Zines Are Back and We Couldn't Be Happier
If you spent a large portion of the ‘90s and early 2000s headbanging, defying authority, and riding a fixed-gear bike, you’re probably familiar with zines. These homemade magazines were inspired by the DIY ethos that drove the counter-cultural punk rock movement—a movement that also treated cycling as a viable means of transportation and something that's just plain fun. In the age before social media and blogging, zines helped people share ideas and issues, and engage others in conversation.
But zines didn’t die when blogs hit the scene—they just went further underground. And they’re still being used today to discuss those serious issues that don’t get a ton of coverage in mainstream media. We talked to zine-maker, writer, and cyclist Elly Blue to learn more about the zine phenomenon, from how it began in the cycling scene to where it is now.
BICYCLING: What is a zine?
Elly Blue: Zine is short for "fanzine," though it’s a word in its own right. It’s typically a small, self-published pamphlet with lower production value that’s focused on a very niche area of obsessive interest.
When did bike zines become popular?
There were zines about bikes in the ‘90s, but bike zines weren’t really a thing until 2001, when two New Orleans cyclists named Hope and Ethan started Bike Bike, the community bike project conference. They were both really into zines at the time, and made zine-making an integral part of that first event. And that started this chain reaction of more people starting bike zines.
I know about this in part because my partner, Joe, founded a zine distribution company called Microcosm Publishing 20 years ago; he's really watched the zine movement grow.
How did zines and bikes overlap for you?
I made zines as a teenager—they probably had circulations of 20 or fewer readers, but I got into writing about biking out of that same impulse. I was trying to observe the world I was in and figure things out, and the way that I processed things was by writing about them. And in the ‘90s, when I was stuck in my room and there was no Internet, I’d write letters to friends, or I’d type it on my typewriter or write it by hand and publish it as a zine. In the mid-2000s, I was trying to understand the whole bike thing that defined Portland, and I was mostly writing about it on email listservs, and then eventually on blogs. I was working for a bike blog but I stopped and started writing zines again.
How is a blog different from a zine?
They're so different. With a blog, everyday you post something and commenters add immediate feedback and make it their own thing, and you’re in that world. In a zine, you write it down and it takes a while to get it into production. And no one is going to write a comment on your zine! They might write you a letter or quote you in their zine, but it’s slower and more permanent. You write a blog post and it feels lost. But zines, you can find them around. They stay.
Related: Cycling's Most Unlikely Social Media Influencer
Zines still aren’t well known in more mainstream cycling, right?
There’s such a cultural divide in cycling. You have the DIY culture that knows about zines and does things like Bike Bike, and you have the more upper-class, status-and-gear-oriented bike culture. I wouldn’t say zines have crossed that cultural divide. I found that when I was working with zines, I’d really have to educate people about what they were; it was easier for people to understand them when I said a zine was a small book or a pamphlet instead of a zine. A zine is a mode of expression really suited to people finding their own voice and building a community in the margins.
Which zines are popular with cyclists right now?
Right now, the women’s bicycling movement is coming up in a lot of different ways and on many different levels, and I think a number of people are using zines to explore that, because that way, you make your own media. You don’t need to wait for someone to decide that women are OK to talk about in bicycling; you can make whatever statement you want. And that’s why zines are having another wave in the bike movement: There’s a lot of questioning and shaking up of original cyclist categories, and zines do well in that kind of atmosphere. People contact me today and ask, ‘Why are women’s issues important in cycling?’ and it’s like they want the same basic thing years later. But if I’m writing about it for my own zine where I can set the tone and the standards, I can have that conversation be way more interesting and assume the givens, like, ‘it’s OK for women to ride bikes,’ ‘we should be equal.’ Let’s move on and talk about other things.
What makes a zine different from a magazine?
It’s about your intentions and how you identify it. If you make something glossy, even if you’re losing money but you want to make money and be competitive with a big magazine, then it’s probably not a zine.
What are some of your favorite zines?
One of the classics is Chainbreaker, and that came out of the New Orleans bike zine explosion in the early 2000s. They did five or six issues, and they ended it after Hurricane Katrina, sadly, but we have the first four reprinted along with their bike maintenance guide in a really cool book.
Another of my favorites is Velo Vixen, which writer Rachel Krause put out as she was organizing women’s bike stuff in Kansas City, Missouri. She did something really cool: She’d have zine-making parties where they would drink wine and beer and eat snacks and a couple dozen women would collaborate on this awesome bike zine. I’m a big fan.
There’s a more high-production one out of England called Boneshaker. It looks more like a normal magazine, but at heart, it’s really a zine. It’s a passion project; they’re not doing it to make money and they’re probably not making any money. It’s really good, compelling stuff, and what they publish really changes the narrative about what cycling is and who it’s for, but in a way that’s not overtly political. It really makes you think.
How can people find zines today?
There are other distributors, but Microcosm really seeks out zines to carry. [Microcosm] mostly focuses on books now, as a book publisher and distributor, though when Microcosm started, it was a record and zine distribution company. Now, we print a lot of zines for people—the logistics of photocopying zines are really difficult for most people!
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