Like magazines – but different! Fanzines as bricolaged media 1

Fanzines as “undisciplined magazines”?

The term “fanzine” suggests a certain proximity to the print media type of the magazine. The magazine—like the newspaper—is characterized by principles of availability (to readers), periodicity (regular publication), and publicity (opinion-forming nature). Availability and periodicity apply to fanzines only to some extent, as they are available to insiders and published at erratic rather than regular intervals. But there is some rudimentary overlap here. If, however, we look at how media studies systematize different magazine genres, attempting to subsume the fanzine under the magazine is clearly unnecessary. That is because many fanzines cannot be grouped with any kind of magazine genre. Unlike consumer magazines, they do not want to inform a broad public about a particular topic; unlike trade or technical magazines, they are not aimed at experts; and unlike so-called alternative magazines, they are not trying to bring an alternative perspective to a general audience.

Werner Faulstich's historical-functional definition of the magazine also offers us no points of departure. He emphasizes that magazines as a media type have their roots in the bourgeois liberalism of the Enlightenment. As a key form of media in the eighteenth century, magazines played a role in the bourgeoisie's identity formation (Faulstich, 2004: 27). At the same time, however, the increasing dominance of print media is associated with a decoupling of the body and its senses from communication. Thus, according to Faulstich (2004: 28), identity formation was accompanied by an abstracting function: that which was vivid, visual, and sensual was removed and replaced by the principles of linearity, discursivity, and abstraction—the body experienced an “elimination.”

Interpreting fanzines as magazine-like print media and thereby as products of a bourgeois era does not really get us anywhere: most of the zines I am familiar with avoid a linear structure, ² just like the writing is not identifiable as a discourse of abstract and rational arguments. Instead, it is oral communication, with all its interruptions and omissions, that the directness and immediacy of a fanzine simulates, bringing corporeality back into the communication process.

In terms of their content, fanzines also do not see themselves as beholden to the Enlightenment. Their identity formation function is much more often located on the anti-bourgeois side of the spectrum. Rather than trying to win over the public at large to care about their interests, fanzines usually present themselves as elite and exclusive instead, while representing radically subjective opinions. The principle of objectivity, a cornerstone of the bourgeois enlightened society's media, is cast aside in favor of an uncompromising subjectivity. Therefore, this conception of magazines as Enlightenment media does not apply to fanzines.

In the meantime, my 2006 suggestion from my master's thesis (Schmidt, 2006), “undisciplined magazine,” also does not seem to go very far—its analytical potential is exhausted in its attempt to describe everything that a fanzine is not. And so, rather quickly, we find ourselves back at the desire for a positive and comprehensive definition of this aimless and meandering medium and the question posed at the beginning: “A fanzine—What is that, exactly?” In my attempt to find an answer, my next step is to present two definitions from fanzine research that exemplify the reasons even fanzine-focused inquiries in media studies and sociology are still struggling to define the medium.

Fanzines as “authentic voices”: Fredric Eertham et al.

The first attempt at a scholarly definition of fanzines was made by the psychologist Fredric Wertham in 1973. Based on science fiction, fantasy, and comic fanzines that had been published in Europe and North America ³ since the 1930s, he tried to determine the essential characteristics and functions of fanzines. He defined fanzines as “uncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their editors produce, publish, and distribute” (Wertham, 1973: 33). ⁴ He then contrasts them with all the “solemn professional and professorial publications” (Wertham, 1973: 36) he had had to read in his life and is accordingly enchanted by their jaunty vitality. He finds the attention that fanzines claim in their existence as “genuine human voices outside of all mass manipulation” (Wertham, 1973: 35). Defining fanzines in this manner—primarily in terms of their amateur, uncommercial, and authentic character, as a counterpart to manipulation through mass media—comes up in similar forms in many subsequent studies of fanzines and basically corresponds with how fanzine makers describe the medium themselves. We thus see ideologically loaded terms from fanzine discourse being adopted and unquestioningly included in scholarly conceptual frameworks. Stefan Kleiber (1997: 48) somewhat shifts the emphasis, centering the counter-public element in his definition. He states that fanzines provide a particular subculture with counter-publicity. For him, they are, in contrast to commercial publications, extremely personal works that are sold to like-minded individuals. Making a profit is not the point for most fanzine makers (Kleiber, 1997: 48).

