Episode 141: Transcript

Episode: 141: The Rise and Fall of Zines

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Charlie Jane, do you remember the first time you encountered a zine or the concept of zines? 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:06] I actually do. My best friend and I in high school used to hang out in this record store all the time and paw through the dollar bins for random old vinyl. There was a whole rack of zines in there and one day my best friend and I picked up this one zine that was just like somebody complaining about high school cliques and people being jerks in high school. And it was by a young woman or a teenage girl, I guess, and it was this really kind of eloquent and angry and kind of like, it was funny. I think we thought it was funny, but we also were like, yeah, this is, we see ourselves in this. 

[00:00:47] It was both. We ironically liked it, but we actually also really liked it. 

Annalee: [00:00:52] That’s very Gen-X.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:54] Yeah, exactly, it was very Gen-X. We kind of kept it. I think my best friend still has the copy of that zine. And then about five years ago, that best friend from high school emailed me out of the blue and said, Hey, you know that zine that we read when we were in high school about like how much high school sucks? The author of that zine is now a best-selling author of feminist books and feminist books for teenagers.

Annalee: [00:01:20] Wow!

Charlie Jane: [00:01:20] And sent me this person's website and I was like, dang. So, actually this person who made the zine—

Annalee: [00:01:24] Can you disclose who this is? Now I’m curious. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:28] So the zine was called Oblivion Zine.

Annalee: [00:01:31] Great name.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:31] And the person who created it is named Laura Barcella. 

Annalee: [00:01:34] Oh, cool. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:36] Hi, Laura. I hope if you're hearing this, you're not weirded out that I read your zine back in high school. I really actually did love it. And she's written a bunch of feminist books for kids and for adults.

Annalee: [00:01:46] That’s so awesome. Wow. That's amazing zine—

Charlie Jane: [00:01:50] I’ve never met her, but she seems really cool. 

Annalee: [00:01:54] Yeah, and there's a lot of definitions of what a zine is. 

Bre: [00:02:01] And if you aren't familiar with the medium, zines are just self-published booklets that can be about anything you want. I like to tell people to think of them like homemade magazines because they're DIY, cheap to make, and easy to distribute. Zines still focus on being a form of expression rather than making a bunch of money, so they're very creative, messy, and cheap, but always free spirited in nature. 

Annalee: [00:02:17] That's Bre, who is a zine influencer on mostly YouTube and TikTok, and her work is really awesome, and she's definitely Gen Z, and she sees zines as being really important to her life.

[00:02:32] Zines have also been super important to my life. When I was young, in the 1990s, I helped start a zine called Bad Subjects. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:41] Yeah! 

Annalee: [00:02:41] And we started out as this, we were a bunch of young, pissy, grad students, and we started this zine because we wanted to do Marxist critiques of pop culture, and we wanted to write something that would appeal to everyday people, not just, like, academics in the ivory tower, so in order to appeal to everyday people, we created this zine in 10 point Helvetica font. It's like unreadable.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:07] The font of the people. The font of the revolution.

Annalee: And we, we Xeroxed it in the English department at UC Berkeley and handed it out on campus and pretty quickly we heard from somebody at Carnegie Mellon University who'd somehow come across one of them somewhere and he was like hey, have you heard about this thing called the web? We could like put this zine on the web and people could look at it using this thing called a browser. 

Charlie Jane: [00:03:37] WHOA.

Annalee: [00:03:37] I know, we were like, sure. We had already been on Gopher. So, we knew that, you know, that the zine could live on the internet. And so we posted on there and throughout pretty much the entire ‘90 I was working on Bad Subjects and those were my first publications. They were all pretty much online and, you know, we were one of the first magazines online, but we didn't know what a zine was. 

[00:04:02] And so I think my first experience with zines was, kind of. doing Bad Subjects and finding out that I was doing a zine and it really did change my life. 

Charlie Jane: [00:04:10] Yeah, I had kind of a similar experience. My friends and I, actually the same friend in high school who we used to read that zine together, we did like a cooperative storytelling thing. It was sort of cooperative and sort of competitive. It was sort of like an RPG, but we would write long text sections of like what our characters were doing.

[00:04:29] And in the early ‘90s, we were still doing it and one of our friends from high school who at the time was in college or had just gotten out of college and was a sysadmin was like hey, you know we could put this on the internet. And I was like great are we gonna have it accessible through Kermit or Grover or one of the other like… I don’t even know. Like, one of the FTP tools and my former high school friend was like, actually there's this thing called the web and we could put it on the web and use HTTP instead of FTP. And I was like, that sounds made up. That sounds fake. And so, we had a website starting in like, I don't even know.

[00:05:06] And it was, it was really interesting because anybody could find it. Nobody did, but anybody could. 

Annalee: [00:05:13] You are listening to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, society, and weird old Xerox machines that live in the basement. I'm Annalene Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction, and my latest novel is called The Terraformers.

Charlie Jane: [00:05:29] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a gadfly about town, who also writes science fiction, and my latest book is Promises Stronger Than Darkness. And you might be listening to this while it's on a Kindle special thing for only three bucks. It's going to be for most of November. 

Annalee: [00:05:49] So, this week we're going to talk about the past, present, and future of the humble zine.

[00:05:55] As Bre said earlier, zines are usually handmade, DIY publications. They can be memoir, fiction, explainers, lists, art, apps, teaching guides, Marxist cultural criticism, whatever you want. That's the point of a zine. 

