DIY or Don't We? is produced by Nicki Sabalu from Olympia, Washington, USA. Here is what she had to say about her zine,'community', and the DIY spirit.Please tell us a little about yourself and how 'DIY or Don't We?' came about?
The zine is a compilation rooted in collaboration, so much love and acknowledgment goes to all of the wonderful folks who have shared their stories. It came about in hopes of encouraging communication about how do-it-yourself ethics can be incorporated into the ways we work together as friends, family, collectives and communities. "Do-it-yourself" can seem like a solitary term. Sometimes that's okay, because it can be important to have time and space to do truly do things on our own. But sometimes it's important to collaborate on projects, work through tough situations with others, help nourish people we care about, and have fun together! That's where the "or don't we?" part comes in. The zine is intended to be an ongoing project, with two issues to date. The third issue, which should hopefully be printed next summer, will be about food and community.
In your opinion what defines a 'community' and a 'DIY' spirit?
A big reason for making this zine is that there isn't necessarily an all-encompassing definition of community, and it can mean so many things to different people. I was hoping that this zine could be a way for folks to share stories that explore what community means to them because it can exist in so many contexts. I don't think I have a concrete definition of community myself, but I think it can have a lot to do with things that are shared: interests, locations, identities. I also think that the strength of a community has much to do with working together – through good times and rough times – to address everyone's needs to the best of both individual and collective abilities. I think that a DIY spirit might be something that can emerge when DIY ethics are incorporated into many different aspects of our lives; when there's something more to it than just having hobbies. Maybe it's the passion that keeps us doing things ourselves, even though sometimes it would be much easier to rely on someone or something else to do them for us. DIY ethics and skill-sharing have been important to me because they can help empower people in ways that make us less reliant on corporations and governments, and hopefully more in tune with ourselves and conscious of the world around us.
With the publication of your zine, in what ways is it helping to foster another form of community?
By encouraging communication, I hope! Ideally, the zine is a way for folks to share stories, learn from each other, and maybe make new friends.
What fanzine would you recommend for us to read and why?
Oh, gosh. Decisions like these are tough for me, so I made a little pile of favorites, closed my eyes, and reached into the middle of it. My fingers have chosen the wonderful zine "Seeking Truth" by my friend Charlie Daugherty. It's a comic zine about an inquisitive character who is searching for their lost friend, Truth.
Ben Hutchings is a comic artist and creator of 'You Stink & I Don't' and more recently 'Comic of Smallness'. He talks to us about his work and the Melbourne zine scene.
Tell us a little about yourself and how your zine 'You Stink & I Don't' came about.
I've been into drawing and reading comics since I was ten and discovered British comics like Beano and Buster. In high school I began photocopying my own comics at school with no idea anybody else did the same thing. They very quickly became ruder and angry over the years (as I did), but they kept a cute, absurd tone which I like more than material that is serious and dark. Finally, I made issue #1 in '93, which featured strips about childhood friends, misogyny (represented as a parody of Archie), a long adventure about a body-builder named Mr. Sexxo (all written in rhyme) and an 'offensive' comic about Jesus doing all kinds of rude things with his bum. This is still the tone of the comic - mean but funny stabs at beliefs and attitudes and lots of rhyming and wordplay. I always spent heaps on professional printing with colour covers. The inside is all cut and paste though, and drawn with pens though. There have been 9 issues and I got a bit of a following from it. The city of Melbourne is fast gaining recognition for being a hub of zine activity. What is the zine scene like for someone living there?
It's great. I can't compare it to much but overseas visitors seem impressed with the art scene of Melbourne, including all the markets and that sort of thing. It surprises me too. There are zine workshops and zine fairs and arts markets all over the place. I think every citizen here has made a zine at some point. The centre of it all is Sticky, a zine shop run from a cramped little store in the subway. There are piles of zines and flyers covering every surface, with stacks of em falling off the shelves. In the middle there's always a table with a handful of misfits cutting stuff out of magazines and pasting it together. The underground comic scene in Melbourne is huge too. While Australia has no 2000AD or Marvel, we do have plenty of self-publishers and Melbournites chug out their own mini-comics like nobody's business. And it's a relief for me to be here. Doing comics for so many years from Canberra was a really isolating experience! Now I draw knowing that people will see it, and appreciate it. Y
ou are also involved in producing other craft-type zines. Can you tell us a little something about your current projects?
