More Than Paper Islands: The Pandemic Circuitry of Quaranzines

 “What is a zine? ⭐︎ My definition: For me a zine is not just a self-made and self-published booklet but it is also situated within DIY culture. This means it is non-profit, non-commercial, low-budget, and non-competitive. Topics and style can vary but it’s important that zines remain accessible … (everyone can afford them) and to writers (everyone can make them). Zines don’t exist as little paper islands but they are connected and blossom within a mutually supportive zine community.”

-Nina, Scissors & Chainsaws #2

One night in Fall 2020, as COVID infected nearly 40 million people worldwide, I stumbled upon this definition of zines as I was doom-scrolling on Twitter. It was quoted by @zinelib, the Twitter account of Barnard zine librarian and scholar Jenna Freedman. Something about this definition resonated with many, including the Twitter account of @fanzines, who retweeted with a comment about the accessibility of zines as expressed in their cost. Seeking more context for Scissors & Chainsaws, I followed the thread further where Freedman posted a link to Echo Publishing, the WordPress site of Nina (Zina), an artist, musician, and writer based in Belgium. I contacted Nina via email to order a copy of Issue 2 of Scissors & Chainsaws, and after asking if the amount was okay, I PayPal’d her $12 — most of which went toward international postage. Not long after, a copy arrived at my mailbox in New Jersey. 

Reading Scissors & Chainsaws #2 is like seeing an embodiment of Nina’s definition. Part perzine, part comic, the issue chronicles her engagement with DIY culture throughout the month of July 2020: releasing a new album for her band Lavender Witch on the independent music platform Bandcamp, sewing facemasks using an online template, cataloging old gramophone records remotely for her job at a local library, and attending a pro-choice protest in Brussels. It also chronicles her day-to-day life as the world was struggling to accept that the pandemic wasn’t going away – an extension of another zine she made during lockdown called Confined. Throughout the zine are details on COVID’s effects on these activities: creating social bubbles, sewing masks, celebrating reunions with friends who broke quarantine, and making zines on communal care.

As the spread of COVID-19 became more troubling across the world and citizens began to socially distance at home to flatten the curve, zine makers, artists, writers — self-publishers who often subsidize their creative pursuits by freelancing, adjuncting, or working service industry jobs — amplified their output with increased urgency. Some playfully dubbed these contributions quaranzines: publications made and circulated by self-publishers under lockdown and other practices of social distancing. As the idea of quaranzines spread, libraries, museums, and community centers mobilized to curate and host online exhibitions and events that assembled such work in digital spaces.

Like Nina, many of these publishers started by exploiting their own immediate communities in urban centers, like New York and Chicago, and online through social media. Marc Fischer, working with others under the group name Public Collectors, was spending most days from March through June churning out 100 issues of Quaranzine, one of the first of many zines to incorporate the clever portmanteau.[1]As Fischer acknowledged in an essay for The Quarantine Times, many zines took on this portmanteau. “The name Quaranzine came to mind, which is an idea that many other publishing minds surely had … Continue reading Meanwhile, Brooklyn’s Dashiell Robb and sisters Lucy and Kate Andersen asked their friends to contribute to their first issue of The Pandemic Post, a professional-looking newsprint published in April that described itself as “a relief quaranzine.”

The cover of Issue #4 of The Pandemic Post from September 2020.As such, the proceeds of the first issue went to two non-profits, including the Service Worker’s Coalition. By May, New York City’s Asian American Feminist Collective in conjunction with the radical bookstore Bluestockings published a third issue of their zine titled Asian American Feminist Antibodies (care in the time of coronavirus), a colorful and freely distributed 46-page pdf that collected stories, essays, lists, and comics that expressed the ways contributors “experience, resist, and grapple with a viral outbreak that has been racialized as Asian, is spoken of in the language of contagion and invasion, and reveals the places where our collective social safety net is particularly threadbare” (3). Like a host of other quaranzines, Asian American Feminist Antibodies used a range of media, genres, tools, and resources to uphold principles of mutual aid and collective knowledge. In addition to the spread of quaranzines made by seasoned publishers, a host of festivals also quickly mobilized online, including CanZine, The Chicago Zine Fest, and Quaranzine Fest, while local arts centers and community organizations dropped “zine kits” locally and held events online.

While the pandemic emotionally and materially challenged the editors, authors, and artists who produced these zines, the constraints of the pandemic inspired resilience and innovation, and in some cases offered resources for financial and emotional support. They historicized racist outcomes of COVID-19, provided DIY instructions for sewing masks for essential workers, and strategized for safe protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Such resilience and innovation, I argue, speaks to the enduring lessons that zine culture can teach community writing scholars in times of crisis. Often their responses to these crises offer opportunities to expand our understanding of zine culture as a capacious — and sometimes contradictory — site for community writing, one that assembles and disassembles just as rapidly as conditions change. 

Put another way: perhaps just as important as their content, quaranzines draw from a range of materials to assemble in both physical and digital spaces, circulating via grassroots, public, and corporate intermediaries, from U.S. mail, telephone poles, and public libraries to PayPal and Instagram. This article builds upon my recent argument that quaranzines amplify posthuman practice (Luther 2020) but extends such practice to assemblage-based models for community engagement, as recently theorized by Jennifer Harding et al and Laurie Gries — models that are multimodal and emergent, and therefore useful in an age of post-truth virality. By explicating examples of quaranzines and the digital and community organizations that have curated them, I conceive of assemblage as a contingent effect of specific delivery systems, what John Trimbur described as a network of circuitry. Such assemblages are more than the sum of self-representation in printed form; in attending to their circuitry during a time of crisis, they highlight the flexible, public, material rhetorics of zine culture.  