And on a yet higher level of fascination with the aspect of rebelliousness, Stephen Duncombe (2008: 7) arrives at an almost socially utopian definition, basically rendering fanzines a projection of an ideal society—“a radically democratic and participatory ideal of what culture and society might be… ought to be” (emphasis and ellipsis in original). He goes on to declare the creative work of making fanzines an act of protest against wage labor, opposing consumer culture with the do-it-yourself principle. Zines are, for Duncombe (2008: 8), “the variegated voices of a subterranean world staking out its identity through the cracks of capitalism and in the shadows of the mass media.” Fanzine makers are politically self-conscious subjects active in a vibrant underground culture, who understand their undertaking as a “strike against commercial culture and consumer capitalism” (Duncombe, 2008: 8; see also p. 209).

Peculiar, authentic, noncommercial, radically democratic, anticapitalist, a resistance movement: all the characteristics proposed by various authors while attempting to define the fanzine medium are relative rather than analytical concepts. Their very existence is perforce tied to that large antipode, be it the mass or mainstream media or the capitalist “system.” The description of fanzines is thus made dependent on the big Other. Ideally, however, we want a definition that does more than construe fanzines as a counterpart to something else. Our methodological concept should not only tell us what fanzines are not; it should describe what they actually are.

Fanzines as alternative media: Chris Atton

The second definition that I want to unpack for this purpose comes from the British media studies scholar Chris Atton. In his book Alternative Media, Atton (2002: 8) groups fanzines with alternative media, which he sees as spanning “single-person zines, large-scale working-class newspapers, radical community newspapers, magazines of sexual politics, anarchist samizdats.” ⁵ In his definition of alternative media he focuses on processes and relations, investigating how the production of these alternative forms of communication is principally constituted by heterogeneity, the joy of experimentation, and mutability. Although his description of the medium moves closer to aspects of technical production and aesthetic form, over the course of the book, he ultimately returns to contrasting alternative media with mainstream and mass media. Although Atton explicitly considers the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which terms such as “radical media,” “alternative media,” and “underground press” arise and are used, he does not sufficiently problematize the questionable validity of the binary opposition between alternative media and mainstream media. Therefore, when his alternative media model is applied to fanzines, it describes a very specific point in history that is not easily transferable to any other. ⁶ In the end, he arrives at a rather narrow definition, which once again reminds us of Duncombe's utopian exuberance: alternative media are, according to Atton (2002: 19), “oppositional in intent” and carry “social change in their heart.” Atton thus also attributes to fanzines as alternative media par excellence aims that are decidedly political and a character of genuine resistance.

Though it is essential to understand fanzines as media that emerge within specific societal power structures and, in turn, influence society, Atton's notion that the fanzine as a medium is, by definition, targeted at processes of social transformation remains problematic. Not all fanzine makers want to change society; not all of them explicitly see themselves as rebels. Perhaps it would be more apt to talk about the array of possibilities fanzines offer their makers in terms of self-empowerment through media. Then we could comprehend the making of fanzines as an everyday political practice rather than a resolute form of political action on the same level as demonstrations or acts of civil disobedience. I use this agency angle—with Wertham's and Atton's respective romanticism for the underdog and the rebel removed—in my own attempt at a definition in the next section. I want to center agency and pour it into the mold of a conceptual model focused on aesthetics and form. This model promises to provide more analytical precision, moving beyond the politically grounded resistance utopia of David versus Goliath.

