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.

The next year we moved to Tucson. For me it was a return to my hometown. For Jessica it was a leap of faith that being around family would be good for us. We had weighed the option of moving to North Carolina where her mom is, but none of those plans worked out. We loaded up a Penske truck and may dad and grandpa Amtraked it up to Oregon to help us drive everything down.

We staked our claim at a crappy apartment complex and I landed a job at Bookmans, while Jessica took a sabbatical from software engineering to go to massage school.

We only had one car at the time and I rode the bus a lot. One of the things that happens when you ride the bus is that parking lots become the enemy. Especially in summer. Parking lots are these huge, desolate sources of merciless blackbody radiation that you always have to cross to get between the bus stop and wherever it is you’re going.

It might have been heatstroke, but I began to see parking lots from the distanced perspective of an armchair anthropologist from the year 3100. Because the parking lot had no relevant function in my own life, I began to wonder about the curious customs of the great civilization that had left behind these monumental earthworks. Unsuitable for agriculture and prone to flooding, perhaps these structures served some ceremonial purpose. I wondered if it was something I could write a book about.

I decided I probably couldn’t, but maybe I should try making a zine.

My Grand Unified Field Theory of Parking Lots never came together, but I started thinking more about the things around me as being cultural artifacts. And each of these artifacts could lead to some kind of meaningful interpretation of the lives of the people who created and used them.

This was part of the strange inner dialogue I had going on during my first year at Bookmans. I suppose I was really trying to come up with some kind of meaning for my own life. Sifting through the books on the trade counter, pricing them in the back room, shelving them on the sales floor. I was constantly in touch with so much information. There was obviously some meaning in there. There had to be signs. I was looking for signs.

I absolutely had to start doing a zine again. But how was I going to fit it all in? Spare moments only came in fits and starts and life was a constant struggle. Could I even come up with enough content on my own? And I really wanted to make an impressive, thought-provoking zine. Something even better than if it was my old semi-autobiographical, ranty fiction.

I wanted more people involved, and I wanted real stories. I wanted cultural artifacts, and, following a fascination I had developed for one of Bookmans’ non-fiction sections, I wanted true adventure. I came to the conclusion that I needed to form an art collective.

I sent emails and asked friends if they’d like to join my art collective because I wanted to make a new zine about true adventure and cultural artifacts. I have some really trusting friends because I’m sure they had no idea what the hell I was talking about. The first round of collective members included Jessica (who gave me the name Bony Landmarks), rogue scholar Dr. Verno the Inferno, genius illustrator Irvin Stafford, and, for moral support, Luke Porter. Luke, Irvin, Verno and I all had worked at the same movie theater in the mid '90s (coincidently Marty Ketola, Bookmans’ resident public access cable personality and filmmaker, worked there, too).

I badgered submissions out of everybody I could think of. I got some. I found weird illustrations and clip art from old books. I got burned out on the project. I got lost in a freak show of my own mind. I was at a standstill. I had my collective and my vision, but I was having trouble getting the final oomph to put it all together. That was about when Microcosm Publishing’s “Cocoon Zine Tour” rolled into town and stopped at the now departed Readers’ Oasis for an evening.

The tour consisted of Portlanders Dave Roche reading from On Subbing, Jack Saturn reading from his We Ain’t Got No Car, and Microcosm Impressario Joe Biel showing his zine documentary "$100 and a T-shirt." The documentary had a lot of footage from the 2002 Portland Zine Symposium, and there, in that scene there - where it sweeps through the crowd of people and tables - there’s a guy in a green plaid shirt and a woman holding a 19-month old; that’s my family! We’re next to famous!

It was the moment that pushed the first zine over the hump and into layout phase. Within a couple of weeks I was charging a print run of 100 copies to my credit card.

We’ve managed to put out 3 issues so far. It takes about a year to complete an issue. And every time I almost want to give up. I couldn’t do it without the help of the other collective members. They get so excited about their parts of the project. They want to see the next issue.

I’m really glad that in this respect the collective seems to actually be a thing. It can be hard to figure out what it is or who runs it. All I know is that I send out a lot of emails about the zine and I get the photocopies made, but I feel there’s always room for more. I’d like to see more members and more projects that could carry the Look for Signage name on them. We’ve had at least one addition to the original collective membership: J. Marshall Hart. He’s not only Speedway’s Book Dept. upervisor, he’s an amazing poet (and by amazing I mean accessible and entertaining, as well as profound). We recently finished a chapbook of his poetry called "Giraffe Fight." We’re hoping it might persuade the admissions board of a major MFA program to grant Marshall a full ride.

There will be other and more amazing Look for Signage projects in the future. Irvin’s got an experimental comic book idea he’s kicking around, and there is another Irvin and Andrew comics project called “New Gibraltar” that we’re furiously working on. Marshall keeps coming up with more poems that need a venue. Dr. Verno, to the best of my knowledge, is engaged in deep cover field research in Croatia. We hope he contacts us soon with new adventures.

We keep looking for signs and making some of our own.

Zines and Zine Resources: The following is a list of zines I like, as well as useful sources of further information for the curious.

Syndicate Product
Clip Tart
Fish With Legs
Hungover Gourmet
tfr Industries
Small World Buttons
Zinester's Guide to Portland
Zine World
Parcel Press Distro
Microcosm Publishing