[00:06:11] And we have got two guests here to talk about zines with us. Writer Lynn Peril, who created the weird feminist zine Mystery Date in the 1990s, and artist Lawrence Lindell, whose recent graphic novel Blackward is about a group of young black queer people in Oakland, California trying to start a zine fest.

[00:06:32] We're going to talk about the hundred year long history of zines and where zines are going next. Also, on our mini episode next week, we'll be answering your questions, if you're a Patreon supporter. And that means you asked us some questions in the Discord, and we're going to just tackle as many as we can. I've already seen a bunch of amazing questions in there, so I'm super excited to get to those. 

Charlie Jane: [00:06:54] And that reminds me, hey, we've got a Patreon and you can support us on Patreon and it'll help us keep this podcast going and spreading joy and positivity and occasionally hate negativity out into the universe. And you know—

Annalee: [00:07:07] We don’t… we don’t do that! No…

Charlie Jane: [00:07:10] Okay, joy and negativity.

Annalee: [00:07:12] Joyful negativity.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:13] Sometimes joy and positivity, sometimes joy and negativity. It's one or the other.

Annalee: [00:07:17] Fair enough. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:20] It’s not just a way of supporting us financially, it's a way of being part of our community in a more meaningful sense because we post extra content on Patreon that you can reply to, including many episodes every other week. And we're in the Discord chatting with you about what's going on in the world and what's going on in speculative fiction. It's a really special part of our lives that you can be part of. 

Annalee: [00:07:41] Yay!

Charlie Jane: [00:07:41] And all you have to do is just give us a few bucks or whatever you can afford at patreon/ouropinionsarecorrect.

[00:07:51] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]

Annalee: [00:08:25] So, before we bring on Lynn Peril, I wanted to start by talking a little bit about zine history. And we've already touched on this in a previous episode where we talked about pulp fiction with the librarian and collector, Jess Nevins. 

Charlie Jane: [00:08:37] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:08:39] Yeah! That was a great episode, by the way. Go back and check that out, because that's really the deep history of zines. Because zines go way back to the earliest days of science fiction fandom in the 1910s and ‘20s, when they were called fanzines. And they were full of critical commentary, reviews, short stories, other weird doodles, poems. And fans would send them back and forth in the mail to each other, often as part of what were called amateur press associations.

Charlie Jane: [00:09:11] Yeah, we owe so much of the culture of science fiction and fantasy to these zines that were being created, including, like, that's how we got Kirk/Spock fiction.

Annalee: [00:09:21] That’s right.

Charlie Jane: [00:09:21] That's how we got the concept of slash fiction and fanfic about characters from, TV shows, movies, books, whatever, like, hooking up and doing all the things that they couldn't do in the official version. That started with zines, and we wouldn't be the same without it. 

Annalee: [00:09:36] Yeah, and one of the most famous zinesters of the early 20th century was H. P. Lovecraft, who started out working in fanzines and amateur press associations and then became editor of Weird Tales, which was a pulp magazine, which was basically one step above fanzine. So the history of fanzines is, let's say, diverse.

Charlie Jane: [00:09:58] Mixed. It's mixed. 

Annalee: [00:10:01] It contains amazing works by people of color and feminists trying to talk about experiences of people who weren't included in mainstream fiction. And it includes people like H. P. Lovecraft, who explicitly used his fiction to advance a racist. history of the United States and a racist image of the United States.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:20] Yeah, I mean, I still love zines, but yeah, it’s not all great.

Annalee: [00:10:24] So, there was also a second wave of zine culture, which kind of starts in the late ‘70s with punk rock, but really catches fire in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And that's when desktop publishing and cheap copy machines made it really easy for artists and musicians to just make a zine at almost no cost.

[00:10:43] And there was this real, as I said, kind of punk, DIY aesthetic to those old zines. One of the first big zines that I encountered in the San Francisco Bay area was called Processed World. It made a big splash nationally, and it was made for office workers who hated capitalism. And one of the editors was Chris Carlson, who's still an activist in San Francisco today. And he urged other office workers to steal paper and copy machine time from the companies where they worked to make their zines. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:17] Yeah, I, you know, that seems like the best use of office equipment and the best use of office time, honestly. Like, I don't know. I mean…

Annalee: [00:11:25] That was the point. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:27] We got to be part of some zinester communities. I've loved hanging out at the Zinefest here in San Francisco which some of our friends helped to run now and like Beantown Zinetown in Boston, we used to go to. I love the fact that zines are a way to kind of talk about like… They’re often kind of in that space between comics and personal journals and just scrapbooks.

[00:11:50] They're a way to talk about stuff that's going on in your life, but they're also a way to tell stories that maybe you couldn't tell anywhere else. 

[00:11:56] And often, a zine belongs to a very specific community, and it's a way to hash out stuff that affects that one community without necessarily inviting people from like the wider world to come in and like share their opinions the way it would happen if you post on the internet. Even now, I feel like zines have a really special role. 

Annalee: [00:12:14] I really agree, and I think part of it is that they can be anything you want. It's not like if you make a zine, someone's looking over your shoulder saying, it has to be 137 characters! Or, you know, it has to be written in a certain language, or you have to spell things correctly, or you can't have lots of art, or you can't have pictures of naked people. It’s your own thing, and it’s interesting to contrast it with social media, which I think we'll be talking about more in this episode, because it is the first glimmer of what we think of as social media now, in that you could make something really personal that was your own, and share it with people, with relatively little friction. But the difference is that with social media, as you said, the whole world could potentially look in. Whereas with zines, a lot of the time, it's just people asking you to mail it to them in the mail and sure they can pass it around to a whole bunch of people and it could become something nationally famous, but it's a lot less likely. There's so much friction there. These are physical objects. It's really hard to reproduce them. 

