INQUISITOR: Letter from the Editor

Zines
by Laurel Sutton

It follows that everybody's favorite zines will be those where they feel at home, where they speak the language and recognize the landscape. The great thing about zines is that you can explore a lot of what's out there for the same bucks you'd spend on a year's subscription to something slick and vacuous like Details or Axcess or Sassy. The "bang for buck" ratio is quite high: no advertising (and therefore no sucking up to advertisers), no mass-appeal junk, no graphic constraints, and no apologies. There is a great satisfaction in knowing that the couple of bucks (cash, please!) you send to a P.O. Box in some small town is going directly into the back pocket of a person who needs to buy lunch and pay the bill at Kinko's. Just like you.

I love zines that make me laugh and think and tell my friends about them. I know it's good if I read it over and over, getting the feel of the words. Zines have secret rhythms that make your mind dance. You hear the voice of each writer in your head and you see the world through their eyes. The most personal per-zines are like letters home from a foreign country, filled with longing and a need to share thoughts and feelings with somebody who "gets it".

One of the reasons that zines provide such an intimate and immediate connection is their extreme "niche marketing"--they are for and by a very selective and select audience--and make no secret of their exclusivity. Reading a good zine on a topic you are familiar with is like finding out that there are other members of a club you unconsciously joined. Skimming through the pages of Factsheet Five, one finds zines devoted to almost any obsessive topic imaginable. Perhaps that should be the motto of the zine revolution: "For every obsession, a zine shall be made".

While this kind of Warholian exposure may not liberate the model train enthusiasts or the Klingon language buffs, it is a powerful and accessible medium for the traditionally disenfranchised, who constitute a large percentage of zine authors and readers. The voice of the zine may rant, but it's an honest rant, not the co-opted, watered-down version that appears in most "real" magazines. There is a strong connection between zines and the underground press of the 1960s, a do-it-yourself credo coupled with a distrust of mainstream media. The difference lies in the zine creator's desire to make a personal statement rather than serve as a collective creative outlet. Zines are usually the product of one person's vision and drive (although it's not unusual for like-minded individuals to collaborate later on). We're currently seeing an explosion of zines on every topic--just check out the latest F5 for a sense of what's available.

Admittedly, a lot of new zines are bad zines. Self expression via zines is the Wild West of publishing, rather lawless and usually gritty, if not down and dirty. Still, zines are at the mercy of a market harsher than any imagined by the strictest free marketeer, allowing the fittest zines to prosper while assuring perpetual outer fringe status

for the rest. Since there is no Prime Directive involved in this process, I feel bound to aid the survival of my own favorites.