Zines in Composition and Community Literacy 

Public writing scholars have long viewed zines — gritty, do-it-yourself print publications with limited circulation — as unique community publications. They have been used to build alternative community partnerships (Jacobi 2013, Graybeal 2018, and Spickard 2018), embody cultural counterpublics (Farmer 2013), and subvert using textual practices within third-space coalitions (Licona 2012). While zines and their makers are an incredibly diverse lot, a central affordance emphasized in our scholarship is the zine’s durability as an amateur-produced corporeal medium — a text that is often made through workshops at local libraries, distributed at transformative sites such as prisons and protests, and passed along at public readings and zine fests. Indeed, the corporality and amateurism of zines are often constitutive of its politics. However, in this essay I also want to suggest that the politics of zine publishing have become increasingly complicated through the attention economy, a distortion that is amplified by socially distant quaranzines. 

It is useful, therefore, to begin with a brief account of how literacy and composition scholars have attended to the politics of zines, displaying varying unease regarding the digitization of zine culture. Part of this ambiguity, I want to suggest, is that the shift from a culture of mass media to social media has altered the assemblage of zine culture, from one that is strictly countercultural or counterpublic to one that is more accessible, acceptable, and therefore more public. The pandemic, and the quaranzines produced in response to it, have only made this fact more visible. While scholarly discussions of zines have been historically accompanied by caveats about the risks of appropriation, where “the best zines are altogether too vital and interesting to be tamed and timetabled” (Knobel and Lankshear 2002, 165), my analysis of quaranzines demonstrates how zines are not merely a subcultural or counterpublic medium but an assemblage of vernacular, mediated practices that resist reduction and have the potential to be quite visible.

By the time literacy and composition scholars started paying attention to zines in the late 1990s, they already had a brief but significant moment in the mainstream. The popularization of the web, of course, played an essential role in bringing zines into the composition classroom, but it was also the marketability of alternative culture that made zines more visible. The punk, riot grrrl, and DIY communities from which zines are born lent them a currency of cool, an authenticity that was quickly exploited by corporate brands, like Nike and Urban Outfitters, who developed their own zines as a marketing ploy (Duncombe 1999). As this was happening, personal computers and dial-up internet were becoming cheaper and interfaces made more accessible through GUIs, leading to the rich participatory extracurriculum that Kathleen Blake Yancey famously nodded to in her 2004 CCCC keynote. 

Amy J. Wan (1999) first noted the ways in which desktop publishing and the internet were affecting the aesthetics of zines. “The boundaries between zines and professional publication,” Wan wrote in 1999, “are no longer absolute” (16). Citing zines like Giant Robot, Bunnyhop, and Factsheet Five — zines that included slick color covers, professional layouts, and large circulation runs — Wan noted how such publications have dedicated staff and used advertising to become more sustainable. By the turn of the century, of course, broader shifts in the delivery systems changed the entire culture industry, zines included. Bunnyhop and Factsheet Five folded by 1998. Tower Records and Borders Books, two corporate distributors cited by Wan, filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and 2011 respectively. And as zines moved online, they had to contend with a different kind of mediascape — one that started to blur the line between mass media and participatory media.  

Michelle Comstock (2001) explores how these shifts specifically affected radical grrrl zine networks of the late 90s — networks that had more traditionally relied upon the DIY, embodied materiality of cut-and-paste pastiche and local distribution. Recognizing the web as “a place where corporations increasingly mediate the production, distribution, and retention of even the most radical forms of critical literacy” (399), Comstock gives the poignant example of how the terms “girl” and “grrrl” — used to signify one’s identity within third-wave feminism — were parlayed into the purchase of domain names such as PlanetGrrl. This commercialization, when combined with connectedness of the hypertext and the technical expertise required for late 90s web design, complicates binaries between what Comstock calls “micro-media” (i.e. zines) and “mass media” (i.e. web content); and yet, she concludes that “[i]n order to write effectively and build coalitions in these environments, grrrl editors must therefore balance the politics of the anti-commercial feminist movement and the zine scene with the pro-technology, capitalist ideologies of the Web” (403). 

Comstock’s analysis was prescient for the time, raising questions community publishers must still ask 20 years after: “Are traditional notions of radical authorship indeed possible in today’s mass-mediated writing communities and environments?” However, as mass media has shifted from a network of corporate publishers and broadcast stations to software companies, platforms, social networking services, and long tail retailers, scholars also began to reframe this question, asking about the possibilities of zines in an era of social media and information abundance.

Scholars like Jonathan Alexander (2002) and Robert Samuels (2006), for instance, saw early 21st century e-zines and webzines not so much as commercial or corporate, but as an exciting gateway into a digital public sphere that made it easier to import zine culture into the composition classroom. E-zines introduced students to experimental, collaborative, and engaging models of web writing, showcasing the work of “specific groups of people—to engage, excite, entice, stimulate, and provoke. Moreover, because the work is often arranged thematically around certain issues or interests, the context invites specific audiences to peruse and respond” (Alexander 389). Likewise, Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2002) considered how such groups used cyberzines to critique dominant narratives and grapple with their own identities and subjectivities, redirecting the emphasis from technical or professional processes to the possibilities for connection and self-representation.  

More than twenty years after the popularization of the web, zine culture continues to survive, only now it is nested within a more complex post-digital scene of participatory media where writers can represent themselves using an array of media. As the tools for digital production and distribution have gotten more accessible, zines at once offer an alternative to digital saturation while also being entangled with processes of communicative capitalism, the term Jodi Dean uses to describe the ubiquitous global communication networks that sponsor individual contributions to democratic participation at the expense of collective action, a “democracy that talks without responding” (22).  This entanglement has led to a renewed interest in zines among literacy and composition scholars over the last ten years, but often as a recovery project that has led to incomplete or mixed interpretations about their political potential in the digital age. 