I've been printing comics for so long, I forgot the fun of crafting small runs of your own comic. I've been recently making "Comic of Smallness", which is a 32 page, 2 inch tall comic. I make my own little display stands for them out of cardboard. I print 12 copies at a time on 8 A4 sheets then chop em up and bind them with a single staple. Such an effort, but so satisfying making little bundles of em. The three issues are all about a cat named Barry who just 
sort of wanders about being silly. It's pretty much the cutest comic ever made I reckon.Please recommend a zine for us to read and why.
I mostly read mini-comics, and a great one is Lumpen by Pat Grant, an excellent cartoonist who loves setting stories in Melbourne suburbia as well as Australian coastal towns. It always comes out in different formats, for example one issue was a large, fold-out poster. Another one that tickles my fancy is Phatsville, a comic anthology from Queensland. It's great because Queenslanders are such dags, and the comic reflects this with its shameless obsession with sex and drug jokes. Then you go up and visit them and all they do is take drugs and talk about sex. If you'd like to see what Sydney cartoonists do, then the anthology Blackguard is definitely worth a look!
OWT Creative is comprised of five young designers: Ste Beed, Jon Hannan,Katrina Currie, Sarah Stapleton and Ben Kither, based in Manchester, UK.
Please tell us a little something about how OWT Creative was formed and what inspired you to start your publication.
The five of us that make up OWT creative met whilst studying Design & Art Direction at Manchester School of Art. After witnessing a lot of our friends jump ship from Manchester and head off to London we decided that we wanted to create a platform for ourselves and other young creatives up here in the northwest.
We wanted to prove that you can be creative up here in the Northwest and you don't have to vanish off to London to be successful. We're not deluded, we all know London is the biggest and best of everything really but everyone likes an underdog.
The reason we decided to create a publication is because we believe in the medium of print. People will argue that print is a dying entity and that we all have to embrace a fully digital future, but we think we’re overloaded these days by flash design blogs and portfolio websites that can be clicked through at pace. Having something tangible to hold and feel adds an extra dimension, the feel of the stock and the delightful printing errors that make each one individual. In 50 years time when today’s equivalent of the floppy disk is no longer readable you will always be able to pick up a zine.The zine is clearly promoting 'creatives' from the Northwest of England. Why do you think this area of the country has such a rich zine tradition?
We think one reason the Northwest has a good tradition because there has been so much in its history that provokes the DIY art and music culture up here. Manchester was at the forefront of the Punk and Rave scenes (to name just two) and these scenes go hand in hand with zine culture. It seems that wherever you have such a rich music heritage the sub-culture of the fanzine readers and writers follow and The Northwest was no exception. Of course this is without even considering the sporting heritage and associated supports that exists here with several of the country’s major sporting teams, and Liverpool FC.How does your blog supplement what the zine is doing?
At the moment the blog is there to let people know what we're up with all our little developments that we make day to day, from being featured on a website to being stocked in a new shop. We also like to feature work that resonates with us, be it music, documentaries, exhibitions or anything else for that matter.
As we progress we want to use the blog to promote the people who submit their work to us. Our first Issue had just 5 contributors, the second has 11, we want all those extra people to be able to say we helped them in some way other than putting their work in the zine. By submitting work to us, they help us grow, diversify and reach more people, we want the zine and the blog to do the same for them. As we said earlier, part of the reason to set OWT up was to promote the arts in The Northwest and the blog is just as important to us as the actual zine is in that respect. The blog also provides us with a much larger audience than can be reached with the zine alone. For instance our blog has regular readers from the USA and Canada, places where the zine would be unlikely to penetrate on it’s own.
What fanzine would you recommend that we should read and why?
We're not sure it can be considered a fanzine, maybe just a zine, but the WAFA collective zines are full of really inspirational stuff from Anthony Zinonos and Co.
www.wearefuckingawesome.org
Another Manchester based Fanzine is one69a.... good quality, current articles + entirely screen-printed with a poster in the middle - win!
We'd also recommend the work from the guys at Nous Vous, really nice stuff. Really nice work and they’re northern, which helps.
Peace OWT.
Interview 12
Wolfwind Collective is an independent publishing and distribution collective founded by Phillip Hawkey and Rob Jones.www.wolfwind.co.uk/wolfwind/TITLE.htmlTell me a little something about who is involved in Wolfwind Collective and how and why you came together.
We didn't make it a conscious decision to be in a collective. It kind of developed from just working together at Uni and hanging out to what it has developed into within the past month, which has been amazing. We have been given great opportunities to meet and work with other creative people in the industry and held our own zine convention.How has the zine helped to develop your artistic practices?