[00:13:22] All right, so here to tell us more about the second wave of zine culture, we are thrilled to have friend of the pod, Lynn Peril, joining us. She is the creator of the zine Mystery Date and the author of several books, including Pink Think, which was partly based on Mystery Date, as well as College Girls: A History of Women in Higher Ed, and Swimming in the Steno Pool: A History of Secretaries.

[00:13:44] Welcome to the show, Lynn. 

Lynn: [00:13:46] I'm so happy to be here!

Annalee: Yes, we are so glad that you can untangle the mystery of the history of zines. 

Charlie Jane: [00:13:56] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:13:55] So, I wonder if you could take us back to the 1990s, or perhaps even further, to describe the world of zines as it was when you first encountered it. 

Lynn: [00:14:10] Well, I discovered zines in the late 1970s as part of the punk rock scene. I am from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And Milwaukee had a fabulously robust punk scene in the late ‘70s in part due to the fact that the drinking age was 18 at the time. So, yeah, but my friend and I didn't drink. We were straight edge before there was straight edge. Of course, all of that has changed now, but, at the time we didn't drink. We just wanted to go see all of these amazing bands that came around because Milwaukee, Chicago, and Madison are basically like a triangle sides of 90 miles. So, bands would come and play all those three towns. So, the first zines that I really was aware of, were the punk zines.

[00:15:04] I read about the ones from, from England, like Sniffin’ Glue. And, I had religiously read New York Rocker, which was more of an independently produced newsprint kind of publication. But then in Milwaukee, oh my gosh. We had, we had a one-sheet Xerox zine called Autonomy. 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:28] Ooh. 

Lynn: [00:15:28] We had like a little digest zine called Crush On You.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:34] Aw, that’s such a great title.

Lynn: [00:15:36] I know, right? And one of my favorites was a zine called See Here, which was of course eventually the same as the, the zine store in New York, although I don't think they had anything to do with each other. See Here was written and produced and illustrated by Glenn Rehse, who was, and still is, a Milwaukee-area musician who was in the ‘80s psychedelic revival band, Plasticland, if you remember them. So this was his pre Plasticland zine that just had his totally trippy black and white ink drawings in it as well, and it was great. 

[00:16:19] So those were the first zines that I saw, and I really, really wanted to do a zine, but I was really too shy for a long time. I moved to San Francisco in 1985, and that's where I also became aware of many, many other types of music zines, because when… I came here with a boyfriend and he worked at Subterranean Records down on 16th Street.

Charlie Jane: [00:16:45] Oh my God!

Lynn: [00:16:46] Do you remember Subterranean? Yeah!

Charlie Jane: [00:16:47] Takes me back! Oh my God.

Lynn: [00:16:51] Yeah, it was great. It was a great place to be. Steve Tupper, who ran Subterranean, was just a really great, interesting, grouchy, great guy to be around. So, Subterranean just had boxes and boxes and boxes of music zines from all over the United States.

[00:17:18] And again, I was just like, man, I really, really want to do his zine. They're so cool. And I just don't know what to do one about. Which then, probably late ‘80s, early ‘90s, I was in… there was that great bookstore that was on California, just up from Polk Street, just up the hill from Polk Street, right by the Five Spice Chicken place that is still there.

[00:17:46] And that is where I found John Marr's Anti-Sex Tips For Teens zine. And that was like, Oh my God, this is what I want to do. I want to do something like this. This is great. I can do this. This is going to be awesome. But I still didn't exactly know what to do, but just the whole idea of these great old, out of touch historical sex guides for teens was like, oh, that really floated my boat. 

Annalee: [00:18:20] Was that before he was doing Murder Can Be Fun? 

Lynn: [00:18:24] It was like a one-off, special edition. Like, Murder Can Be Fun was already in existence, I didn't know about it yet because the first thing that I saw. In fact, I bet you they had actual copies of Murder Can Be Fun there on the same shelf. But I just went, no, this is for me.

Annalee: [00:18:43] That's so awesome. For listeners who aren't aware, murder can be fun was John Marr’s zine that was you know, quite well known in the ‘90s. Still well known among discerning murder fans. 

Charlie Jane: [00:18:57] So, Lynn, can you tell us more about Mystery Date and what led you to create that zine and who did you think of as your audience for that zine?

Lynn: [00:19:04] So finally, I wound up getting… I finally got a copy of the Mystery Date game, which I had wanted ever since I was a little kid. And I was like, great, this is it. This is what I'm going to write about. This is what my zine is going to be called. And I just always imagined that my audience was… You know, I always write the stuff that I want to read, so I guess I always thought my audience as being somebody like myself who had grown up with these really antiquated ideas about gender and femininity and went to their home ec class when there was still sex-segregated home ec classes. Mine was, I believe, like the last year that my suburban Wisconsin junior high school did sex-segregated shop and home ec and who just, you know, thought it was a load of BS and just really wanted to dig down into that and laugh at it. 

Annalee: [00:20:03] So, feminist satire. 

Lynn: [00:20:07] Feminist, you know, feminist history and pop culture history with a feminist bent. 

Annalee: [00:20:15] And so what was the meaning of Mystery Date when you finally played the game? Like, was that your first issue, was like just talking about the game? 