In his analysis of contemporary zines, Frank Farmer (2013) accounts for the ways new media has been incorporated into zine-making as yet another available means; like Comstock, he understands the internet to be a primarily professionalized corporate space whose ownership has become only more centralized, standardized, commercialized, and surveilled over the course of its short existence. This fact, for Farmer, is enough to argue that “zines will endure because they have a critical purpose to accomplish, the urgency of which is likely to be exacerbated, not lessened, by Internet discourses” (82). In other words, for Farmer, zines offer an important alternative to web-based mass media. This is certainly true for the many contemporary artists, writers, and activists who use zines to foster more authentic and intimate relationships than are typically possible on the web — a fact especially important for women and people of color who are systemically harassed online. 

At the same time, as Nina makes clear in Scissors & Chainsaws #2, “zines don’t exist as little paper islands” but develop a range of embodied and digital practices for connecting with other like-minded creators.  Likewise, for the feminist zine makers interviewed in Rosemary Clark-Parsons’s (2017) study, zines partly constitute a digitally-networked feminist practice, where “social media platforms act as porous yet protective boundaries, providing access to the zine community, but not to the actual content of zines themselves” (559) since this particular counterpublic rarely digitizes its zines for online distribution. Interviewees in her study share how they mark the internet as a boundary space using sites like Tumblr and Etsy to help publicize their work while holding on to the material intimacy of zines. By focusing on the broader mediation practices of zine makers — practices that extend from both a DIY ethos and the promotional promises of social media — Clark-Parsons productively explores the affordances and limitations of different media and the practices associated with them for feminist zinesters. One important conclusion from this study is not only how digital feminist counterpublics promote and broadcast the progressive messages of intersectional feminism, but how they attract new participants into its politics, and, by extension, the culture of zines — especially for those who are willing to move into its more physical spaces.

Like Clark-Parsons, I am interested in contemporary zine-making as a digitally networked practice; however, I also want to consider how zines are community publications that cannot be reduced to their counterpublicity or corporeality and that doing so foreshortens their political potential. Rather it might be more productive to consider quaranzines and zine culture more broadly as shape-shifting assemblages that come together and fall apart as human and non-human circuits become available or get closed off. The speed in which quaranzines were able to assemble in March and April of 2020 speaks to the capacity of these community publishers who at once cultivate a discourse of experimentation and connectedness while piecing together writing projects by any materials necessary. Quaranzines, in other words, cannot be reduced to singularities but conceived of as objects that emerge through collectivity. 

Zine Assemblages

Assemblage theory, as Kathleen Blake Yancey and Stephen J. McElroy’s (2017) recent edited collection shows, has been attractive to scholars in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies as a means for understanding authorship and intertextual composition; writers, after all, assemble writing from language, sources, genres, media, and more. Adela Licona (2012), Rebekah Buchanan (2018), and Frank Farmer have all documented how print zines are classically produced by splicing or bricolaging images from consumer magazines as way of subverting mass-mediated representations. 

However, more recent scholarship has used assemblage theory to go beyond representation to consider the broader socio-cultural contexts of writing, using it as a methodology for exploring the affective dimensions of communication and accounting for slower nonlinear processes of political action where nonhuman objects and structures (technological, economic, scientific, etc.) converge with human agents to produce new, sometimes measurable, outcomes. Such applications are specifically helpful for public writing scholars as they point to the ways movements, events, and texts emerge through relational processes of organization (what assemblage theorists might call territorialization), fracture (deterritorialization), and change (reterritorialization) — processes that cannot be reduced to a single cause or origin, including a pandemic. At the same time, assemblage theory allows scholars to account for the relationality of different scenes of writing as socio-cultural forces impact them both discursively and materially.  

Jennifer Harding, Jessica Pauszek, Nick Pollard, and Steve Parks (2018), for instance, use assemblage and affect theory to account for the beginnings of the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers (FWWCP), a British-based international network of working-class writers formed the mid-1970s and whose work can be situated within a broader class-based social movements. These included several that were focused on developing countercultural spaces that simultaneously rejected rising neoliberalism and oppressive compulsory literacy curricula, inspiring new assemblages comprised of bodies (students, teacher, governors, media reporters); actions (writing, protesting); things (books, flags, images, media reports); places (classrooms, streets, offices); technologies (for publishing, reporting); ideas (about literature, working-class culture, education); identities (working class, East London, professional); and emotions (grievance, resistance, solidarity, pride, loyalty, discontent, outrage, defiance). (15-16) 

Indeed, central to the assemblage of the FWWCP was the production and circulation of literacy artifacts, like self-published books, and embodied literacy events including classes, workshops, writing groups, and annual festivals. In this way, working-class identities were asserted and revised through its articulations but also through its changing material practices. Such materiality is always in process; as new circuits emerge (ISBNs on books, widespread access to Adobe InDesign, etc.), old circuits calcify, and the affective energies of the working-class assemblage shift with them. When viewed through assemblage theory, writing becomes political not only through its content or representation, but the ways in which that writing materializes.

Assemblage theory can account for the dynamic multiplicity of specific publics which exist simultaneously at different scales. As such, assemblages are helpful for considering how a monumental event like the pandemic has chaotic cascading effects to previously territorialized assemblages, from global economies and national healthcare systems to specific zines and zine culture writ large. Assemblage, in this sense, is an ontological construct, as Laurie Gries (2019) notes, where writing is understood as a merging of specific elements that territorialize and reterritorialize with other assemblages (repositories, databases, collections, archives, etc.) whose rhetoric is less concerned with “persuading an audience of a given argument than it is about creating socio-material assemblages that entice bodies, if only temporarily, into collective action” (337). Rhetors therefore approach social change not through individual acts but through orchestrations of collectivity as various tools are pursued or other circuits and actants are made available.