A lot of the pieces featured in the zines are from projects that we've been working on so it's helpful to look at my work and assess what I think was working, what I'd like to take further and what maybe didn't work. Also, I think we feed off of each others ideas and feel comfortable giving criticism on each others work when putting together each issue.What does the zine allow you to do that working in the mainstream can't?
The zine is like our world that we can do anything we want with...so I guess its freedom. If Phil wanted to do the next issue and put no images in and decided he wanted to put his poems in that world be fine. Every issue is something new and exciting so we don't have any art director who's expecting something that we have done before and wanting it again. It's our ideas.In what ways has the Wolfwind Collective supported other zine producers? What are your plans for the future?
We held our own art and zine fair called 'MADE' in our town of Tunbridge Wells which was the first one Tunbridge Wells has ever seen with the aim of showing that London isn't is quite the 'be all and end all' thing and, that events such as these can happen anywhere and also to help local artists/zine lovers who find it hard to get certain events in London as well. Also our newly decorated website is housing a few independent zines from other collectives/zinesters. We are kind of trying to build up a little distro of zines and along the way we can help others by spreading the word. We both have ideas constantly floating around, so we are planning on doing another zine event in our hometown at some point next year as well as doing a few exhibitions around the country and of course, more zines. Hopefully we will have a few more ready for the Alternative Press zine convention in November.
Interview 11
Maximo Tuja is a prolific producer living in Barcelona. His titles include Revolucion Juvenil (Youth Revolt), Zine, Alludd:Un Fanzine de Max-o-Matic, Algo Sobre (Something about),and Contenedor.
Tell us something about why you started doing fanzines?
I started my first fanzine in 1995. I´m not sure why i did it, but without even noticing it i had texts, collages and pictures layed out (awfully) in a proto-fanzine. Then I wasn´t aware of what a fanzine was or all the history behind independent publishing. I think i just needed to express my anger, disappointment, confusion, etc. in a positive way.
After that i met some really interesting people with different backgrounds that had a much more rich idea of what a fanzine could be. There i discovered a whole new world and fell in love instantly with it. Not only i felt great publishing my ideas and sharing them with pairs, but also felt really identified with the DIY ethics that´s deeply related with the fanzine culture. Doing fanzines, for me, was always related with learning something. And that´s what kept me doing fanzines for so many years; it was a perfect way to learn, experiment and have a great time.
What do you think the smaller, mini-zine format adds to the message of the zine (for example, Alego Sobre or Contendor)? How is the visual important in your zines?
I started doing fanzines because i wanted to write. Design was just a necessary thing to display the content. But as fanzines and years went by i became interested in the design as well -till the point I became a designer myself. So now the visual aspect is as important as the content. Contenedor and Algo sobre have only in common their mini format, but the rest of them is quite different. Contenedor is a visual exercise. It´s just playing with images. Also it was a container (that´s what Contenedor means in Spanish) of small visual gadgets (stickers, pictures, etc.). This was the first fanzine i did after many more conceptual and text based ones. This was the result of a couple of ludic afternoons playing with images with a friend. The size in this case was just a way of making something slightly different using a standard paper size (A4 paper folded into an A6 fanzine). Also the folds helped us to divide the content in only one sheet of paper. On the other hand, Algo sobre (Something about) was a fanzine about people we knew. Each number was about one friend. Each number was written by different people and it was written in a way that the personality of the featured friend could be best described (one number is only a copy and paste of emails; another is a list of obsessive compulsive behaviors...). The design of this fanzine is basic and there´s no intention of adding visual elements that could distract from the main element of the zine: the text. Design was meant to be invisible. The visual elements of the fanzine (pictures mainly) had to work along with the text to help the reader to make a portrait as real as possible. In this case the size had no special meaning. We just liked it to be thick, and that was the only way to make it with the amount of text we had. You live in Barcelona, so what's the fanzine scene like there?
Barcelona fanzine scene is quite interesting. There are many talented people doing interesting things and there some great projects that are helping the scene to grow and become more self-conscious.One of Barcelona´s greatest projects is 'La fanzinoteca ambulant' (www.fanzinoteca.net). It´s a public and mobile fanzine library with a huge collection of classic and rare fanzines from Spain and other parts of the world. The library is a mobile module that goes around showing their collection, which is categorized in a data base that help the reader find what they want between all the great stuff they´ve got. Also La Fanzinoteca is an organization that every year organize Fanzine Jam sessions and other kind of activities related to the independent publishing world. The guys that run La Fanzinoteca are really passionate about fanzines, super friendly and work really hard. They publish two fanzines: Minca (fanzine about fanzines) and Minca Ilustrada (a visual zine showing their favorite illustators).In my opinion, La Fanzinoteca is responsible of a big part of the rebirth of the fanzine movement in Barcelona.What fanzine would you recommend for us to read?