Lynn: It was pretty much that. That was the main essay in the first issue and I think I also… when I say we I mean I because it was always, except for one issue when I had a couple of other things from a couple of other people, it was always just me. I wrote it, illustrated it, or collaged it. It was all me It was so amazing to have the game and to actually look at it. It was all about all of this intense gender training for young girls.

[00:20:53] For example, the age range, like the game box always would have these are the ages that we think should be playing this game. Recommended ages started at age six. So here they were talking about very intense female gender roles of dating and ultimately marriage and breeding because, of course, that's what dating, heterosexual, rigidly heterosexual dating is about breeding, in many cases. Or certainly, back in the mid-20th century was, you know, was it Adrienne Rich came up with the term compulsory heterosexuality. I mean, these are all about compulsory heterosexuality being introduced to really young kids.

[00:21:44] So, I thought that was completely fascinating and really made me think about gender roles and all of that stuff in a way that I hadn't before. 

Charlie Jane: [00:21:59] So, what can you tell us about the zine scene of the 1990s? What was it like and were there specific zines that you felt really defined that era? 

Lynn: [00:22:08] Well, we've already talked about Murder Can Be Fun because I feel like that is definitely one of the big zines of the era and it certainly meant a lot to me. And Thrift Score, Elhoff's Thrift Score, I think was a big one. Beer Frame by Paul Lucas. Bitch, which was just a little zine when, when they started out, was another incredibly important one. 

[00:22:33] And yeah, I feel like those are really big ones from the era. I also feel like there were just a ton of really little one-offs that… One of the great things, and speaking about community, one of the great things was like, once you had your, your PO box up and running, you could just wind up with all of these great zines landing in your box and you would trade a copy of your zine for them.

[00:22:58] And so I feel like there were like just a ton of little one-offs. And as always, I think the best zines were always ones that introduced you to a subject that you had no idea about or no interest in and all of a sudden, by the time you got done reading it, you were just like, oh, this is completely fascinating. I love this. I still may not want to partake of this activity or whatever it was about, but just to read about something that really drew you in, I thought was great. Those were always my favorites. 

Annalee: [00:23:31] I was wondering, you mentioned Beer Frame and Thrift Score and I was thinking of a few others like Comet Bus was another one that was also a local, zinester.

[00:23:44] Was there something that those zines had in common with each other that you thought made them so definitive? Was it just the focus in on one topic or what? 

Lynn: [00:23:54] Oh, I think it was the personality of the writers really came through. And again, it was being interested in a particular subject and really writing about it in a way that was accessible and entertaining as all get out. 

[00:24:20] So, I think that's what they, for me, certainly, I think that's what they have in common for me. It was just… Again, you know, maybe you didn't care anything about the Brannock device. Speaking of like, one of Beer Frame’s famous issues was where Paul Lucas did a deep dive on the metal device that they… do they still measure your feet in shoe stores?

[00:24:41] I'm so used to like… 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:43] Oh, God, that weird metal slider thing. God, yeah. 

Annalee: [00:24:46] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:46] That was so weird.

Annalee: [00:24:46] There's a whole industry behind that. 

Lynn: [00:24:49] Yeah. That is a Brannock device.

Charlie Jane: [00:24:52] Kenneth Brannock, he got busy.

Lynn: [00:24:56] So, like who? And you're just like. Well, that's so interesting. I never thought about that. I never thought about it that way or I, who knew it had a name, you know, it was that slider thing.

[00:25:07] So, yeah. I mean, again, I think that's where… I think that's what made these zines stand out and why I think of them as being the ones that really described that era to me. 

Annalee: [00:25:21] So, I wanted to ask you one final question before we let you go, which is about how I first heard of you, which is because for zinesters, this was a big deal. V. Vale, who ran RE/Search Publications, did two collections of zines, ZINES! Vol. I and II and you were on the cover. And I was like, who is this cool person? And why are they on the cover? And so, how did that come about? Like, how did you become, the face of zines on this incredibly important collection?

Lynn: [00:25:53] Well, it started out because I'm in Incredibly Strange Music. Yeah, so I met, I met Vale. Oh my God. I started reading, RE/Search back in Milwaukee with the Industrial Culture Handbook and I just thought Vale must be the coolest person on the face of the earth, which of course he is.

Annalee: [00:26:11] True, yeah. 

Lynn: [00:26:13] And then I met him first, although it was not like a met and remembered each other or anything like that. I used to work at, a gallery called San Francisco Art Space in the ‘90s and we did a Survival Research Laboratory show and, and, Vale was down for that and that's the first time I met him. But I did not actually meet him to become friends with him until, you know, ’92-ish, I think. And then, yeah, I don't even remember how he found out that I was a record collector and into incredibly strange music, but I wound up being in that. And I think at that point in time, I actually talk about wanting to do a zine and maybe I had just started doing Mystery Date, I can't remember. But he knew that I did a zine. And then, to be honest, it was just, I was as shocked by it as anything. I was like, what? Be on the cover? Oh, my God. Yes, of course, of course, of course. 

[00:27:20] So, yeah, he knew me. I had already been interviewed by him, and I think that made it kind of kind of an easy choice in the sense that I was already there.

Annalee: [00:27:33] So, yeah, and RE/Search publications was an interesting phenomenon where it was kind of a zine and kind of a book and kind of self-published and kind of not. So, yeah, that was a really… And so yeah, it sounds like music is what really brought you into this on every level.

Lynn: [00:27:49] It did. It did, on every level. And I didn't even think about that until you said it, but yeah, that’s true.

Annalee: [00:27:55] Cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us—

Charlie Jane: [00:27:59] Yeah, thank you.

Annalee: [00:27:59] And for telling us all this history. 

