Love and Reproduction
Object #6: In Which I Refer to Past Events
Stop! This blog entry will make more sense if you have received objects #6 and 6.5.
Object Notes:
In Which I Refer to Past Events:
This lil mini zine is printed on one sheet of letter-sized paper (4 up imposition if you are into that kind of thing), cut in half, folded, and stapled. This is my favorite zine/minicomic format because you can succinctly fit one idea in it or just a few smaller ones. It was printed on a laser printer on 70lb Cougar Digital paper. (I am experimenting with nicer papers.) This is the first zine I pasted up entirely digitally. It's not a super smooth process, but I didn't have to cut and paste everything by hand, which was nice. I wrote the essay in Google Docs, transferred it to Adobe InCopy so I could format the document easier for InDesign (I hate the InCopy interface which is why I didn't write the doc there), placed it into InDesign so I could have page formating be the right size, and then copied the pages into photoshop. I dunno if there is a better way to do this, but while it's clunky, it doesn't take that long. There are a couple of things I am not happy about, but that's how I roll. The cover is taken from a photo of me when I was 19.
We First Saw Him by the River:
This zine was first printed in 1998 when I was an undergrad, probably for painting class. It's my favorite, so I thought it deserved a nicer second printing. I still have the original paste-up pages so I scanned them, cleaned them up a bit, and printed them on 80lb Cougar Digital paper. I photocopied everything I thought was interesting in those days in order to collage them up for paintings and zines. I still have a box of them and for some reason, I have 20 copies of the same picture of William Burroughs, whose cut-ups are an indirect inspiration for the writing style of this piece. I sat down and wrote a lengthy stream of conscious story and then went through and selected some parts that could make an interesting narrative, keeping any misspellings or other mistakes. Then I built the collage and added the text. The original printing was done in the printing center of Southern Oregon University. All the little girls in this are also me.
Research Notes:
I've been making minicomics and zines for a long time, so this didn't require as much research as some months, but here are some fun things I found, because of course I am gonna do research. I LOVE RESEARCH!
Fun exhibition notes from Rich Dana at the University of Iowa show Spirit Duplicators: Early 20th Century Copier Art, Fanzines, and the Mimeograph Revolution.
Excellent video from the same guy.
From Democratic Multiple to Artist Publishing: The (R)evolutionary Artist's Book by Tony White
Blog entry detailing how I made In Which I Refer to Past Events and We First Saw Him By The River.