Zines are an especially rich kind of artifact for understanding the capacity of writing for collective action since those who make them cannot be essentialized to particular identities, goals, or even tools; rather zines, as Nina writes in Scissors & Chainsaws #2, are a product of DIY culture which has historically made do with the various means of production and circulation by reappropriating glossy images from pop culture, stealing copies at the local Kinkos or Office Max, shopdropping subversive publications on store shelves or local buses, and selling them on consignment at local radical bookstores. In this way, Miloš Hroch and Nico Carpentier (2021) consider zines post-digital assemblages, made up of networks of bodies, spaces, paper (and more), machines, and scarce capital. Through their analysis of four contemporary zines in Prague, they assert that the intermateriality and transmateriality of zines are their primary affordance; that is, while discourses of amateurism, fandom, radical politics, and alterity are still highly relevant in zine culture, post-digital contexts draw our attention to the associations between disparate elements as well as their transgressions. For instance, the sensorial and haptic quality of Scissors & Chainsaws #2 — including the weight, texture, and smell of its paper, ink, and string binding — provides a separate space from the more commercialized or hostile platforms of the internet; however, Nina’s chronicles are not only full of digital entanglements, but it is those very entanglements that got her zine into my hands. If not for Twitter, email, WordPress, or PayPal, my knowledge and procurement of Scissors & Chainsaws #2 would not have been possible.

Following Hroch and Carpentier, I attend to the assemblage of quaranzines like Nina’s by focusing on their various circuits of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption that led to their existence. These circuits work together to assemble what John Trimbur has called a delivery system. Delivery systems compliment assemblage theory as it accounts for both the ethical and political dimensions of public discourse — what Trimbur calls its “cultural value and worldly force” (194) —without losing sight on its materiality. The discursive and material elements of delivery systems, in other words, play a constitutive role in the territorialization of assemblages; taking a closer look at them can help present more nuanced and complicated scenes of public rhetoric. 

The examples I share below highlight different affordances of these circuits, challenging more conventional definitions of zines as uniformly radical, print-based, noncommercial publications of self-representation. Indeed, the quaranzines I highlight offer different pathways toward collectivity, at times under a politics of mutual aid that is also entrepreneurial. As I argue in the conclusion, this collectivity will ultimately produce a transmediated archive of how community artists, writers, and publishers made sense of a global pandemic. As a new materialist method, I trace both the objects I’ve obtained and the discourses surrounding them, including personal communication I’ve had with some of the zine-makers throughout the pandemic. 

My goal in sharing these examples is not to dismantle the subversive political potential of zines; it’s quite the opposite. That is, by tracing the circuitry of zines I aim to spotlight their capacity as an everyday medium — one that is flexible and able to respond to the exigencies of something as difficult as a pandemic. In sharing these accounts, I hope community writing scholars will continue to explore the capaciousness of zines and zine culture and look to its makers for creative and experimental ways of partnering with other community writers.

Quaranzine Circuitry

Circuits of Production: Therapeutic, Vernacular Expressions of Pandemic Life

Above all, quaranzine assemblages produce discursive and material expressions of how everyday creative citizens experienced the pandemic. These took shape through a variety of genres and media typical of zines: comics and drawings, essays, poems, collages, photos, and more. Engaging these circuits of production were at once therapeutic for zine makers while offering up articulations of the vernacular. By therapeutic and vernacular, I refer to how the process of engaging with creative materials — pen and ink, string, scissors, glue, iPad apps, letterpress machines — led to a documented catharsis of everyday coping mechanisms, circulating a range of productive affects via the wider zine assemblage. 

In Issue 144 of Ker-Bloom, subtitled “Pandemic Snapshot,” Artnoose (2020) describes the initial lockdown while living in a communal space in Berkeley, California from May to June 2020. Like other issues of this prolific zine, Issue 144 is meticulously letterpressed in rich hues of blue, green, and brown inks as Artnoose documents her anxiety and sadness as “the pandemic arrived like a set of firewalls”: the closing of her son’s school, desperate trips to the local library and grocery store, and the difficult decision of admitting a former housemate who may have been exposed to the virus. Taking stock of these early days, Artnoose shares her unique perspective as a printmaker, mother, and communalist, struggling to understand how others have felt bored and isolated. 

Likewise, within the pages of Scissors and Chainsaws #2 we witness stark inked representations of Nina adjusting to a summer of COVID in Europe through a series of comics: playing punk rock, eating lavender-lemon poppyseed cake, reading about underrated indie bands from the 1980s, imagining and illustrating her dream communal home, tending herb gardens, livestreaming a concert, photographing graffiti about queer power — sometimes alone and sometimes with a pod of loved ones. Collectively, Nina’s chronicles are overwhelmingly positive and show what else gets made in a prolific, DIY network. 

Not all quaranzines are so grave or personal. Skeletor’s Guide to Self-Quarantine offers a parodic take on life under social distancing. Its colorful cover features the recognizable antagonist from the popular 1980s media franchise Masters of the Universe, Skeletor, wearing a childish Easter-themed mask. The inside is desktop published, featuring sparse black and white images and a list of several common coping mechanisms — “find a way to be helpful,” “stay engaged in your community,” “keep (or make) a routine,” “learn something new” — filtered through Skeletor’s cartoonishly evil mind. Like so many snarky zines that came before it, this Guide appropriates a familiar icon from pop culture and incorporates it into its own circuits of production.