Lynn: [00:28:01] Wait, wait. That's a better heart. 

Annalee: [00:28:02] Yeah. 

Lynn: [00:28:04] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:28:04] For those who cannot see what we're doing, we're all making little heart shaped hands into the Zoom. 

Lynn: [00:28:11] Yeah, except mine just looked like a potato. So…

Annalee: [00:28:13] I mean, potato is love. All right. Especially if you're from the Midwest, so.

Lynn: [00:28:17] Food is love, yeah.

Annalee: [00:28:19] Mine also looks sort of potato. Charlie's is the best heart so far, so yeah.

Lynn: [00:28:23] I know, she's really good at it.

Annalee [00:28:26] Nice job, Charlie. All right, well, Lynn, thank you so much for joining us. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:29] Thank you.

Annalee: [00:28:29] And, where can people—

Lynn: [00:28:31] Oh, my pleasure. 

Annalee: [00:28:31] Is there any place where you want to point people to find your work online?

Lynn: [00:28:35] Probably HiLoBrow.com has like the most of it, the most recent. Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:28:42] All right. So, check out Lynn's column there. And of course, you can pick up her books anywhere where fine books are sold. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:49] Hell yeah. 

Annalee: [00:28:50] All right. 

Lynn: [00:28:50] Thank you.

Annalee: [00:28:50] Bye. 

All: [00:28:50] Bye!

Annalee: [00:28:54] All right. Coming up next, we have artist Lawrence Lindell, whose new graphic novel, Blackward, has us both completely obsessed.

[00:29:04] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.

Annalee: [00:29:09] Lawrence Lindell is the author of Blackward, a new graphic novel about a group of young queer Black people in Oakland who organize a Black zine fest. Lawrence is also an artist, a musician, a cartoonist for the New Yorker, and they run the small press Laneha House with their spouse, the cartoonist, Breena Nuñez.

[00:29:28] Welcome to the show, Lawrence. 

Lawrence: [00:29:29] Hi, thanks for having me. 

Annalee: [00:29:31] Yeah, thanks for joining us. So, I want to dive right into Blackward, which completely blew me away. I got it in email and I started reading and I just basically couldn't stop until I was done and I was laughing and crying and feeling cozy and I just loved these characters so much and I was really invested in their journey to find community.

[00:29:53] So, I wonder if you could start by talking about the process of coming up with these characters who we know by the name of the Section because that's what they call their friend group online. 

Lawrence: [00:30:05] Yeah, it started as a webcomic called The Section, so that's where the name comes from. huh. and then we changed it to Blackward because they're like, I don't think The Section is gonna be good for marketing, so that's what happened.

Annalee: [00:30:20] Which, actually, we see the characters kind of trying to come up with the name Blackward in the comics, so that's kind of cool.

Lawrence: [00:30:26] And yeah, I just based it off of my own community, who I live around. So, a lot of the characters are based on my spouse and friends and people that I hang around. Lika was based on me originally. The original character design was much closer to how I look and then I kind of changed it, but I was trying to explore and express some gender things I kind of deal with. And it felt safer to do that on the page than in real life, if you will. And so that's kind of how that character came about. Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:03] That's awesome. So, what made you decide to have the way that they find community and come together be a zine fest as opposed to any of the other things that they could have been doing? 

Lawrence: [00:31:12] That's funny, because that was the exact question, my editor Tracy asked, like, why, zine fest? It could be anything, and for me, it couldn't have been anything, because zine fest is kind of where my community comes. Like, I make comics, but my entry point into comics starts with zine fest, so most of the people I know that are cartoonists or that make comics, I met them through, like zine fest or organizing before. Comics is the extra part of it, so I was like, it's the one place I know personally that, gathers so many different kinds of people with a similar intention. And so I was like, I can't just make it a comics fest because comics fests are very much just strictly comics only, and zine fest is like, oh, I can get punk zines, I can get sci fi zines, I can get how to organize against police, and it's all in one space, so that's what I figured would be the perfect combination.

Annalee: [00:32:08] Is there a zine fest that you went to that was like your home base? 

Lawrence: [00:32:12] LA for me. I'm from Compton, LA. but also San Francisco. That's where I met my spouse, San Francisco and Berkeley. 

Charlie Jane: [00:32:22] Oh, yay. Our friends who helped organize the San Francisco Zine Fest will be so fricking happy to hear that.

Lawrence: [00:32:28] Yeah, that was a big one for me too. Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:32:33] So the vibe of Blackward really made me think about blerds, or Black nerds, and the rise of Black nerd culture generally over the past couple of decades and I wonder if you could talk about that. First of all, do you think there actually has been a rise of the blerds and do you see work like Blackward fitting into that?

Lawrence: [00:32:53] Yeah, I guess there's a rise and I guess it's more visible now, if that makes sense. Yeah. Obviously, most things always exist and then it kind of gets, like people kind of get to see it, especially now because of the internet. 

[00:33:09] But yeah, I think that's always existed. I don't know if Blackwards fits there, I would love to think so, but because it's so heavily focused in, kind fandom and a specific kind of comics, sometimes they don't… In my experience, haven't always been receptive to more cartoony, or comic strips or like, if I'm not fitting a certain aesthetic, it's like, uh, I don't know about that.

[00:33:39] So, that’s what I struggle with sometimes, knowing if I do. Like, obviously, I fit into that. I’m Black and I like comics and things like that, but it's just like knowing that sometimes there is an aesthetic associated with it that aesthetic doesn't always fit. So I don't know where my place in all that is. 

