Tl;DR zine archive: Navigating zine culture in an academic institution

In 2021, we founded the TL;DR Zine Archive to create a platform for professionals in our fields to connect and share visual research. TL;DR (meaning “too long; didn’t read”) collects zines that investigate topics in graphic design and illustration through formats that are designed and illustrated. This includes short-form writing, narrative comics, and visual essays that pertain to the intersections of practice with activism, criticism, history, methodology, pedagogy, and theory. The collection exists in three parts: the archive, located in the Dowd Illustration Research Archive (DIRA) at Washington University in St Louis (WashU); the teaching collection, held at the WashU Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts; and the touring collection, which we exhibit at different institutions. Our project responds to the dearth of opportunities within North American research universities for designers and illustrators to produce knowledge about our fields in visual ways that are also recognized as intellectual achievements. In the process of creating such an opportunity, we learned to navigate a number of tensions between zine culture and that of academic institutions.

At the outset, we grounded our collaboration in feminist praxis—the linking of feminist theory to action. This means putting into practice ideas that expose and challenge patriarchy, while also pursuing an emancipatory means for building an institutional zine collection. Zines are a co-creative medium with deep feminist roots. They have long empowered people to explore their personal identities and political views while providing a community in the zine's social network. With this in mind, we aimed to respect different types of knowledge, learn from our collaborators, and strengthen relationships between like-minded peers.

Zines are central to our own practices. In her zines and collages, Aggie Toppins foregrounds semiotic play, treating text and visuals as different levels of content that complement, contrast, or hijack one another. Shreyas R. Krishnan makes zines and comics that explore illustration in the context of gender and cultural identity, leveraging these sequential forms to make comparisons between various works and visually communicate theoretical concepts. Historian Darren Newbury (2020: 671) writes, “Images are not ideas in disguise, but are themselves intellectual propositions,” and argues that “visual researchers should be attempting not just to illustrate written arguments, but to do things with images.” Zines in the TL;DR Zine Archive, much like those in our own practices, are intellectual propositions that do things in and through graphic design and illustration.

Making and running a zine archive

We began our project by researching existing zine libraries, seeking to differentiate our collection. The St Louis Public Library collects a broad range of subjects for the general public and holds over 350 locally produced zines. Comparable art schools such as the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have extensive artists’ zine collections, including contributions from graphic designers and illustrators. Some peer research universities have collections pertinent to our fields. For example, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at The Ohio State University specializes in cartoon and comic art, and the University of Michigan's artist book collection includes publications in various creative fields. WashU's Rare Books library contains historically significant books, artists’ zines, and a punk zine collection. However, no zine collection to our knowledge focuses specifically on graphic design and illustration. After establishing our scope, we developed collecting criteria to serve our primary audiences: WashU students and faculty, and the broader community of professional graphic designers and illustrators. We distinguished the zines we would collect from artist books or independent magazines by defining a zine as a self-published book (or one published by a small press) with fewer than 100 pages, printed affordably in multiples.

With institutional funding, we collected 25 titles aligned with our criteria. We learned about these zines through our own participation in zine communities. These first titles acted as conceptual coordinates that made our collecting criteria more apparent to us and future contributors. Notable examples include Comix Skool by Kevin Huizenga (2018), What Is Queer Typography? by Paul Soulellis (2021), Pot Calling the Kettle Black by WORK/PLAY (2019), and Almanaque by Jason Alejandro and Laura Rossi García (2015) (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Selection of zines from TL;DR Zine Archive, used with permission of respective authors.

We created a graphic language for TL;DR and used Instagram to broadcast the project. Our visual identity, inspired by risograph inks and whimsical drawings, sought to balance the official language of branding with playful aesthetics. TL;DR's online presence helped define our collection and attract public interest.

To expand our collection, we launched a call for submissions, seeking existing zines and proposals for new zines that visually explore research questions in design and illustration. Using a rubric focused on content, form, and diversity, we reviewed about 90 submissions from designers and illustrators all over the world. We acquired 50 additional titles, including zines created specifically for TL;DR. Examples include Indians Don’t Like White Space by Sarita Sundar (2022), Halftone Havana by Ryan Hartley Smith (2022), and a > A by John Early (2022) (Figure 1).

Since its founding, the TL;DR Zine Archive has grown to 100 titles—compact so it fits into a crate, yet expansive enough to fill a gallery. We self-published two risograph-printed catalogs (Figure 2) and mounted four exhibitions, the first of which took place at MICA in 2022 (Figure 3).