Bricolage as concept and method

Bricolage in content and form: Fanzines

As vernacular media, fanzines transport messages relevant to a particular subculture or scene between at least two types of participants: fanzine makers and fanzine readers. I contend that, in constructing their messages, fanzines always use bricolage as a method, so that they are understood first and foremost by other members of the scene. They want to make an autonomous statement that is separate from the appropriated material's original meaning. Furthermore, I contend that fanzines are, both at the level of content and the level of form, bricolaged media: they are poachers of both preexisting media forms and preexisting media content.

In the first issue of the Oi! punk zine Strafraumpogo [Penalty Area Pogo] (1996), the creators made an advertisement for their own zine by taking a photograph of then Pope John Paul II and German chancellor Helmut Kohl, with a speech bubble added to the Pope: “Moin Loite!!! Mein Froind Helmut & ich lesen: Strafraum Pogo” [Oi oi!!! My mate Helmut & me read: Strafraum Pogo] (Figure 1). Here the zine makers satirize a typical advertisement for a magazine, like the well-known German TV guide Hörzu, by using a photograph, likely lifted from a daily newspaper, combined with text that emulates the classic celebrity endorsement. The changed spelling (using oi instead of eu in “Loite” and “Froind”) references the internal jargon of the Oi! scene.

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Figure 1.

Strafraumpogo #11 (1996).

Fredric Wertham (1973: 89) also provides a long list of examples of how fanzines satirize existing media formats, including parodying TV commercials and series, political speeches, and the labels of particular editorial sections or columns in magazines. In the fanzine Ama-Pros “editorial” becomes “odditorial,” and in Fan Focus, “table of contents” becomes “table of contentions” (Wertham, 1973: 89). With this use of bricolage as method, fanzine creators decontextualize and recombine found elements to create a new complex of meaning. This enables them to communicate new messages—also between the lines—to other members of their scene.

The bricolage of media contents takes place in different ways, depending on the social, cultural, and historical context. Communicating a (new) message, however, is not the only goal; the process also serves as a form of symbolic self-empowerment. As John Clarke (2006: 150; emphasis in original) remarked originally in 1975: “What happens is not the creation of objects and meanings from nothing, but rather the transformation and rearrangement of what is given (and ‘borrowed’) into a pattern which carries a new meaning, its translation to a new context, and its adaption.” If I sit down with an article in a mainstream newspaper that doesn’t speak to me, I also won’t see any potential for it to be cut out and used in my fanzine to gain a new meaning. When faced with a found source, I need to detect an echo of the spectrum of potential meanings that are relevant to me specifically to want to select it for reuse in a different context. And especially in the case of making fanzines, this is not just some act that amounts to nothing more than being “anti”—against the dominant culture or mainstream media. It is, on the contrary, a highly originative, creative act and its material constitution is analyzable. My proposed perspective on fanzines as bricolaged media purposefully goes beyond locating them within the boundaries of an assumed binary system of media and counter-media; it is an invitation to grasp zines as the outcomes of a concrete creative recombining. This brings racist or sexist fanzines back into focus as potential objects of scholarly inquiry rather than excluding them based on a romanticized underdog definition of the medium.

With our focus on the concrete actions of fanzine makers, we find ourselves in the company of the British media and culture scholar John Fiske, who always advocated for the recognition of consumers’—and especially fans’—active interpretive capacities. For him, consumers are not generally passive “victims” of the culture industry; they have agency and are cultural producers in their own right. According to Fiske (1989: 146–151), fans take texts and fill in gaps, make changes, use them as a cultural resource for new texts, write themselves into the found texts, or extend the narratives in their fanzines. Henry Jenkins studied fanzines made by fans of the Star Trek series (Jenkins, 1988) and of horror films (Jenkins, 1992) and established that these creators use the TV episodes and films in a variety of ways as source material for their own narratives. He calls this practice “poaching,” borrowing the term from Michel de Certeau (1984: 165) and sees fans, with their highly independent nature of productivity, as “textual poachers” (Jenkins, 1992). He describes how fans “inflect” the content of a TV episode “with their own social experience and displace commercially produced commodities for a kind of popular economy” (Jenkins, 1988: 87). This process transforms “spectator culture” into “participatory culture”: indeed, “for fans, consumption sparks production, reading generates writing,” and thus a commercial TV show becomes material for a fan's own literature published in a fanzine (Jenkins, 1988: 88).