For those who hadn´t already read them, I would recommend Harmony Korine´s Collected Fanzines published by Drag City. They are wild, fresh and with a great attitude. They made me want to make more fanzines.
Interview 10
justseeds members Josh MacPhee, Nicolas Lampert and Colin Matthes produced the stencil zine Cut & Paint, USA
http://justseeds.org
Josh MacPhee responds:
How has 'graphic agitation' shifted focus in the post-Bush era?
I'm not sure it has shifted much, I think the Bush-era set the tone, and in general the same pattern is being followed. Basically, Bush was perceived as being uniquely 'evil', and as such, a personal embodiment of what people wanted to reject. Their imagery became dominated by images of him as a person, and our landscape was flooded by pictures of Bush. When Obama came along, he began to be perceived as uniquely 'good', and as such, a personal embodiment of what people wanted to embrace. Just like Bush previously, our landscape became littered with heroic representations of Obama. Either way, our graphic toolbox is dominated by rich guys from above, and there has been little effort to think through graphic representations of empowerment on a much more direct, human, and democratic scale.
How might justseeds bring a different perspective to political activism?
I can't speak for all 26 members of justseeds, but for myself, I believe it is important for cultural producers to work more directly with and in response to social movements on the ground, and that is what we are trying to do. Social justice organizations often doing great political work have little sense of how to best represent their ideas both internally to themselves, and eternally to the rest of the world, and artists with experience in this realm can be very useful. On the flip side, often politically-minded artists think that their cultural production alone will make the changes in the world they wish to see, and lose sight of the fact that generally their work only gains real traction when it operates in concert with on the ground, grassroots political activity by people, lots and lots of people.
What does self-publishing (Like Cut & Paint) bring to your projects?
Self-publishing is mostly about the direct joy of making things yourself. I'm not sure it is 'better' than other forms of publishing, but it allows a little more control and a more direct role in the creation of your projects. Having a hand in the entire process, from idea to final printed zine, allow an author or editor the ability to have a deeper understanding of the materialization of their labor.
Please recommend a zine for us and tell us why.
I like homemade graffiti zines, not the slick 'lifestyle' ones, but down-and-dirty photocopied collections of photos and drawings, offspring of the original International Graffiti Times (ICT/TIGHT).
Interview 09
Dana Leigh Raidt is producer of She Must be Having a Bad Day/The Cult of the Female Food Service Worker, USA
www.shemustbehavingabadday.blogspot.com
How would you describe your zine?
For the reader, I think it's a funny (and sometimes sad or angering) tell-all about what actually goes on in the food-service industry between servers and customers, employees and employers. For me, it's a distillation of, and outlet for, a lot of pent-up anxiety left over from working in that industry for a long time.
What can your zine do that a mainstream publications can't?
I think any zine has an advantage in that we don't have to worry about what others will think. If people like it, great. If they don't, no big deal. Zine makers are spending money out of their own pockets. Design and editorial decisions aren't influenced by worry over scaring away advertisers, like in the mainstream commercial publishing world. Those decisions are coming straight from the heart and gut of the zine maker. So readers are getting content that is unfiltered and heartfelt.
Does the look of a zine matter?
To me, yes. But if a zine has great content but flawed design, I'm willing to look past it.
Please recommend a zine for us and tell us why.
I'm not sure if it's in print anymore, but my friend Karen Olson Edwards wrote A Tenderness So Painful I thought My Heart Would Burst back in 2005 or 2006. It's a great personal zine - basically Karen's musings and memories, but it's written so well that the emotion seems universal. My copy is dog-eared and dirty from dragging it around. Karen is the one who really got me involved in zine culture, and this is the one she put out right as I was putting my first one out. Lacey Prpich Hedtke's Excitement and Adventure is also great. She studies the lives of gangsters, photocopied their fingerprints and arrest sheets, and even made gangster trading cards.
DIY or Don't We? is produced by Nicki Sabalu from Olympia, Washington, USA. Here is what she had to say about her zine,'community', and the DIY spirit.
