A backlash is brewing against digital life. Everywhere you look online, ironically, it seems people are talking about “digital detoxing” and “going analogue”.
Tired of doomscrolling and AI slop, Gen-Z are turning back towards physical media, including books, magazines and the humble zine.
Originally known as fanzines, zines have their origins in early sci-fi fan publications made in the 1930s. They exploded during the punk movement of the 1970s, with handmade, stapled and photocopied zines chronicling the scene distributed at gigs or dropped into local cafes and community centres.
Intended as a way to share ideas in a creative way outside of the mainstream media, in a cheap and accessible format, they are different from magazines in that they are typically self-published, have a small circulation, and are not profit driven.
When my friend YeeWen Wong and I had the idea to open up submissions for our own DIY, self-published print publication last year, we couldn’t have anticipated the level of interest.
What started out as a once-off creative project geared towards the lesbian community in Ireland and France (where we are both based) has now turned into two 48-page publications called Dyke Affair, stocked in 15 bookshops across Europe and North America, with a third in the works.
We’ve had hundreds of submissions ranging from essays and poems to photography and illustration.
Though the format ended up somewhat closer to a magazine than a zine, it was rooted in the DIY culture of zines. Zines have historically provided a space for marginalised voices, often left out of traditional publishing.
The inspiration for our own publication came from a deep dive into those zine archives, and, a desire to provide a new platform for lesbian creatives. We had hoped to break even with our publication, but instead, we’ve been able to donate several hundred euro to various LGBT collectives, organisations and individual GoFundMe pages.
The Dyke Affair zine, created by Jade Wilson and YeeWen Wong.
Zines are about community and connection over profit, and the rise in their popularity right now is testament to the demand for exactly that. Community and connection.
Though our contributors are based all around the world, we recently hosted a night of music and a collage-style zine workshop for Dublin’s lesbian community led by Hana Flamm, a public historian, zinester and artist. Tickets sold out in just a few hours.
On a wet Wednesday evening in late January, we gathered downstairs in The Black Sheep on Capel Street, huddled around piles of old magazines and flyers, holding glue sticks, cutting out letters and photos, and passing the scissors on to the person next to us, while YeeWen played some chill tunes.
Flamm became interested in zines after taking a class in university on LGBTQ+ social movements, and writing her paper on the Riot Grrrl movement, a feminist punk movement in the 1990s in the US. Her college’s library held the largest Riot Grrrl collection, “so physically thumbing through tons of zines created within that movement was really meaningful to me at the time”, she says.
“It was so comforting to know that 22-year-old girls in the mid-1990s felt the same confusion, joy, isolation, and growing pains that I felt as a 22-year-old girl nearly 30 years later.”
Flamm began making “anonymous zines to dump my deepest darkest secrets into”. She left copies in bar bathrooms, or on the windowsills of coffee shops. “It was just nice to have somewhere to unload my worries, and then physically leave them behind,” she says.
Hana Flamm (centre left) at a zine fair. Photograph: Rob Fay
She later started a zine series called “goldfish”, which continued that public diary idea, but this time with her first name attached.
“Because I’m primarily a collage and mixed media artist who refuses to learn any more than the absolute rudimentary skills of digital creating, physical zine-making has [opened] a huge world of possibility for communicating ideas and art,” she says.
Though most zine makers like Flamm hand-make and photocopy their zines, with the rise of the internet, digital tools are also popular now. Electric Zine Maker, a free, 1990s CD-Rom style software, for example, helps zine makers create printable, foldable zine booklets with digital templates and simple tools like text boxes, image pasting and paint brushes.
Others use templates on apps like Canva to design their zines, and then take the pdf to a local printer to bring the digital design to life in a small print run.
The Library Project, an art bookshop in Dublin’s Temple Bar, boasts a massive collection of zines for sale, ranging from traditional handmade and photocopied zines to digitally designed and printed publications.
A zine by Hana Flamm
Some of their best sellers include a zine called The Land For The People by Eimear Walshe, which highlights the relevance of 19th century land conflict in the present day; a zine telling the story of the Norfolk Trans Joy Community Quilt; and Now Is The Time by Irish Times columnist Una Mullally and photographer Dorje de Burgh, “an object of solidarity and a donation mechanism” for Gaza Mutual Aid collective.