Annalee: [00:34:00] Can you, can you say more about that? What is the aesthetic that you think, is the blerd aesthetic that like a more cartoony graphic novel doesn't fit into? 

Lawrence: [00:34:12] Yeah, it's weird because it's like, obviously it fits, but it doesn't. When I used to go to conventions early on, they would kind of pick up my work and be like, oh, this is kid's stuff. It's like cartoons. Like, you know, we're looking for the comic books. We want to see this good depiction of Blackness. And it's like, well, this is a type of Blackness that exists that I'm trying to depict. 

Charlie Jane: [00:34:36] Like you mean like superhero comics or like… 

Lawrence: [00:34:39] Kind of more indie, like Image, I guess, would be the closest I could.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:44] [Crosstalk]

Lawrence: [00:34:47] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:34:48] Like creator-driven comics. 

Lawrence: [00:34:48] Yeah. So, like, in a certain aesthetic too. It's like, yeah, I know how to draw, but this is what I like to draw and it doesn't need to be like so realistic all the time. And sometimes I get it. Our history in the States as Black people, particularly being caricatured. It's always on my mind of like, I don't ever want to be, like, I don't want my characters to come across as buffoons and things like that. But it's like, I'm very deliberate in what I do, and I hate that it's automatically written off. It's like, oh, we don't, we don't do caricature type stuff. We want more serious. 

[00:35:28] So, it's like a weird balance of being this artist of who has all these years of studying and who thinks I'm being intentional and then to meet people who are like, no we don't like that type of stuff. 

Annalee: [00:35:37] Yeah, because it just could too easily be mistaken for a stereotype.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:42] Yeah, it's sort of a weird form of almost respectability politics, I guess. 

Lawrence: [00:35:45] Yes. Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:47] So do you think Black and queer nerds have changed mainstream nerd culture? And if so, like, how do you feel like that's happened? 

Lawrence: [00:35:56] I’d say so. I mean, I feel like Black and queer people changed culture all the time, whether we get the credit or not, it's just a fact, but… Yeah, I would say so because I feel like there's a lot of things that are queer that people don't know off the bat. Like it's kind of, not snuck in there, but it's written from his perspective of a queer person that until someone finds out he’s queer, and they’re like, oh, we don't like that.

[00:36:24] And it's like, oh, but it was queer all along. Like, what are you talking about? And so, in that way, I feel like definitely. It’s, I feel like, what they feel like is the gay agenda. It's like, oh, everything's being made gay now. It's like, no, it was gay all along. You just didn't know. And now that you know, it's like, you have a problem with it. But oh, well, you'll get over it or you won't. 

[00:36:44] So I feel like, like, yeah, queer people, Black people, especially, meaning, being in the States, like we shape culture here, no matter what it is. And so, yeah, I feel like it's undeniable. Even if it's not intentional, I feel like it's just a part of what happens.

Annalee: [00:37:04] I was just gonna ask if you have a specific example or a set of examples in the back of your mind when you're thinking about people saying like, oh, this is all of a sudden queer. And you're like, no, it was always queer. Is there something that stands out to you?

Lawrence: [00:37:18] I think in mainstream more recently is like the Matrix movies.

Annalee: [00:37:21] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:21] Oh, yeah, for sure. 

Lawrence: [00:37:23] Like even myself as someone who was like, when I was watching, I definitely was not out or even thought to explore any of the queerness that I'm coming to terms with later in life, but then you look back and you're like, oh, yeah. Like, oh, okay. 

[00:37:40] So, I think there's so many things like that where it's like, it goes over everyone's head that's not in the know, especially if you haven't started exploring. Like me, like, I just wouldn't know. And then when you know, you're like, oh, that's, that's kind of cool. 

[00:37:58] So that's what I think about. Things like that, where it's like, oh, this is so obvious. But at the time to me, it wasn't obvious. And it's like, kudos to them. Maybe I don't even know if it was obvious to the people making it or if it was just coming through them, like, subconsciously.

Annalee: [00:38:12] Yeah. I think that that's that's a good question because I do think that Wachowskis have talked about how it was kind of, they were also expressing something unconscious. And so, yeah, and I think that's how a lot of queer culture works oftentimes is there's sort of two levels. There's like the, do you know what's going on if you're queer, level. And then there's like, hey, there's bullet time and cool jackets and racing around. And that's good too. Like, I love that. So, you can appreciate it on both levels.

[00:38:46] I also wanted to talk about, going back to the characters in Blackward, I wanted to, talk about Mr. Marcus, who's such a cool, pivotal character. He owns the Books and Thangs bookstore, and which made me think of Marcus Books in Oakland and Sista Sci Fi in Oakland, which are two great Black-owned bookstores, one of which totally specializes in sci fi and currently doesn't have a real bricks and mortar presence, but is there online.

[00:39:13] So I'm wondering, what does it mean to have activism and community start in a bookstore as opposed to, say, on the street, or in a church, or in some other kind of community space? 

Lawrence: [00:39:25] Yeah, funny thing is the character's named after Marcus Books, and so…

Annalee: [00:39:29] I kind of wondered that. 

Lawrence: [00:39:31] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:31] Yeah.

Annalee: [00:39:34] Yeah, that's really cool.

Lawrence: [00:39:35] I don't know if I thought about it. I think I was thinking about spaces that exist like that, like bookstores, where it's kind of, well I don't know about anymore. Everything's been weird since the pandemic, but where you could just go and kind of explore all these things. And I feel like bookstores are very good at—some of them are very good at that, like creating a space. Even libraries, too. I thought about having a library because they focus on that even more. But where bookstores are kind of like a part of the community that's left out, if you will.

