Making A Zine

Filipino punk bands, conceptual art drawings and catalogues of what the author has eaten for breakfast for the last six months: The Sticky Institute has stocked zines on all these topics, along with nearly 10,000 others over the last 12 years since it was founded. But what exactly is a zine? Luke Sinclair, creative consultant at Sticky, explains, “Usually it's an independent publication, usually it's made by an individual or a very small group, and its always made for love and not profit. If you tick those boxes, you're probably making a zine.”

Located in Degraves Street Subway under Flinders Street, Melbourne's Sticky Institute is a not-for-profit zine store and artist-run work space packed to the rafters with the creative output of local and international zinesters. Things are going well at the moment; the Melbourne Zine Fair for 2013 has just taken place with a fantastic turnout and Sinclair is looking forward to hosting an all-night zine making marathon this Saturday for White Night festival.

But around the time that the shop was founded, the outlook for zines was not so good, he explains. “There was a real sense in '98, '99, as the Internet was just growing, that it would really kill zines completely. I didn't know much about digital technologies at the time and I totally bought into that argument. I believed the people who said that in another 12 months zines wouldn't exist because everything would be online! ... It just didn't happen. We have more zines coming into the shop than any time before in our 12-year history.”

Photocopied, stapled, frequently hand-written and hand-drawn, zines are deeply analogue. So what does keep people coming back to them when nowadays anyone can go online and start a Tumblr? “Every different medium has its strengths and its weaknesses. So if you want to make something that requires links to video footage or animation, then maybe the internet is a good place for you to do that. But if you want to sit at a party and run a zine stall and hand sell things to people it's just really embarrassing if you hand someone a business card with your blog's web address on it. That's what real losers do,” Sinclair laughs. He says that the best zines use their form creatively. “For example, there was a really good zine that came out of Adelaide called Westside Angst and issue number two came with an actually piece of Adelaide rubbish taped on. And the makers of the zine just couldn't keep up with [demand].”

Zines can be a lot more personal than the average publication, creating a feeling of intimacy between readers and makers. There's a community feel and Sinclair hopes that the zine making marathon might attract some new people as well as the old hands. The store will be open from 7pm to 7am and they are laying on free photocopying for the night. “[It'd be great if] new people come down. The idea is that people will be working, making zines in the store. [Visitors can drop in and] they can have a look at what's going on in the zine world, because it's really flourishing at the moment.”