Seite - 175 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Band 2/2020

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Tanja Kapp | Journeying the Page 175 Zines are quirky, individualized booklets filled with diatribes, reworkings of pop-culture iconogra- phy, and all variety of personal and political narratives. They are self-produced and anti-corporate. Their production, philosophy, and aesthetic are anti-professional. (Piepmeier 2009: 2) Crucially, she adds that, ‘because zines are ephemeral underground publications, it is impossible to determine how many are in circulation’ (Piepmeier 2009: 2). Zines are inherently heteroge- neous, granting their authors a wide range of creative freedom. Due to its democratic, partici- patory nature, the medium is beyond the reach of any controlling, cataloguing or categorizing instance or institution. Lacking any definitive on- or offline recognition or registration, for example via an ISBN number, zines are artefacts that elude classification and tracing. Most zines are entirely self-produced by and marketed to what Kate Douglas and Anna Poletti call an ‘intimate public’ (2016), a group of people with access to particular zines within a temporally distinct space. Outside of these bubbles of encounter, their very existence may be forgotten, and the number of their copies and editions may never be fully traced nor verified (Cox 2018). Zines are utterly decentralized and characterized by a kind of ‘anything goes’ mentality that is reflected not only in their sale and distribution, but also in the way they are medially con- structed. While the definition of a zine can be roughly delineated, the medium lacks a uniform mode of production, which is intrinsically linked with its political function(s). Defying stand- ardized notions of literary and cultural products, zines were invented to give people an adapt- able, dynamic medium without overarching, exclusionary or essentialist conventions of produc- tion. Zines can employ techniques of what could be called détournement, bricolage, or culture jamming, in which creators use pre-existing material and appropriate it, to a degree in which it surpasses or forfeits its former meaning and value. Oftentimes, certain signifiers are completely inverted as the zine’s appropriation of mainstream media reveals the hegemonic politics behind collectively shared norms of perception and behaviour. Through their medial appearance, zines make reference to cultural products and their associated discourses. By assuming characteristics of established, capitalist media they unsettle conventions that have been deeply entrenched into our navigation and consumption of the world. Identity-related perceptions that, partly through these media, have become accepted as ‘natural’ or intrinsic suddenly become exposed and can thus be questioned.7 The prevalence of travel zines is evident not only to those that visit specific places and events, like zine fairs, zine libraries or collections. Nowadays, the medium is embedded within the world wide web. While before the internet, zines were obtained or distributed via analogue networks, some contemporary zine cultures have moved, at least partly, into online environ- ments. A number of zine creators and artists sell their publications via their own online stores. As zines are tied to DIY culture, they have also become available on the e-commerce website Etsy, which offers an online marketplace for vintage and handmade objects. Renowned libraries acknowledge the importance of the platform in their collection of zines (Berthoud 2016; Cox 2018: 80), or recommend it as a distributer (Wooten 2016: 96; Barnard Zine Library 2020). 7 The liberal canvas of the zine has, for example, facilitated the emergence of the medium of underground comics, as comic artists appropriated the zine’s mode of production. While zines can take many forms, the medium gen- erally lends itself to the implementation of comics, as can be seen in the difficult delineation of both media. Both are characterized by a coming together of images and texts and are originally thought of as a kind of independent and low-cost type of artwork that can be homemade.