Masturbation on paper: zine fairs stick it to the Man for 15 years

Two events this weekend in Toronto are making an old-fashioned case for the kind of print media that is generally unbound, unvarnished and unfunded: Saturday, an afternoon of readings at the Toronto Zine Library within the Tranzac Club, followed on Sunday by the Canzine fair and festival at the Gladstone Hotel — a 15th annual mixed-media event organized by The Peep Diaries author Hal Niedzviecki’s stapled quarterly Broken Pencil. Mainstream attention for these gatherings has naturally waned, but there was a time when an overarching newspaper feature about the zine scene was the most expedient way for arts editors to not seem totally out of touch. The first articles about do-it-yourself photocopied journalism date back to when homemade publishing centered on music and science fiction — Ehmphasis, a gossipy fanzine exclusively dedicated to MuchMusic VJ Erica Ehm, was regularly cited on grounds of obsessive audacity.

By 1995, however, the first CutnPaste show at Sneaky Dee’s provided a one-stop opportunity to feel guilted by doe-eyed suburban punk publishers into swapping a couple of bucks for their anti-establishment expressions. For them, a zine fair proved much more fruitful encouragement than dropping copies off in local stores with faint hope of some consignment sales. The Beguiling comic shop co-owner Steve Solomos was quoted repeatedly in the Toronto Star as the consummate contrarian: “They’re incredibly masturbatory, that’s what they are, masturbation on paper,” he said once, and again. “A very, very small minority of the zines available are worth the paper they’re printed on. The rest are made by idiots, designed by idiots, and eventually mailed out to idiots, usually in exchange for other zines.” But he nonetheless stocked them because they were a good idea in principle. That is, until handmade websites became a bigger story instead.

Yet, in 1998, Jim Munroe, a local author who scored a book deal with HarperCollins, published what fleetingly became Toronto’s most notorious zine: Holiday In the Sun featured a memo to Rupert Murdoch, branding him a “manipulative right-wing bastard” concurrent with the Murdoch-funded publication of Munroe’s novel. Once, this kind of name-calling stunt seemed radical. Today, how many text-based chronicles of subversion need to be expressed specifically on paper? Last of that breed might have been Infiltration (“the zine about going places you’re not supposed to go”) whose pseudonymous publisher Jeff Chapman passed away in 2005 — you wouldn’t want to be caught traipsing through a forbidden zone because you were reading directions by the glow of an iPhone.