zines zines zines
Zines have been making a big comeback in the last couple years coinciding with the resurgence of roots hardcore aka “regular hardcore.” I’m sure the Shining Life zine compilation inspired even more folks to do zines as well. Download that zine here.
I think there’s an irony in documentation within punk and hardcore. We do fanzines to document things so they don’t get lost to time, but they’re done in low runs, go out of print quickly, and then THEY are mostly lost to time. The same could be said for blogs. There were so many crucial blogs in the Blogspot era that got nuked - a serious tragedy.
This is a long way of saying that I wanted everyone to know that the zines I’ve done over the last couple years are available to view online, and I have a couple more in the works. I’m almost done with a new one on 1986 and I’ll hopefully be doing a reprint/update of the Nardcore one later this year as a full sized zine. All of these zines are sold out but you can view them all digitally on archive.org so peep the links below.
This came out in October 2023 to coincide with a presentation John Crerar and I did on Nardcore for the 150th anniversary of Ventura County. You can watch that here. I did so much work leading up to the event so I figured that I should put it all into zine form.
This came out in December 2024. It was basically a guide I was working on for myself for a while and then I just figured I should share it by putting it into zine format. I’m pretty fascinated with the spaces where old punk shows took place and what they turned into.
“See the Whole Foods over there? Dead Kennedys played that building in 1982 and 3 dudes got stabbed.”
You know what I’m saying. So with this zine I mapped out some old locations that hosted some legendary San Diego shows in the 1980s. I’m working on one for the 805 right now and hope to do more cities in the future.
I went to a zine fair in San Diego and someone had a bunch of these quarter-sized zines for sale. I thought they looked super sick but I didn’t care about the subject matter of any of them so I passed then immediately regretted it when I got home. So I wanted to make one with a subject matter that I was interested in and that ended up being WILD WKND #2. These zines are so small and inconsequential, I honestly felt weird selling them so I just listed them for $1. They cost the same to make as half pagers so they are a complete novelty that I probably won’t do again unfortunately. RIP Bad News and the quarter-pager.
I worked on this fanzine for the entirety of 2024 to document a year of music in San Diego. By August I was regretting this project big time, and in December I was bummed anytime a show got announced cuz I had to keep fudging around the layout. But overall this project was super rewarding and something that I’ve wanted to do for the last 20 years but never got around to it. This came out at the end of January 2025.
Lastly, Bob Wilson and I put out this zine in December 2024 that documented a bunch of punk and hardcore scenes across the globe. I’m super proud of this one and we may do another in a couple years - who knows?
Be sure to check out the compilation here as well:
Or you can download it here.
Thanks for reading!
- ZN