In August at the State Library you can join Queensland zine creator Jeremy Staples for You Won’t Really Know Till You Try It – a series of zine making workshops and meetups that will explore how the Library can be a super useful resource for Zinesters and will serve up participants with a heap of the tips Jeremy has collected over his 18 years making zines.
What belongs in a Zine?*!..
is that question, a emphatic statement or just a state of mind ??
From 2015 to 2017 Jeremy Staples curated and toured exhibition, Copier Jam! around regional centres of eastern states of Australia from Wollongong to Childers. The exhibition showcased the diversity of zines and independent comic creators, and collectives as well as the distributors, from across Australia. This exhibition included the finished publications, the makers original layout pages and original art, as well as a vending machine that distributed zines.
Diving into Copier Jam! gives you a sense of the huge variety of topics, the formats and production styles possible in this form of publishing.
In no particular order here's a small taste of the exhibition and the wide variety of answers to the question... What belongs in a Zine?*!...
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Vanessa Berry
Vanessa is one of Australia’s most respected zine creators, has been publishing since the mid-nineties. Her I am a Camera series covers personal tales, travel stories and reflections. Berry’s work has been exhibited at the MCA and NGS and she is the author of two memoirs: the collection Strawberry Hills Forever (2007, Local Consumption) and Ninety9 (2013, Giramondo) a memoir of growing up in the 1990s.
Benjamin Constantine
Aka Ben Sea, who has been at the forefront of the Brisbane independent comic’s scene since the mid 2000s. His unique blend of pop surrealism floods each page with dark undertones hidden within a cartoon aesthetic. Constantine has appeared in a number of internationally released anthologies, featured in VICE, Juxtapoz, and is well known for his Plump Oyster series.
she Canberra Zine Emporium
The Canberra Zine Emporium collective formed to support and host the CZE festival and fair in 2012. Since the formation, the collective has hosted two hugely successful fairs as part of the We Are Here Festival held in Canberra. They invented the world’s first zine vending machine featured in this exhibition.
Jeremy Staples
Jeremy started as a bedroom publisher in 2001, when he released the first Bizoo, a community art and music zine that went on to a huge twenty-five issues between 2001 and 2006. In 2010 he experimented with travel, scrap booking and photographic publishing creating Faces Of Nippon and whenever I see a Bearded Hobo on the Street I'll think of you and smile. Staples was the co-founder of the Zine and Independent Comic Symposium that was held annually at The Edge from 2013 -2017.
Silent Army
Silent Army is a print collective run by artist and comic creator, Michael Fikars, who has published and supported independent, small run comics and arts books since 2002. Most of their printed ephemera is short run, numbered editions available online and via the Silent Army Storeroom, which is located within a secret warehouse studio in the laneways of North Melbourne. Silent Army’s ongoing newspaper anthology, Dailies was made on a larger scale print run to distribute internationally and regularly featured fifty plus artists from the South Pacific region.
Ashley Ronning
Ashley Ronning is an illustrator, risograph printer and zine creator based in Melbourne. Melbourne was recently plastered with Ronning’s work for the annual Festival of the Photocopier hosted by Australia’s largest dedicated zine shop, Sticky Institute. Her recent debut solo exhibition Deep Space House Plant at Rooftop Art Space included ten, three colour risograph prints and a complementing zine.
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