[00:40:12] Also, because not everyone has an independent bookstore. Like, when I was growing up, I had to go to Barnes & Noble or Borders and things like that. But I remember you could sit in there and read books all the time, so. 

Charlie Jane: [00:40:20] Yeah, that's one of the things that's amazing about bookstores is that you can kind of hang out. And just kind of be there with the books and with your friends. And it's a really cool thing in the community.

Lawrence: [00:40:33] I think of these characters like all of the elders I kind of had. Even if they didn't understand whatever I was into, they didn't kind of throw me away. They kind of just like, well, well, let's let him explore that type of thing. And so that's how I view Mr. Marcus, yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:40:52] Nice. 

Annalee: [00:40:55] What kind of exploration do you think is possible in a bookstore that isn't in, like another kind of space? 

Lawrence: [00:41:03] I feel like it's similar to zine fest like there's so many options. Even bookstores that specialize in stuff. Yes, it might be one specific genre, which is kind of rare, but it happens, but it'll be things that you didn't even know exist within that genre. And that's why I like bookstores. You’re walking like, oh shit, this can be this? And I don't know, I feel like, especially bookstores, because it's such an investment for them. They're very, not selective, but they want to put like the quote unquote “good shit” or things they value in their store as well. And I don't know, I've found so many things in bookshops. As long as the shop owner is not snobby, but that they're like, oh, you should check this out. You like this, maybe you check this. And then you're like, oh shit, I didn't know this existed. And so I feel like similar to zine fest, you can explore more than just, what you're used to.

Charlie Jane: [00:41:55] Yeah, totally. So, I mean, we were talking before about how zines were a huge part of our lives back in the day, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but you know, zines are kind of coming back again. And what do you think zines mean now compared to what they meant 30, 40 years ago, and how do you see your work fitting into this long tradition of science fiction fanzines that go back like a hundred years?

Lawrence: [00:42:19] Yeah, I was thinking about that, too. This is weird. I meant comics, but my entry point to zines, like I didn't learn about fanzines until after I was reading punk zines. You know what I mean? My entry point was definitely from hardcore and punk rock. And then, a lot of political pamphlets on like don't talk to the police or here's what you do if you, you know, that type of thing.

[00:42:45] So when I found about fanzines, I was like, oh shit. It expanded what I thought zines were even more. And then you dig into mini comics, which it’s like, oh, what? And then you get into portrait zines and then photo zines. And I feel like. I don't feel like there's anything, I'm not gonna say it's not new, but I feel like it's just it's reviving what already came before and it's a little… Zines are always supposed to be accessible, but I feel like they're even more accessible now because of the fact of the internet, I guess, if that makes sense. 

[00:43:21] There’s a lot of people doing zine archives and history and workshops and panels. So, there's like this, you don't have to be the cool kid to know about zine fest type of thing. Like there's more access to it, even though it's supposed to be accessible, but we know sometimes things that are accessible, it depends on who you are and who you have proximity to. But yeah, I don’t know.

[00:43:49] Basically, all that rambling is to say, I don't know, I'm trying to figure it out so that you guys have a good show. 

Annalee: [00:43:59] Are you working on anything next? 

Lawrence: [00:44:03] Yeah, I have a book, a middle grade graphic novel that I technically did before the Drawn & Quarterly one that comes out next year. But I'm currently, working on my second novel with Drawn and Quarterly. It's more adult. I mean, Blackward wasn't… it’s marketed as YA, but it really was just like, I'm making a comic for everybody or whoever wants to read it, but this one is specifically adult memoir comic. 

Annalee: [00:44:31] Cool.

Lawrence: [00:44:33] And so it deals with, me coming home from England to Compton and then kind of this mental health break I had, because I have bipolar and PTSD. So, kind of dive into what that was like. And it talks about zines and me doing zine fest and traveling and all that stuff. 

Annalee: [00:44:57] Cool. So we can expect, more community through zines coming from you soon. 

Lawrence: [00:45:04] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:45:06] Well, thank you so much for joining us, Lawrence.

[00:45:10] The book, again, is Blackward and people can find that anywhere that fine books are sold. And where else can people follow your work online? 

Lawrence: [00:45:21] Just lawrencelindell.com. Most of my social media is private because I feel like…

Annalee: [00:45:28] Relatable. 

Lawrence: [00:45:30] I don't know. Yeah, it just, yeah. So, I'm trying to step away from that and just focus on family and making work that I enjoy.

Annalee: [00:45:40] Awesome. Well, thank you again. 

Charlie Jane: [00:45:41] Yeah. Thank you so much. 

Lawrence: [00:45:44] Thank you.

[00:45:46] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.

Annalee: [00:45:49] Wow. That was so interesting. I loved hearing the really different stories of how Lynn and Lawrence found their way into the world of zines. And it made me think that we're in this moment right now where there's a resurgence of interest in zines. And that's maybe because we're in kind of this media crisis where we're not really sure where to go for our social media. We're not really sure where to go to get good information or to find good music or find other people and zines just feel right, somehow? They feel really tangible and authentic, not algorithmic and corporate. I don't know. What do you think? 

Charlie Jane: [00:46:27] I think that's absolutely right. And I think that there's a bunch of reasons why maybe zines were less of a big deal for a while there, but part of it was that the internet was supplying that need to have very personal, very weird, kind of like non-monetizable personal expression that was just like, here's some weird stuff.

