BY: ANDREW COLTRIN

Speedway's Andrew C documents the evolution of - and passion behind - his zine Bony Landmarks, the human culture that inspires him, and the art collective Look for Signage.

I’ve tried four or five times to begin this article, an article about a thing I do that takes a lot of time and care, something that is such a part of who I am, a natural extension of my being, that I have trouble describing it. In a way it’s like explaining why I wear shoes or metabolize hydro-carbons. Why do I make a zine? What is a zine?

It’s a kind of insanity surrounded by little scraps of paper I’ve photocopied and cut out from old books. Pieces of letters and postcards from friends. Original drawings, some comics, a kick ass cover illustration I really should have had to pay money for. Stories from friends who I’ve asked to give me stories because I know that life is more than just playing video games and drinking beer. It is, you know. Am I crazy for saying that?

Am I crazy? I spend a lot of time and a lot of money, money I could have spent on beer, photocopying and pleading and mailing and sharing a 40-page photocopied publication that has a new issue about once a year. It’s a zine called Bony Landmarks and people tend to tell me they like it. Perhaps they’re being polite because they know I’m crazy.

But, seriously, you ask, what is a zine?

I’m not sure I can do the paper and staples artifact justice on a computer screen. I think I can only really give you a clue. A clue and a quote. The clue is that a zine is a very special kind of publication that relies much more on the creativity of those with big dreams and limited means than it does on advertising sales and circulation. You can’t find them at Barnes & Noble or Borders, but you just might find them amidst the jumbled reading materials in the corner of your favorite coffee shop. They pass between peers on high school and college campuses. They wind up on merch tables at punk shows and in anarchist infoshops and radical bookstores. And if you can find an independent record store, you just might find some in there. But most of the time they come in the mail because you’ve sent someone a couple dollars concealed in an envelope you made out of an abandoned art project. Or you’ve sent them your own zine to trade. You find out about them from other zines and other zinesters. You might even be lucky enough to go to a zine festival or gathering or symposium.           

Zines just aren’t about reading material, they’re about who you are and how you relate to others. Which brings me to my quote from Alex Wrekk’s zine Brainscan issue 19: “zines are a lifestyle, if you let it be. This is how I keep track of the people I care about and know they are ok.”

I got my own start doing zines back in the '90s. I had been playing around with making mini-comics and had learned a bit about making the self-serve copiers at Kinko’s do what I needed them to. Making comics was really time-consuming and my drawings were crude, but I really liked the finished product. If only I could make them faster. I ran into a friend on the bus who handed me a zine. It was half the size of my last comic, but it didn’t matter. The thing had energy in its collages and its typewritten pages of true to life, aimless teenagers wandering in a desert city. I realized that the free-reign and open possibilities of cutting up and photocopying together whatever the hell I wanted was a lot more exciting than just making comics. I could do it. I could make them different sizes, different shapes. I didn’t have to worry about what people might expect a comic book to be.

Around that same time I picked up a copy of the long since defunct Factsheet 5 from the used magazine racks at, you guessed it, Bookmans. Factsheet 5 was the zine community resource of its time. They reviewed absolutely everything and if you sent them $3 they’d send you a priority mailer stuffed with zines that they were done with. It was a crash course education on the possibilities.

Inspired, I ditched the mini-comic format and made something called the Twilight Zine. It was full of my semi-autobiographical fiction and comics as well as a couple light-hearted jabs at the alien abduction phenomenon that was going around at the time. I printed my friends’ rants and satirically skewered my enemies, both real and imagined. I tried to be funny and smart and meaningful. I was trying to change the world, tear down the system and all that. Plus, I figured it would help with meeting girls.

And it kind of worked. Having a copy of the Twilight Zine in my hand gave me something, besides my cultivated veneer of zero self-esteem, to represent the best and cleverest of myself at a first meeting. I might not be able to come up with immediately snappy conversation, but I could hand over my latest tract of what it was like to be an unpaid intern working at the Aliens’ secret ChupacabraCorp. headquarters. It eventually earned me some cool points with a couple indie rock girls. Through various twists and turns of teenage/twentysomething drama, this somehow led to me crashing on a friend’s couch in Portland only to meet my future wife, and the mother of my child, Jessica. I stayed there a week, but before I left, I gave her a copy of the Twilight Zine with my phone number on the cover.

A couple years passed as I moved to Portland and found myself suddenly very involved in becoming a dad and a husband and working in used bookstores. I tried to keep my hand in at writing, but we were washing our own cloth diapers, putting together the most awesome DIY wedding, and of course I had that Sunday morning volunteer shift at the food co-op. Let’s just say having a baby was a bit more time consuming than I thought it would be. We did, however, make it to the first Hip Mama Gathering in Portland. The next year we managed to put together enough back issues to stock a table at the Portland Zine Symposium. We split the table with one of my first zine friends, Dr. Verno the Inferno.