Flamm loves that so many people now want to attend zinemaking events like hers, where “people come for the purpose of physically creating something and meeting new people”.
But she’s also “a little frustrated with giant media conglomerates like Condé Nast” jumping on the trend, publishing a magazine and calling it a zine. “I hate to be such a zine snob, because that also goes against zine ethos, so maybe we just need to expand the meaning of the concept of a zine. But, these words rooted in counterculture do have their meanings and histories, which should be honoured,” she says.
Flamm started running workshops while living in New York, and since moving to Ireland, she has hosted workshops at Limerick Zine Fest, in Dublin City University Library, and in local bars.
“It’s been such a treat to meet so many new people around Dublin and beyond. Collage nights are a really versatile and valuable way to make friends and nourish community; they provide space to use a different side of your brain and make creative connections with others.”
She has developed “lasting friendships” with people she’s met through zine communities and feels that “any sustained, creative, in-person meetings can nurture these kinds of bonds”.
A zine workshop with Hana Flamm. Photograph: Áine Brennan
At a time when young people aged 16 to 24 in Ireland are reporting feeling “lonely most or all of the time”, according to an OECD report published last year, it’s no wonder these kinds of events are taking off in popularity. For years, social media has been touted as a way to connect, but these days, there is a growing appetite among Gen-Z for moving away from the screen, and for returning to tactile, physical media as a way to create, connect, and share.
Google Trends data shows online searches about zines in Ireland and the UK have increased significantly over the past year alone. A Reddit group for zines, which now has almost 50,000 members and 15,000 weekly visitors, offers guides on where to sell zines, and features plenty of posts by individual users sharing their own zines.
Themes include: “a zine about my time working as an assistant in the professional drag industry”, “a zine about thawing from seasonal depression”, a zine about Bjork, and a zine about eggs.
Rita Hynes, who runs the Drogheda Zine Fair, says that while zine culture has always existed, it has “definitely gotten bigger” in Ireland in the past few years.
Her own entry point to zine culture occurred while she worked as a bookseller in Scotland. She came across zines at a feminist anarchist fair, and then noticed that a lot of independent bookshops in Glasgow and Edinburgh had sections for zines, or had organised zine fairs.
After moving back to Ireland, she decided to set up a zine fair in Drogheda, where she’s from. There is a big DIY scene in Drogheda, she notes, but “a lot of it is to do with music”, while the intention of the zine fair is to give other creatives “a chance to be centre stage in a way that a band gets to when they play”.
When she started three years ago, there were just a few local people making zines who took part. The second year, it doubled in attendance, and this year, Hynes “had to say no to a lot of people who applied to the open call”, which she says was “actually disheartening and not the ethos”.
Rita Hynes speaking at the Droichead Arts Centre. Photograph: Rob Fay
“The footfall was just crazy this year. We had 56 zine makers from all over the country and some from around the world, and we’re now a three venue event,” she explains. Druid Arts Centre gives the fair a space, as well as a small artist led venue, Kiosk, which lets the fair do pop-up exhibitions, while The Watchtower hosts their after party.
The “real achievement” has been all the “local people taking part or coming by and thinking, ‘I could do that’, which is the whole point. It’s non-hierarchical, the baseline is this DIY ethos, and you’re allowed to make mistakes. It doesn’t have to be super polished,” she says.
Hynes feels the resurgence of interest in zines is owed in part to “the ‘going analogue’ thing, but the other aspect is that people are genuinely disenfranchised, or being pushed into places creatively where they can’t put their work anywhere else”.
The zinemakers applying for Drogheda Zine Fair have aged from teens to people in their 70s.
“DIY culture in general is also just growing bigger in Ireland … You can see zines suddenly well represented in Dublin and other parts of the country, where you wouldn’t have found them before, unless you were really looking.”
Now there are zine fairs all around Ireland, including Cork, Limerick and Belfast.
“The really rewarding part of the fairs is being able to socialise and share your art with someone else,” Hynes says. “We’re not all retreating entirely from the online world, but we’re craving to socialise our art in the real world.”