These circuits of production come together to produce what Hroch and Carpentier (2021) describe as the sensory or haptic capacities of zines. I have ordered and received each of these zines myself and incorporated them into my own zine library of hundreds of others — I carry them with me (creased edges and all), leave them on my nightstand, smell their different inks as I turn their pages, and pass them along to my friends, family, and students. 

However, quaranzines also move via digital circuits of production highlighting what Hroch and Carpentier call inter- and transmateriality. Aside from the thousands of posts tagged “#quaranzine,” one Instagram account, @the_quaranzine, became a zine of zines: “a collaborative, virtual zine documenting life and thoughts during COVID-19,” ultimately sharing posts from a variety of interested users who DM’d submissions in advance. Often these submissions were haptic and sensory but digitized through iPhone snaps with pages uploaded through the carousel feature on Instagram.

Andrew Peck and Katie Day Good call this kind of print-to-digital remediation a vernacular rhetorical strategy, a process that is “potentially empowering for contemporary social movements because it draws on both memetic practices and material-textual traditions, which, in turn, help users cultivate a sense of vernacular authority” (627) — an authority that has become increasingly valuable at a time when public voice necessitates corporate and professional circuits of production, such as Instagram. While free flip page web-apps like Issuu and Flipsnack seem to make zine-making more accessible (and plenty of those also circulated during the pandemic), they lose this vernacular quality as users create digital-born publications. 

Circuits of Distribution: Convening Socially Distant Bodies

As @the_quaranzine makes clear, some quaranzines draw from circuits of distribution as they assemble larger bodies of writers. Circuits of distribution describe the material and affective channels that allow assemblages to emerge and spread; they most clearly account for the capacity of a discourse to materialize and become social action. The assemblage of the FWWCP, as Harding et al point out, came together through vehicles, spaces, bodies, and more, weaving together a working-class identity through the production of publications and their distribution at public events and assemblies. Likewise, Hroch and Carpentier focus on networks of bodies since zine-making so often involves collaborative, intellectual, and physical labor. Also like Harding, et al (2018), Hroch and Carpentier (2021) note how these networks are affect-driven, “with affects themselves being discursive-material assemblages — where friendship plays a vital role, and is also materially performed” (10). 

This was certainly the case with Marc Fischer (2020) with his project Public Collectors, who published 100 issues of Quaranzine, a two- sided one-page zine, in 100 days. Starting on March 15, just as the CDC advised against gatherings of 50 people or more people, Fischer printed the first issue of Quaranzine using a Risograph duplicator in his Chicago basement. He plastered these around his neighborhood, taping them to dumpsters and poles, dropping them in little free library boxes, and sticking rolled copies into the openings of park fences. He also archived each issue on his Tumblr blog. An experienced and well-connected artist, Fischer was able to publish at this pace primarily because he solicited contributions from longtime friends and new acquaintances as well as current and former college students that he and his friends knew. His Tumblr not only served as an archive, but a place to network with others. On this inaugural post, he also issued this call:

I would like to print work by other people. The work should be something new that you made during the pandemic. Get in touch if you are interested. I know I won’t be able to print everything but I do want collaborators. I’m thinking this will be one person/group/idea per issue and I hope to continue as a single sheet zine in order to keep it moving and make many issues. (Quaranzine #1)

Like most of us at the end of March 2020, Fischer had no way of knowing how long the pandemic would last and expressed ambitions to publish Quaranzine throughout its duration, seeing the project “as a concrete physical record of what some people thought, how we managed, and hopefully, how we survived” (“Quaranzine: A printed space…,” para 14). In a separate email to me a few months later, after Quaranzine was finished, Fischer was transparent about his goals: “I tried to print things that I felt were not like normal reporting on the virus, or the usual perspectives. With most contributors this wasn’t an issue but a couple people sent graphics that I thought looked a little too much like newspaper graphics.” 

The cover of Issue #65 of Quaranzine from May 20,2020. Printed on letter-sized paper, it includes the zine’s title at the top, with the smaller subtitle “A printed space for creative work produced during the COVID-19 pandemic” just below it. Below that is a featured, large drawing of a rustic tombstone, surrounded by withered grass. The tombstone reads: “When they ask how I died tell them still angry.”
The cover of Issue #65 of Quaranzine from May 20, 2020. Drawing by Murat Cem Mengüç.

Quaranzine’s network of bodies — made up of a number of talented writers, artists, friends, students, and children — convened quickly. These guests also shared a wide variety of work: essays on isolating alone with depression and keeping schools closed, coloring pages of people with face masks, instructions on what to do when you get COVID-19, and collages against racial injustice. While Fischer continued to distribute Quaranzine around his neighborhood, scanning and archiving of issues on Tumblr allowed Quaranzine to spread as publications like The Chicago Sun-Times, Brooklyn Rail and, Chicago Reader spread news of his project across the web. Fischer eventually sold 12 packs of Quaranzine via the online store he co-runs at Half Letter Press, his publishing imprint, which is how I obtained my own copies. 

Fischer’s social media extended beyond Tumblr. He noted to me that email and Facebook posts played an especially important role in connecting with collaborators: 

… collaboration is normal for me, as is working with people of all age levels, degrees of education and professionalism etc. And collaborating across distance over email is also typical for me. The project felt like a very fast, highly condensed version of what I’ve done for about 20 years. The mix of very formal, and quite informal is typical for me.