With the concepts of bricolage and poaching in hand, we have methodological tools that simultaneously describe what is happening on the level of form and the level of content in the making of fanzines. Aspects such as an alternative economy or resistance are no longer central to the definition. Instead, they are corollaries to a conceptual framework that primarily defines the creative practice of producers as autonomous agents. If we examine fanzines through the lens of bricolaged media, we gain an analytical and precise view of the “becoming” of the medium in form and content, the symbolic context from which it creates, and what it produces with it. The medium no longer needs to be defined in terms of what it is not, as an antagonist to other types of media; an autonomous description is now within reach.

In what follows, I want to test this conceptual framework by applying it to a few examples from the history of fanzines, working out to what extent it enables us to approach fanzines’ specific kind of mediality more productively. I analyze how fanzines, both at the level of form and the level of content, draw on bricolage and textual poaching techniques.

Science-fiction fanzines in the United States (1930s–1940)

As has already been mentioned, the term “fanzine” first made its appearance on the American science-fiction scene. From the 1920s onward, newsstand magazines such as Amazing Stories, with stories about spaceships and strange planets, were becoming increasingly popular, especially among male teenagers in the United States. It was not long before these young people developed the urge to connect with others about these fantastical narratives. Over time, more of them joined local fan clubs, organized regional fan conventions, and published their own printed works.

The Comet is regarded as one of the first science-fiction fanzines, first published in May 1930 by the Science Correspondence Club in Boston (see endnote 3). Many similar zines followed. Like The Comet, they were almost without exception printed in small runs of one to two hundred copies on manually operated hectographs (Hallenberger, 1974: 50). In the beginning, there was no consistent name for this new kind of fan media. Only by the 1940s had “fanzine” become dominant and more broadly used than “fanmag” or “letterzine,” which had also been circulating. Louis Russel Chauvenet from Boston played a significant role in the term's success (Warner, 1994: 175). In his fanzine Detours, he made the case for using the term to differentiate science-fiction fans’ self-published booklets from the professionally produced, commercially targeted science-fiction magazines like Amazing Stories, which Chauvenet called “prozines.”

We thus see the distinction between fanzines and other available print media coming up early on. This relationship to the field of “professionally” produced media was, however, never intended as a dismissal or as a self-description in terms of what the fanzine is not; instead, the fanzine's character was brought to life and staged through bricolage techniques and creative exuberance. The fanzine medium has always been the result of a conscious, playful recombination of bits and pieces from found material—both content and form.

This involves combining elements from more than one media type. Rather than exclusively sticking to print media, for example, creators use media of disparate origins, which exemplifies the bricolaging of form I argue for. So-called letterzines, ⁸ meaning some of the earliest science-fiction fanzines, show this clearly: the fusion of the letter and the mass media magazine originated a novel representational media form.

The editorials in science-fiction fanzines, too, can serve as examples of this bricolaging of media forms. Like regular magazine editorials, they were placed at the beginning of an issue and labeled “editorial.” Stylistically, however, they were more like magazine columns, as Fredric Wertham (1973: 88) already noted in the early 1970s. So even the earliest science-fiction fanzines were not simply magazines. They fundamentally deviated from this media type in content and in their cobbled together—bricolaged—quality.

