We have a winner! The wonderful pin design featured on our 2011 Participant Pin was created by Katie of ! Katie is extremely active in her town’s zine culture, and successfully hosted an event in her apartment in Birmingham for the 2011 24 Hour Zine Thing Challenge! She was gracious enough to take time out of her busy schedule to answer a few questions for us about her involvement in zines, how to create a zine culture in your hometown, and more! You can read the interview and see pictures of zines completed during the event below the cut.
Rick Silva is the creator of the wonderful zine Caravan, and has participated in the event for three years now! Who better to ask about conquering the 24 Hour Zine Thing challenge?
Why did you decide to participate in the 24 Hour Zine Thing challenge? It’s a great excuse to exercise some creativity. If not for the zine challenge, well, I didn’t HAVE to put a zine together this summer. It’s a great motivator to do something extra.
What type of pre-planning, if any, did you do before starting on your 24 hour zine? My only pre-planning was to brainstorm a bit for ideas. With any kind of writing, I tend to mull it over in my head for quite a bit before I actually sit down to write it out.
How did you get your idea for the topic of your 24 hour zine? My inspiration is right there (usually demanding that I play with him or feed him!). My wife did one minicomic about our first summer with our son. I wanted to do my own autobiographical piece. I also thought that I had enough fun material stored up from the past two years or so, that I could really do a fun take on “geeky parenting”.
How did you come to the decision to use the type of binding method and size that you chose? I wanted to do some cartooning, so I knew I had to go pretty small or else I’d never get the zine done in time. I can’t draw at all, so I was using really crude stick figures, and I didn’t want to agonize over re-drawing them every time, so I knew I’d need to digitally copy/paste. Thus the decision for quarter-sized and to lay the whole thing out in MS Word.
Was completing the challenge harder than you expected? Definitely harder. It took me longer than I thought it would to come up with dialogue for some of the situations. I also ran into a lot of technical problems with getting the images where I needed them to be. MS Word is NOT designed to be a layout program, but it worked for me because I’m very familiar with its functions, so I knew how to work around its limitations. It wasn’t always easy, though.
What advice would you give to others who are attempting the 24 Hour Zine Thing challenge? Avoid preconceived notions about what the project needs to be. The really great thing about zines is that they can take any shape/size/form. So stretch the boundaries of your ideas. Don’t feel like your zine needs to look like other zines you’re seen or read. It only needs to look like YOUR zine.
The 24 Hour Zine Challenge asks zinesters to create a 24-page zine
from conception to final product in 24 hours straight.
Zines should be of suitable size and technical difficulty
so that this truly is a challenge for individual zinesters.
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