Fischer’s 20 years of experience isn’t representative of a typical zine maker; however, Quaranzine was able to launch quickly because of other circuits of distribution that were in place long before the pandemic, including zine fairs and festivals. Similar to the ways the FWWCP’s Annual General Meetings or Festivals of Writing provided opportunities for members to re-articulate their working-class identities, zine fests are temporary intense assemblages where the circuits of distribution are typically embodied in one space, leading to a flurry of connections and reconnections as tablers exhibit their work and sell or exchange them with attendees and other zinesters. As one organizer put it: “If zinesters are the lifeblood of zine culture, then zine fairs are the heart, offering a place to gather, be inspired, and connect” (Rawhani 2021, 29).

Of course, the pandemic cancelled most zine fests in 2020 — some of them on short notice. The Chicago Zine Fest, for instance, quickly moved their event to YouTube, uploading videos of screen-recorded zine readings, a short list of tongue-in-cheek prompts, a behind-the-scenes tour of Quimby’s Bookstore with longtime zinester Liz Mason, and more. [2] Perhaps reflecting a year of burn out, the CZF did not go digital in 2021 but is instead planning to focus on hosting an in-person event in 2022.

Other zine fests had more time — and circuitry — to prepare. Canzine, for instance, is a constellation of Canadian zine festivals spread across three cities and sponsored by Broken Pencil magazine, which started the event in 1995. Each year Canzine typically assembles hundreds zinesters and thousands more attendees. In an article in Issue 90, Broken Pencil’s assistant editor Anisa Rawhani discusses the difficulties of moving Canzine to a virtual event in the span of five months: 

The biggest challenge was creating the browsing environment, the heart of a zine fest. We needed something that was not only interactive and engaging, but seamlessly integrated. We sought to build a marketplace where shoppers could browse at their own pace, add all their items from hundreds of vendors into one basket, and pay just one shipping fee. No other indie fair was doing it, so how were we going to pull this off by October? (30) 

Similar to in-person zine fests, the circuits of distribution, exchange, and consumption overlapped in a noncompetitive assemblage. To move this online, organizers worked with Hand Eye Society, a local nonprofit videogame arts organization who installed a specific interface on Canzine’s website. The virtual event yielded less participation than in-person festivals (260+ virtual vendors versus 600); however, shifting the circuits of distribution led to the emergence of new affordances and digital practices: video tutorials on different facets of zine-making; virtual hangouts at night; tours of zine libraries from South Africa, Italy, and New York City; zine horoscopes; and a “random zine” button. 

The pandemic also inspired entirely new zine fest assemblages. Around the same time Fischer launched Quaranzine, ally Peter Miles Bergman, owner of is Press, was beginning to organize Quaranzine Fest 2020. Over the years is Press had participated in plenty of in-person zine fests in places like Chicago, Miami, Vancouver, Detroit, and their hometown of Denver. Here Bergman describes how the fest came together:

On March 14th, as the concept of a quarantine to flatten the curve was gaining steam, I woke up with it in my head. (That same day Marc Fischer of Temporary Services and Half Letter Press stated publishing his Quaranzines and Rich Dana started the Social Distance Quaran-zine! Collective zine-making in the age of Covid-19 facebook group.) It was in the air. (ahem… cough…) Over a morning cup of Chai the idea morphed into Quaranzine Fest. #quaranzinefest had zero posts on instagram and quaranzinefest.com was available! I conferred with Eric Von Haynes at Flatlands Press – our sister press in Chicago – who advised me to jump on it. (“QUARANZINE FEST 2020 – WRAP UP + CLASSES & TALKS! – is PRESS”)

In each of these examples, networks of bodies assemble through circuits of distribution. While social media is an essential part of this, these also include micro-capitalist tools like PayPal, Venmo, Big Cartel, Etsy, and more. As Bergman himself pointed out, the rise of zine festivals can be largely attributed to the spread of these Web 2.0 applications. However, noncompetitive allyship also organizes and produces zine assemblages through contradictory circuits of exchange and consumption, which provide necessary and important infrastructures that paradoxically reinforce the nonprofit motive of zine culture while reinforcing the neoliberal structures of communicative capitalism.

Circuits of Exchange and Consumption: Mutual Aid and Activist Entrepreneurship in Precarious Times

While it is true that many artists and writers chose to make zines as a labor of love, this hardly resolves the problem of raising capital or making time to work on them. Circuits of exchange and consumption are helpful for calling attention to the ways discourses, practices, and objects mediate zines for publics as they ask us to consider what materials, capital, or labors are transferred through their circulation. The initial stages of the pandemic gave many zinesters more time to create, but it also took away their ability to work or assemble resources to make their zines. This produced two responses: one rooted in mutual aid and another in activist entrepreneurship. 

Mutual aid is an anachro-communist belief that requires participants to take responsibility for one another’s wellbeing, especially as living conditions shift for marginalized populations under the instability of late capitalism. Several mutual aid networks sprang up in response to COVID, distributing basic needs to the disenfranchised — those who were out of work, in need of transportation, or short on food or diapers. In this way, mutual aid is a material practice, created by building new or innovative social arrangements and relations (Spade 2020, 136), including networks of information and circuits of exchange. This is the case with quaranzines like Asian American Feminist Antibodies, a downloadable zine that was given away on their website. As the authors write in their intro: 

This moment of precarity and disaster reminds us that we cannot rely on the state for our wellbeing. The legacies of imperialism, capitalism, and patriarchy undergird forms of violence that unevenly expose many in our communities to further risk, rendering people disposable. (3) 

Thus throughout the 46 pages of Asian American Feminist Antibodies, authors gift a variety of writing: histories of xenophobia in public health, interviews with prominent activists, resources for linguistic justice, and essays on prison abolition, domestic violence, sex workers, and others affected by the pandemic. Other quaranzines similarly uploaded zines to Google Drive or WordPress to help distribute under protocols of social distancing. [3]For a helpful roundup of other mutual aid zines see Cheung.