Early punk fanzines in the Federal Republic of Germany (1977–1980)

“Poaching” as an approach to production is especially clear in early punk fanzines from West Germany. Not only in its fanzines, but also in its style generally, punk was “defined principally through the violence of its ‘cut ups’” (Hebdige, 1979: 106). The removal and recontextualization of existing stylistic elements was important not only for the character of punk fashion, music, dance, band names, concerts, and design, but also for punk fanzines. The fanzine creators used bricolage techniques in many ways and did not limit themselves to appropriating ironically fractured editorials or columns, other text types, or formal essentials of established print media. At times, entire articles or other text or image units were lifted from existing magazines and newspapers and integrated into the zines in various ways. The fanzine makers took the established print media as hunting grounds on which they poached, in Certeau's sense. The material thus “caught” or “stolen” was used in a variety of ways. Cut-out and collaged image and text fragments became elements for the creators’ own new texts and images. Cut-up letters and words, arranged to form new texts, reminiscent of ransom notes, are typical of this form of working with poached material.

A punk fanzine collage such as the one in Figure 2 illustrates how closely bricolage at the levels of form and content can be bound to practices of symbolic self-empowerment. Clippings from newspapers are used here to create entirely novel textual relations. The maker of Ich und mein Spiegelbild [Me and my reflection] arranged text and image fragments from various print media, added a newly composed text, and visibly inscribed themselves into it all between the lines, for example, with the introduction of the words “punk” and “identity” rendered in handwriting.

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Figure 2.

Ich Und Mein Spiegelbild #1 (1980).

In the first West German punk fanzines, published between 1977 and 1980, the bricolage of form was especially apparent, mainly because they were made as cut-up montages and reproduced as photocopies. Justin Hoffmann (2002: 168) describes how fundamental the spread of photocopiers and the arrival of copy shops, including in smaller cities, was for the flood of new fanzines from the punk and new wave scenes. While massively exploiting this cheap, accessible technology, punk zines often drew inspiration from contemporary music magazines. Yet the zines were not mere amateur imitations of these magazines. In fact, according to the author and journalist Peter Glaser (2002: 123), on the level of content, they were “simulated rock journalism,” at times even “metasimulations.”

They were simulations, since the punk fanzine creators simply made things up: bands they profiled in interviews or whose sensational performances they reported on, records to review, and tales of adventures in the boonies. They also made collages with no clear meaning that resembled Dada rather than music journalism. For their fanciful inventions, they repeatedly sampled characteristics and properties of existing material from the media. They combined different kinds of sections and texts from newspapers or magazines in unexpected ways while breaking their forms in an ironic manner. And so we find a review of an Iggy Pop record in the fanzine The Ostrich written in the form of an obituary or while reading a write-up about a concert by the band Charley's Girls we at some point realize that it is actually a science-fiction short story. Some punk fanzines deliberately fall short of any and all expectations of known forms of journalistic representation. For example, a text printed in the fanzine AG Rock Musik [Rock Music Club] is described by its headline as an interview conducted with Mr Seffcheque and Mr Padeluun at the Label Night in the Market Hall, except it simply contains doodles, made—one can only assume—by the persons “interviewed,” although the scribbles carry no meaning for the readers.

In the same vein, in the 1977 debut issue of Total Control, we find the supposed “Exclusive Interview Ostrich/Strummer” (Figure 3), though it is merely a short, handwritten dialogue about a dedication to the zine that the interviewer is trying to get from Joe Strummer. The headline is printed on embossing tape with a Dymo label maker, usually used for administration and filing purposes.

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Figure 3.

Total Control #1 (1977).

Punk fanzines often break every boundary of established media formats. Willkürakt, a fanzine from Hamburg, took on forms that more resemble art objects than printed matter. A piece of sheet metal folded together, originally used to package building materials, a pure objet trouvé in other words, combined with a note with the word “Willkürakt” [random act], became an issue of the fanzine. Further issues took the already very stretched definition of a print product and blew it up once and for all: a transparent plastic glove filled with small folded-up notes, or a plastic plate with plastic cutlery and plastic pasta, all packed in a plastic bag.