Annalee: [00:46:51] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:46:51] You and I both used to go to the web zine fest in San Francisco back in the 2000s where it was like, yeah, they were zinesters, but they were zinesters on the web.

Annalee: [00:47:00] The web! And a lot of them were early bloggers and LiveJournal people. 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:05] Yeah, and it was like a mixture of bloggers, LiveJournal people, and people who would do just like a website of nothing but naked German parachuters. Like they'd find tons of pictures of naked Germans parachuting, and that would be the entire web zine, and it'd be just like, here's every picture I could find of this weird thing, and that was the kind of stuff that I was like, oh yeah, okay, zine culture is alive and well on the internet, and we don't need to necessarily spend all that time photocopying and pasting and stuff, because it's on the internet. There's webzines. I still have my Webzine 2000 T-shirt somewhere. It doesn't fit anymore, but I still have it. But I feel like now the internet has gotten more corporate and has gotten more kind of all the stuff that zines were reacting against and that web zines were reacting against and the web is gone. And so yeah I think that we have to turn back to zines.

Annalee: [00:47:56] Yeah, it's funny because what Lynn was saying was that for her zines had been this source of weird information, like you said, like you could just kind of go on the internet and replace that really easily by finding the naked German parachutists or know or the website that's entirely devoted to how to take care of African daisies or something like that. But what Lawrence said was that his early experience of zines was a lot of political stuff and how to deal with the police if you're Black and like that's also the kind of information that people were trading actually a lot on Twitter and other spaces online. Black Twitter was almost performing that role that those zines described had once performed but now all of that stuff is just buried under propaganda and weaponized information. So you can't be sure that you're getting something real and authentic from a member of your community, but with the zine, it feels like you are.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:02] Yeah, it feels more personal and you can often meet the person who made the zine. If you go to a zine fest, they're sitting there at a table. They've got their zines You can actually be like, hi, you're a real human. Okay, cool. This zine looks cool. 

[00:49:15] But you know, I feel like now I wouldn't want to let my freak flag fly on social media at all because I would just get dogpiled by weirdos. Like, you know, I'm a weirdo, but I'm talking about weirdos who are just like there to harass you. And I might be like here's all my weird thoughts about lasagna And people might be like, I'm going to kill you because your thoughts about lasagna are not the approved thoughts about lasagna or only Garfield is allowed to like lasagna. 

Annalee: [00:49:41] Or just because you’re a trans person who cares about lasagna, you know, like, it doesn’t even matter.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:43] Exactly. I’m a trans person so I'm making lasagna trans and like, I gotta say actually, that…

Annalee: [00:49:50] Ooh, I love trans lasagna. Charlie, thank you. 

Charlie Jane: [00:49:51] I mean, it is the best kind. 

Annalee: [00:49:54] I'm waiting for your trans lasagna zine. 

Charlie Jane: [00:49:57] We use the correct amount of garlic is all I'm going to say. The correct amount, which is a lot. 

Annalee: [00:50:02] Yes, for sure. 

Charlie Jane: [00:50:02] But yeah. but the thing I was going to say is that I did have a moment a few weeks ago where I was like seriously thinking about, like, should I start making a print, a paper zine again, or really for the first time, because I never really made… I made like a couple of Dr. Who fanzines back in the day, but I never really was like a zinester. So I was thinking about this because I've… People who read my newsletter will know I've been really worried about some of the legislation coming down the pike, like the Kids Online Safety Act that would drastically restrict what we could say on the internet and might shut down a lot of our online ways of communicating. And I'm like, well, you know, I guess if that happens, one thing I could do is just start making a paper zine and anybody who wants it, I'll just send it to them and maybe raise money for it online, but the content won't be online because I just think there are things in motion right now that if they succeed could make the internet even worse than it is now. And I think that that would be a boon to zines and a bane to those of us who want to get anything useful on the internet.

Annalee: [00:51:06] Yeah, and maybe a boon to the post office.

Charlie Jane: [00:51:12] I mean, yeah.

Annalee: [00:51:12] Because I mean mailing this stuff around. Maybe we'll bring back fax machines. That would be another way to go. 

Charlie Jane: [00:51:18] Yeah. Fax machines, man. 

Annalee: [00:51:21] Yeah. Or maybe people will just be emailing PDFs to each other or something like that, so. 

[00:51:27] Yeah, I think that, that might be the future direction of zines is a way that we can bring back the good parts of the internet without all of that surveillance and negativity and automated… Or what the experts call coordinated inauthentic behavior, which is basically just a fancy way of saying bots spewing propaganda.

Charlie Jane: [00:51:52] Actually, I have to say, Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior would be a great title for a zine. 

Annalee: [00:51:57] Yeah! 

Charlie Jane: [00:51:59] I'm buying that zine right now. 

Annalee: [00:52:01] Go forth! Go forth and make that zine. 

Charlie Jane: [00:52:03] Somebody make that zine and send it to us, please. 

Annalee: [00:52:06] All right. Well, thank you very much for listening to another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct.

[00:52:14] Remember that you can find us on Mastodon, on Patreon, and on Instagram—

Charlie Jane: [00:52:19] And on Bluesky!

Annalee: [00:52:20] If you'd like to follow along. And on Bluesky now. Now on Bluesky! 

[00:52:24] Thank you so much to Veronica Simonetti, our intrepid producer. And thanks to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music. And we will talk to you later. If you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord and you'll hear us in your ears with our mini episode next week. Bye! 

Charlie Jane: [00:52:41] Bye!

[00:52:41] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]