Mutual aid zines existed well before the pandemic, often through gift economies. Red Chidgey (2009) outlines several of the ways feminist zines have drawn from circuits of exchange to circulate their work through these economies, especially drawing from tactics of sabotage to leverage the resources necessary for assembling zines, from scamming copies at work to repurposing used postage stamps. However, part of the problem with gift economies — and the circuits of exchange that support them — is that they perpetuate practices of uncompensated labor. Instead of submitting to systems of voluntary labor, Chidgey suggests that zine communities 

may benefit from taking lessons from the women’s liberation movement and from other feminist networks that have been successful at creating the infrastructure necessary to pay their workers. In turning activist work into compensated work, instead of holding on to a romanticized ideal of anticapitalist work as merely being unpaid, nonalienated labor, zine cultures may yet break into their maturity and create publishing cultures that can sustain themselves rather than burn out. (35-36)

One way of sustaining an activist agenda in a capitalist system is exploiting the circuits of consumption that raise capital ethically and in the pursuit of social and political change. Joshua Clark Davis’s (2017) historical study of activist entrepreneurs of the New Left — including bookstores from the women’s liberation movement that Chidgey refers to — is helpful for considering what was once possible via a more participatory economics: “the idea that citizens could regain power over their lives by making their daily experiences in capitalist society more humane, authentic, and even political progressive or radical” (3) through products, spaces, and business practices that reject capitalist norms, especially as an endless pursuit of profit.   

Zines, distributors, and festival organizers often deploy such strategies when they draw from crowdfunding models. On April 5, as stay at home orders were expanding, Broken Pencil started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for a “COVID Micro Zine Grant.” The magazine contributed $1,600 of its own money and asked “zine lovers and unusually wealthy eccentrics” to match it to support eight zines. By the next issue, the magazine highlighted the work of these recipients in their feature story, titled “Zines in Plague Time.” Ultimately their efforts raised more than $4,000 and led to more subscribers. Others, like the aforementioned Quaranzine Fest, also used Kickstarter to raise money for their event; perhaps controversially, the company even sponsored a day’s worth of Zoom workshops, raising questions about how much control sponsors should have over zine communities. [4] Indeed, Nina expressed her hesitation in embracing such models where “there is a difficult balance between staying radical/achieving change and getting funding/customers/money in the current … Continue reading

Other quaranzines – such as The Pandemic Post — did not use Kickstarter or GoFundMe but still drew from entrepreneurial strategies. Created by Brooklynites Lucy Andersen, Kate Andersen, and Dashiell Robb (self-described on Instagram as “a work-from-home graphic artist, recently-laid-off writer, and freelance designer”), The Pandemic Post took preorders for its first issue through its online store hosted by Squarespace. Despite costing $8, these pre-orders sold out quickly thanks to a savvy marketing campaign that included posts on Instagram. These first three issues, printed on colored broadsides, collected pandemic-related stories, recipes, poems, and art, and reflected the same kind of urgency as Quaranzine. Through a mix of journalistic flair and expansive design, The Pandemic Post touted a more professional ethos that, in turn, attracted a wider audience. 

The cover of Issue #4 of The Pandemic Post from September 2020. Printed on quarter-sized paper, it includes the zine’s title and issue information in the top left corner and the cost of $10 in the top right corner with the text “A Quaranzine for Good Causes.” The cover features a surrealist painting of a barefoot, topless Black man wearing green pants. He has an orange and purple floral arrangement covering his nose, eyes, and head; part of his resting arms are distorted to look like squiggles.
The cover of Issue #4 of The Pandemic Post from September 2020.

This ethos became only more professional with Issues 4 and 5, which cost $16 and $20 respectively. While such fees are prohibitive in most zine communities, this reflects two political decisions by the editors: first, these issues were no longer printed on broadsides but instead published as more traditional bound zines by Radix, a worker-owned shop in Brooklyn; secondly, they expanded their mission as “a relief quaranzine.” Issue 1 raised over $1,000 for two nonprofits that supported the service industry. For Issue 4, which published only Black voices, 100% of profits were donated to The Audre Lorde Project and all contributors were paid a $40 honorarium for their work. 

While there are elements of commercial and professional publishing embedded in the circuitry of The Pandemic Post, this is intentional. Rather than express its politics through an underground and gritty cut-and-paste aesthetic, Lucy Andersen (2021) noted in an email to me how the glossier look assembled a more privileged audience and produced different affects in authors: 

Our slightly more polished look probably helped us increase our reach, because folks (especially younger people who had never been published anywhere) were so stoked to see their work in print in something that felt a bit more professional/editorial. So even though we’re a very small team doing tiny, self-funded runs, our aesthetic seemed to help our contributors feel more legitimized and excited to be featured. It’s been so nice to get to connect with new people and create our own little community of artists and writers during such an isolated year, which I’m sure is something that all quaranzines have in common.

Andersen speaks to the entrepreneurial (and arguably “impure”) circuits of consumption some contemporary zines use to fund their creative endeavors, doing so in order to support other artists, writers, and nonprofit organizations. In this way, circuits of consumption approximate the goals of mutual aid, but through entrepreneurship. Such circuits are politically controversial in zine communities, especially if they lead to the amplification and material support of disenfranchised voices, but also make them less accessible for certain readers.