Peter Glaser (2002: 124) also notes that common media boundaries were not binding. As an example, he points to the first issue of the fanzine brauchbar/unbrauchbar [useable/unusable or useful/useless]: almost one hundred pages of texts, handmade items, and other materials packaged in a freezer bag that defied any kind of classification. By appropriating such materials, media forms, and bits and pieces of content of any kind under the motto of “do it yourself,” the creators of early punk fanzines in West Germany crafted a meaningful cosmos for themselves. But they saw this cosmos as much more than a comment on “the system”—that is to say, relationally bound to a larger antipode: it was their autonomous zone. Anyone can create a fanzine. Everything is up for grabs and can be used. According to Hoffmann (2002: 169), the bricolaged material brought into a new context generates a Wahrheitserlebnis—a kind of epiphany in the face of an authentic truth—that urges the reader to act. This radical level of meaning-making productivity in which almost all members of the scene had a hand, be it as musicians, concert organizers, fashion designers, or indeed fanzine creators, was very much noticed and commented on by outsiders.

Perzines (2000s)

Similar forms of bricolage can be seen in riot grrrl and queer-feminist zines from the 1990s onward. Tonya Katherina Davidson (2005), who worked with Lévi-Strauss’ bricolage in her master's thesis at the University of Victoria in Canada, provides a range of vivid examples for this practice. She writes that feminist zines use the mode of bricolage to make fun of consumer culture's relentless targeting of women. The zine Beating Around the Bush, for example, reprinted 1950s advertisements for bras—“Do your breasts sag? A Spencer brassiere helps nature restore weakened breast tissue”—and juxtaposed them with an article about the ridiculous cultural aversion against sagging (Davidson 2005: 39). According to Davidson (2005), this against-the-grain approach to how feminist zines use found texts from advertising and mainstream media often functions to expose the beauty industry along with its implicit demand that women should conform to unrealistic standards by buying products to trim and shape their bodies.

From the early 2000s onward, many US fanzines that emerged from the riot grrrl scene continued to use bricolage techniques. These zines were no longer centered around a particular scene or fandom. Instead, they captured the everyday lives of their creators, who were explicitly autobiographical in their writing as they dealt with the “unique and often uncomfortable position of females within punk culture” (Kearney, 2006: 153). These so-called perzines, a portmanteau of “personal” and “zine,” opened up new themes. Their creators produced radically private texts about what was going on in their heads or what they were or were not experiencing in life. Such booklets ultimately became known mostly just as “zines.” When taking a closer look, these zines, too, reveal themselves as bricolages made up of elements from the media forms diary entry, letter, and magazine. Extremely personal insights into the creators’ everyday lives—especially people from marginalized social groups—alternate with texts that are more journalistic in nature as well as political statements.

Such zines oscillate between the intimate and the political, between private and public space, providing an outlet for specific forms of political agency in everyday life. The sociologist, gender and sexuality scholar, and zine activist Kristen Schilt (2003: 81) describes this in relation to so-called grrrl zines—feminist zines made by girls and young women in the broader context of the riot grrrl movement—as “c/overt resistance.” Schilt (2003: 81) understands this form of resistance as: “a sort of … resistance that allows girls to overtly express their anger, confusion, and frustration publicly to like-minded peers but still remain covert and anonymous to authority figures.” With their zines, these girls and young women create semipublic, protected spaces where they can share their experiences while also developing and trying out less hidden, more public forms of feminist activism. ⁹ Without the bricolaging of form as a cultural method, this principle of c/overt resistance would be inconceivable. Only once the different strands from the media genres diary entry, letter, and magazine have been combined and interwoven with one another does this specific space appear. It oscillates between protected anonymity and public manifesto through the sharing of personal encounters with sexism and discrimination with others who have had similar experiences. This process gradually affords the space a political dimension, ultimately generating a broader public sphere.