Luckily I got in off the waitlist for KC Zine Con #5 and will be tabling there for the fourth time this Saturday! Here’s the awesome poster with all the deetz:
Poster by Gabbi Brandini.
I’ll be at Table #57 with Urscape #1, Tales from the Hyperverse, Vortex, and some newer Retrofit comics like Fashion Forecasts by Yumi Sakugawa, Understanding by Becca Tobin, and Survive 300 Million #1 and 2 by Pat Aulisio.
I circled my table location on this map of the venue:
Map of Pierson Auditorium on UMKC campus.
This is the last year that KC Zine Con will be on UMKC campus. Pierson Auditorium is a great venue but UMKC allowed a hate speech event on campus in April which resulted in violence against trans people and has made people in our community feel unsafe on campus. You can read more about KCZC’s thought process behind the venue change on their website. I support KCZC’s decision to seek a new venue for future cons. Trans rights are human rights.
Bonus Zine-Related Content: A recent Twitter kerfuffle made me realize that there are art and comic makers who aren’t familiar with the term zine! ’Zine is short for magazine but means any self-published booklet. It could be photocopied for cheap at a local library or sent to a printer, but to qualify as a zine the booklet should be self-published. My understanding is that it originated with SF fans around the middle of the century who self-published fanzines that mimicked the pulp SF magazines that were so popular. Major SF writers such as Moorcock got their start in these zines. In the 90’s, the Riot Grrrl movement and others developed extensive mail-order networks of zine creators and traders. These zines featured an expanded array of content such as poetry, photographs, personal essays, and collages. My friends and I made and traded our zines from 4th grade on. One of the first zines I encountered that was made by someone I didn’t know was the Dishwasher zine by Dishwasher Pete, which chronicled his adventures during his quest to wash dishes in all 50 states. In my personal lexicon, I usually call my self-published comic books mini-comics, but I think they also quality as zines. Now if you want to talk about what is and isn’t a mini-comic, that’s a whole other discussion.
For a different perspective, check out this page provided on the KCZC Press page:
There’s no creator so I’m guessing this was a collective effort by KCZC staff.
If you want to make your own zine on a photocopier without a computer, check out Julia Gfrörer’s zine, Thuban Press Guide to Analog Self Publishing, available from her Etsy store.
You can also download a free copy of Re: A Guide to Reproduction: by Ron Rege Jr., Dave Choe, Brian Ralph, and Jordan Crane from my site. This PDF got me started self-publishing my mini-comics over a decade ago.