I found both articles on "The History and Characteristics of Zines" useful to my understanding of the growth of the fanzine and its position in the lit world amongst the magazines, or should I say in comparison to the function of magazines. Through visiting Quimby's and learning more about zines I've surmized that their popularity, like all unregulated plops in the pool of message output, exists because anybody who likes them, never heard of one before today or can't stand the last one they've read can produce one with Microsoft, a printer and a stapler. Nowhere in either of these articles does Fred Wright mention that majority of these intense overtures to the sanctity of fantasy and sci-fi are offering earth shattering literary art.
Quite a few of these zines are produced for freedom of speech sake not to uplift mankind or participate in any cultural statement much like that of the Patterson novels we read about last class.
If someone's paperback novel has a picture of a bare-chested man on a horse and is sold in Walmart does that automatically make it crap? If someone produces a fanzine filled with poems and flashfiction about clown wigs that is "uncorrupted by money or the demands of advertising" will it, without question, be ushered into it's place in history as a part of the ancestors of Zines, insofar as the Beat Poetry Chapbooks or Revolutionary War Broadsides? Are the same numbers of people really working that hard in today's Zine scene, fighting that hard, thinking that hard about what they send out into the world or are they just sending words out? I think that no matter the format or the packaging all of these forms exist to fill a niche. Someone wants it, so someone is producing it. As writers we're all hoping we fill a niche someday, right?
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