than a zine about zines for ziners (?) at Zine World or a list of zines by keyword at E-Zine List. Or so one would think. Because zines appear and disappear like mushrooms in the rain, many of the links are dead, fronts for spam, or like the number 404. Or the creator of the zine has changed his or her mind and changed the focus since it was listed. (A zine about jazz bassists in Europe turned out to be a huge advertisement for phone services and equipment.)

For a neat site that allows you to judge a book by its cover, go to Cafe Royal (a UK distro.) Not a lot of any information about the insides, however, except the price. Not even scans of sample pages. Well, maybe it's not such a neat site but it looks nice and gives you an idea of cover art for zines.

I have read and looked at a few sites devoted to an individual creative outlets. Here are just three that you might want to look at:

Some clever and insightful writing and art at Chinese Sweatshop

A rather intense series of zines at the distro (distribution channel to us older fugs) Gimme Brains!!!

From the middle of almost nowhere (southern Arizona that is neither Nogales nor Tucson, almost normal zine at Almost Normal Comics