Tag: editors

“The underground is not a tight, formalized, and coherent social grouping with firm boundaries; instead it is a nongeographical sprawl which must be mapped out” (57)  -Stephen Duncombe, Zines: Notes From Underground

The final five issues of F5 spanned three and half years, from February 1995 (not September as mistakenly mentioned in an earlier post) to July 1998. Smack in the middle of these final five issues, in 1997, Stephen Duncombe published Zines: Notes From Underground with Verso Press. Duncombe’s book is by far the most influential book on zines (more than 1,500 citations) and for good reason: it carefully captures the significance, contradictions, and political limitations of zines (and underground culture) during the 10-year span of the zine explosion (Burf Quimby’s term for the period between 1985-95) or zine revolution (Josh Glenn’s term for the period between 1984-93). And it does this purposefully, privileging the archives, interviews, close readings of zines, and his own participation over the academic jargon of critical or sociological theory. The book is therefore organized schematically, using the themes that emerged out of close readings of zine culture: identity, community, work, consumption, etc.

No other piece of scholarship has taken up F5 in as much detail as Duncombe and as such, my own project both owes it a debt of gratitude while seeking to revisit, expand, or update some of its findings. Unless we were intimately involved with Factsheet Five, most zine studies scholars have directly or indirectly relied on Stephen Duncombe’s observations. Obviously his citation count is high because it was the first true academic study of zines outside of Fredric Werham’s Fanzines (1973) 25 years earlier; however, I want to make the case that Duncombe’s methodology made a difference in cementing F5’s role in zine history. He is cited in countless sources, including books like Julie Bartel’s From A to Zine (2004), Amy Spencer’s DiY: The Rise of Lo-fi Culture (2008), Kaya Oakes Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture (2009), Alison Piepmeier’s Girl Zines (2009), Adela Licona’s Zines in Third Space (2012), Frank Farmer’s After the Public Turn (2013), and more.

I’ve read the original 1997 edition of Zines: Notes from Underground several times and at various points in my life, and as I look back on this book now with this project in mind, it’s fascinating just how much Duncombe relied on F5 for his data.  In situating F5 specifically in the history of zines, he aptly notes that the network zine “brought together and “cross fertilized” two dominant “tributaries” from zine culture — sci-fi and punk rock — that were “joined by smaller streams of publications created by fans of other cultural genres, disgruntled self-publishers, and the remnants of printed political dissent from the sixties and seventies” (7). As such, its issues “serve as nodal points for the bohemian diaspora” (11).

At the NYS Library Archives, where he held a research residency, he poured through back issues of F5, noticing correspondence and trends in reviews, while also closely reading the zines that were also archived there. Duncombe began his study in 1992, “near the end of the twelve-year conservative drive of the Reagan/Bush era” (3), and a survey of the footnotes shows that while most of the interviews he conducts and the zines he examines cluster around that date (~1990-1995), he also quotes from F5 letters and columns (especially “Why Publish?”) that preceded it (~1985-1989). In other words, Duncombe used the F5 archive strategically to account for the foundational discourses of zine culture during this era while also incorporating the work of the subjects themselves to trace its effects. In reflecting on his assessment of the geographic trends of zines in America, for example, which was based on 1,301 reviews from Issue 44 (Gunderloy’s last issue), he concluded that his is a study on “the culture of zines, and FS5 was and may still be the locus of that culture” as it is the only “large-scale listing of a zine universe available” (200 n13).

Significantly, he also interviewed, and sharply contrasted Mike Gunderloy and R. Seth Friedman — Gunderloy in December of 1992 in New York City and R Seth Friedman via telephone interview (presumably from San Francisco) in September 1993. Importantly, this was also a transitional time in F5’s history, Friedman was only just starting out, having published his first issue of F5 (#46) a mere eight months earlier (for whatever reason, Duncombe does not include Hudson Luce in the book).

Subsequent editions have been published by Microcosm in 2008, 2017, and 2025. Interestingly, Duncombe updated the 2^nd edition in 2008 to craft a more complete story of F5. For instance, in the chapter on “Community,” he added two paragraphs that noted how Zine Guide and Zine World attempted to continue the traditions of network zines, with the former also failing. For me this emphasizes an important through-line with F5 — that the labor of love was unsustainable both materially (money was a constant issue) and emotionally. Gunderloy and Friedman, for instance, seem to have both put F5 behind them.

An important question here is this: did all these reviews lead to “cross-pollination,” as Gunderloy’s version of F5 aspired to, or did they lead to enclaves and separate identities, especially as Friedman introduced more categories in addition to tacking on a multi-page index of reviews at the end of every issue. It’s also not entirely accurate to characterize Gunderloy’s organization as anarchic, because like Friedman, he alphabetized reviews by zine title so that people could find themselves and others more quickly (the only issue that wasn’t alphabetized was Issue 45, published by Hudson Luce). Duncombe wonders if the emphasis on “personal experience and subjective realities over broader, public concerns” would ultimately lead zines fraying into micro-communities that in turn, shape a specific reality. In some ways, you can see the shift in the literal book covers of Duncombe’s four editions, shifting from the punky black and white covers of zines (the objects) in the 1st and 2nd to the embodiment of the hair-dyed zinester (the identities) in the 3rd and 4th editions. Zine politics shifted from emphasizing the means of production in the 90s to something more identity-centered as the new millennium went on and digital infrastructures started to play a more essential role in zine production and distribution. In short, self-publishers started organizing and/or gravitating toward their separate niches.

I want to talk more about this, especially given that Quillette published a recent retrospective account of zine culture written by Broken Pencil founder and outspoken Zionist, Hal Niedzviecki. The publication sums up Niedzviecki’s argument pretty well up front: “The zine community was a haven for all types of free-thinking artists, misfits, and heretics—until online mobs turned it into just another bastion of social-justice groupthink.” If you’ve followed the drama around Niedzviecki over the last 10 years, you won’t be terribly surprised by his slanted account of contemporary zine culture; however, as problematic as his argument is, I do think his version of zine history provokes an important discussion about how the politics of zines changed over the last 40 years — and one I hope to expand upon shortly via tracing not only F5, but the research I conducted for my dissertation on Niedzviecki’s Broken Pencil, Canada’s version of F5.