The Delivery Systems of Zine Assemblages

Conceiving of zines as ephemeral assemblages of community writing and examining their publicness as a territorialization of particular circuits of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption underscores both their dexterity as a medium and their efficacy as an enduring rhetorical artifact worthy of continued inquiry. The post-digital strategies that have been cultivated by these communities over the last twenty-five years have enabled contemporary artists and writers to quickly assemble imperfect vernacular texts that make use of varying circuits as they respond to the ongoing pandemic crisis. This is a marked contrast from how zine cultures have typically been imagined in the past as counterpublics or quirky forms of alternative media. Certainly while some zines perform a radical and underground ethos more than others — especially the anarchist and riot grrrl zines that have been the overwhelming focus of previous research — quaranzines highlight the evolving, diverse, and contradictory approaches of participatory media generally and the capaciousness and vitality of zines as an iteration of community publishing specifically. Quaranzines show what experienced (and admittedly privileged) community writers can do when they draw from DIY practices, especially those that require compliance with intermediaries and circuits that aren’t sponsored by our institutions. 

At the same time, my analysis of delivery systems suggests how zine assemblages struggle to challenge the profit imperative of media. That is to say: quaranzines also perpetuate communicative capitalism. Jodi Dean has argued that the materialization and expansion of these global technologies reinforces a neoliberal ideology “wherein everyone is pre-sullied to be a producer as well as a consumer of content” and where messages “become mere contributions to the circulation of images, opinion, and information, to the billons of nuggets of information and affect trying to catch and hold attention, to push or sway opinion, taste, and trends in one direction rather than another” (24). In the absence of political antagonism, Dean beckons us to consider three fantasies about democracy that are underwritten by communicative capitalism: fantasies of abundance, participation, and wholeness. Together these fantasies — produced by endless messaging, technological fetishism, and internet-based communities — distort our faith in social change as collective, embodied action.    

Future scholars, I hope, will draw from and extend assemblage theories to acknowledge the extent to which particular material and affective dimensions of zines and other forms of citizen media participate in these fantasies and which circuits provide the best chances at collective movement and action. Which circuits provide the best opportunities for making ethical meaningful contributions? What methods of analysis help authors and makers evaluate the varied interests pushing upon them in a given communicative network? What scenes of community writing can be built to both adjust to changing exigencies but also to be persistent? While quaranzines are ephemeral and limited in their ability to enact measurable social change, they nevertheless remind us of what’s possible with public writing, and their stories and work demonstrate tenacity and resilience in the face of crises. 

As teachers, we can also use artifacts such as quaranzines to challenge essentialized notions of community media and publishing processes, helping students to attend to the ways various modes and circuits — photocopiers, little libraries, social networks, smartphones, blogging software — authorize and benefit from their participation with them. Delivery systems provide a vocabulary by which students can make ethical decisions about which intermediaries and circuits and worth their complicity and toward which ends. 

Conclusion: Quaranzines as Transmediated Archives of Social Distancing 

As word circulated about quaranzines – through libraries, newspapers, and public radio – they became a larger and larger assemblage. In late May, after Broken Pencil awarded its microgrants and Asian American Feminist Antibodies continued to circulate online, NPR produced a story on quaranzines wherein Barnard librarian Jenna Freedman shared her feelings on why these community publications will be essential to our understanding of the pandemic: 

In the future this story will be told by journalists, by historians, by people with influence. But that doesn’t tell the full story… By inviting a range of people that don’t have those kinds of platforms to contribute, we’re making a better historical record. (McCabe)

Barnard meanwhile circulated a call for COVID-19 zines, especially from authors who identified as womxn & nonbinary, offering to buy them via PayPal. In an interview with Library Journal, Freedman was more specific about Barnard’s efforts: 

I started off with broad asks on social media and our website, but that passive approach doesn’t find everyone or make people feel invited… Therefore, I asked my student workers … to follow hashtags #quaranzines and #quaranzinefest on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter. They also reached out via Facebook quaranzine groups and pages. They had the most success on Instagram…. It’s the most popular platform for today’s zine makers. (para 9)

The rapid assemblage of these zines (and the deterritorialization of projects like Fischer’s Quaranzine and @the_quarazine) show that whether born digitally or in-print, the afterlife of zines is just as important as their exigences, as they document an ethical perspective that more institutional public rhetorics tend to erase or obscure, yet whose infrastructure is often required. Through a variety of circuitry – both grassroots and institutional — quaranzines have become an important part of the public record, documenting how a certain kind of community publisher experienced the challenges and confines of the pandemic. These also serve as an important reminder that zine culture is not singular — nor has it ever been – and that a rich potential of less fixed forms of community writing and community publishing exist, serving as important archives of memory and affect during a time like no other.

References

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Jason Luther
Rowan University | + posts

Jason Luther is an Assistant Professor of Writing Arts at Rowan University where he teaches courses on self-publishing, digital and multimodal composition, rhetorical theory, and sound writing. His research interests focus on multimodal (counter)publics and DIY participatory media. His work has most recently appeared in Community Literacy Journal, SoundEffects, and the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative.

Notes

Notes
1 As Fischer acknowledged in an essay for The Quarantine Times, many zines took on this portmanteau. “The name Quaranzine came to mind, which is an idea that many other publishing minds surely had simultaneously. I’m against competition. We can all call our thing a Quaranzine. Sometimes the best title is the best title. I just knew I wanted to make something and hopefully collaborate with others too. Everyone was about to go real stir crazy real fast, but not everyone has the means to print something at home” (Para 6). Likewise, Fischer’s friend Peter Miles Bergman, who started Quaranzine Fest around the same time noted “Quaranzine is one of those portmanteaus that comes so naturally no one person can lay claim to it.”
2 Perhaps reflecting a year of burn out, the CZF did not go digital in 2021 but is instead planning to focus on hosting an in-person event in 2022.
3 For a helpful roundup of other mutual aid zines see Cheung.
4  Indeed, Nina expressed her hesitation in embracing such models where “there is a difficult balance between staying radical/achieving change and getting funding/customers/money in the current capitalist state” (personal communication, August 24, 2021).