Q1: How long have you been kicking around in the zine world?
There were zines in my orbit before I was really thinking about them. Friends from art school and elsewhere put together the seminal Daughters of Slaughter women in comics publication, my bandmate and his girlfriend edited a collaborative one called Plastic Green Trees, our musician friend from England — Mr Snakes — was making something called Circuit 47. I first made my own in 2002 after releasing a solo album that was getting no attention from the music press. I thought, back in the day, when punk was ignored, fans and musicians just photocopied their own press to fill the void, so I made a cheeky bit of promotion for my ignored solo album. That was the first issue of Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People.
Q2: Zines are so ephemeral and so few libraries have collections of them. Is this part of the reason you felt it was time to tell a history?
The history project came from a genuine self-interest in finding the thread from today’s plethora of zinefests back to the punk rock zines of early 80s Aotearoa. In 2015 I wrote a rather subjective history of 21st century zines in Aotearoa. I released this as issue 56 of Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People, also presenting it at pop culture and bibliographic conferences. I was thinking, who’s qualified, who could I commission to research and write the earlier part of Aotearoa’s zine history? Eventually I decided I should just take the job on myself.
Q3: Do you also feel that they’ve been overlooked, and even looked down upon, by the art/ publishing/ library world?
I’m sure they’ve been looked down upon, but many in the zine scene wouldn’t have it any other way. For all those who celebrate the growth in this media, there’s others who see the shift from scrappy punk zines and zinefests in community halls to zinefests in major galleries and the like as evidence that zines have lost their edge. I don’t think that’s true but there’s something to be said for the aesthetic challenge made by your scrappy punk zines versus your well-crafted Risograph-printed chapbook for example.
Q4: Not every zinester is in the book. That would’ve been impossible, of course. How did you make your selection of who you would talk to?
Both the publisher and I were thinking that 50 interviewees was an ambitious but doable number for this book. Once I started to break that down into decades and regions I realised that really only allowed for a couple of voices from each region per decade, e.g. a couple of Ōtepoti zinesters from the 80s, a couple of 2000s zinesters from Tāmaki Makaurau and so on. Then it was a case of making sure there was cultural diversity, balanced gender representation and queer representation. Many of those chosen are kind of a big deal in the zine scene because they made zines for 20 years, or started a zinefest or some such, but I balanced this by selecting others whose interest might be more fleeting; this is also an important aspect of zine culture — everybody’s welcome.
Q5: Forty years on from those early punk zines, the zine world still is active and there are good attendances at the various zinefests. What does that signify to you?
In some ways, 80s punk and the contemporary zine scene are completely different worlds, but then again, zinefests are still populated by marginalised voices, queer voices, trans voices, neuro-diverse voices, those with political ideas not represented by mainstream political rhetoric . . . The other side of it is that the promises of the world wide web have failed: AI, algorithms, billionaire owners of the internet media platforms, the poverty of ‘too much information’. Zinesters would rather make a publication by hand and sell it directly to another human being somewhere like zinefest.
Q6: They can be such a labour of love to create. What’s their role in today’s world?
Creating something by hand is great for your mental health, increasingly so as we look to get off the screens every waking hour and back into our bodies. Also, the digital world and the world of internet are all about speed. It’s good to slow down and make something with a different kind of value.
Q7: In your view, best zine cover of all time? Why?
Let’s go for a three-way tie between: Submission #3 (Ania Glowacz) from the 80s for graphic punch and its mix of photocopying and fluoro spray paint; 90s Daughters of Slaughter (Stella Corkery) for freehand organic goodness and being right there at the start of Riot Grrrl despite being separated from Riot Grrrl’s US origins by an ocean; and Daily Secretion #3 for its abject ziney title and Hannah Salmon’s detailed yet graphic drawing prowess.
Q8: Saddest zine back story?
All the climate change zines yet to come out.
Q9: Weirdest?
Damn, I can’t remember the title but I saw one recently that slavishly indexed every lyrical word used on some heavy metal album.
Q10: Will you always be fascinated by them?
Until the dementia takes hold and I find their idiosyncrasy just too bewildering. Perhaps even then.