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Figure 2.

“Cut, Paste, Fold & Staple,” TL;DR Zine Archive Spring 2025 Catalog of Zines.

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Figure 3.

“Doing Things With Images,” TL;DR Zine Exhibition at Maryland Institute College of Art, 2022.

Tensions and possibilities

There are, of course, tensions between zine culture and academic culture. In our project, we navigated issues such as consent and copyright, access and preservation, competition and collaboration, as well as challenges such as categorization and resource scarcity.

At some institutions, zines are collected and written about without the consent or knowledge of the people who made them. For some zine authors, particularly those occupying less powerful social positions, academic procedures of collection and knowledge production can be perceived as coercive (Fife, 2019: 232; Casado, 2020: 29–30). TL;DR only collects from living, willing authors. We compensate them and work to ensure that they are fairly represented and have some control over how their zines are exhibited. Another tension concerns balancing preservation and access. By housing TL;DR zines at DIRA, we ensured their long-term preservation, but this meant restricting access to in-archive, by-appointment handling. Zines are meant to be touched and read. To account for this, we acquired zines in triplicate, a strategy that allows us to preserve our zines and make copies available for teaching and touring. In the future, we hope to launch an online catalog to further increase access.

Both the academy and creative industries foster competition. Research grants, refereed publications, industry awards, and juried exhibitions are achieved through rigorous selection. Zine communities, by contrast, shirk peer review and build community through participation. Part of our motivation in building the TL;DR Zine Archive was to create an outlet for expression, experimentation, and authorship in our fields. But we also wanted to supply research outcomes that count as achievements for tenure and promotion. In his zine Against Competition, Marc Fischer (2014: 6) argues that finding affinities and establishing friendships with peers is not a retreat from making critical work. Zine culture's rejection of competition does not mean that zines aren't serious or that zine makers can't improve each other's work through dialogue. We are transparent about TL;DR's collecting criteria, and while we may reject titles that do not meet this criteria, our goal is to contribute to our fields through inclusion. Although institutions of higher education tend to privilege individual authorship over collective efforts, we value cooperation systems. Through TL;DR, we enact feminist collaboration and cultivate expertise through collective participation. Every person who sent us a zine is a collaborator: someone we interacted with, provided feedback to, promoted, and included in exhibitions.

Zines, as countercultural materials, resist categorization (Hays, 2018: 63; Nguyen, 2015: 12–21). Yet institutions sometimes collect zines, fitting them into preconceived categories that may not be accurate, in attempts to achieve thematic or chronological completeness (Nguyen, 2015: 18–19). Rather than forcing our collection into hard categories or seeking to “complete” our archive, we prioritize serendipitous dialogue between the zines in both their storage and presentation. The only ordering system we use is found in our printed catalogs, where zines are listed by subject headings such as “typography” and “illustration history.”

As busy academics who teach, write, manage creative practices, and serve our professional fields, we face constraints with time and funding. We are fortunate to collaborate with our university's library staff, whose expertise is invaluable. They engage with other zine libraries to suggest best practices and are open to institutional critique. Initial funding allowed us to hire research assistants, buy zines, and invite new work to be created via our open call. As we move forward, we hope to find consistent sources of funding so that future collecting initiatives can be more regular and systematic, and so we can platform more programming.

Who creates a zine archive, the types of zines included, and where it is housed matter. Fife (2019: 232) asserts that collecting and exhibiting practices are politically charged, especially when collecting institutions and archivists occupy different power positions from the archived subjects. TL;DR is distinct because it is curated by a designer and an illustrator who also make zines about design and illustration. Our identities as underrepresented individuals in our fields and our feminist perspectives impact our aspirations for the archive. Hays (2018: 63) writes that zine culture can become unrecognizable when zines move from localized cultural expressions to institutional collections. Despite being embedded within a research university, TL;DR's audience includes our community of designers, illustrators, visual culture scholars, researchers, and students. Our collection is a localized cultural expression.

In summary, the TL;DR Zine Archive aims to create a venue for practice-based research dissemination, dialogue, and collective growth through zines. The project demonstrates how academic institutions can support zine culture. Through our inclusive, feminist approach, the collection confronts institutional priorities, creating productive tensions that offer new possibilities for applied creative practices within research universities.