Blog: Zine Machine

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For the past few weeks I have been toiling away at making a ZINE for the next batch of Data and Doctor Doom shows.

There are mulitple THORTS behind this, the first one being that I'm off to play a couple of festivals soon and so I thought it'd be nice to have some MERCH to sell. Long experience has shown me that there's no point at all in trying to flog MERCH at Fringe gigs, as people usually rush off as soon as your show's finished to see something else, but that people DO sometimes want to buy stuff at festivals. My initial idea was to try and record all the songs for a CD, but to be perfectly honest I could not be arsed so to do. Also, I have another IDEA for what to do next with the songs and indeed the talking which I'd rather do instead, more news of which ANON!

Another driver was the fact that I recently attended a comics conference and caused a minor FURORE by suggesting people stop moaning and just got on and DID some stuff without waiting around for permission from somebody else. Obviously once I'd said this people asked what *I* was going to do, so I had to come up with something! My initial idea was to do an ACADEMIC ZINE but, as with the previous idea of recording a whole album, 2 seconds thinking told me that this would be a LOT of work, so instead I decided to just do a zine myself about the show. To be more precise, I thought it'd be good to have something that EXPLAINED some of the ideas that I didn't have time to go into AND/OR went into some of the issues that have been raised by DOING the show.

This all led onto the THIRD motivation for doing it, which was that it was Actually Quite Good Fun. Writing the various articles was all right, but the FUN has arisen mostly from the decision to ILLUSTRATE it with some of my own DRAWINGS. Last year I created a comic strip poster for work which was a) FUN b) a LOT of work, so I thought I would try and focus on the former aspect rather than the latter and do some spot illustrations. This has been LOVELY, and I'm now thoroughly enjoying tinkering around with the layout to make it all look ACE.

The PLAN is to get these finished in the next week or so, so that I've got time to get them printed ready for my appearance at The Lakes International Comic Art Festival at the end of the month, but I'm also planning to make it available to buy online. I'm THINKING of doing various options, including a PDF version for non-UK people (now that various TWITS have made it expensive and difficult to send things abroad), but I'll see how it all goes. Either way, there should be an announcement in the next issue of the newsletter, and possibly more discussion of PRINTING efforts here! THRILLZ!!

posted 4/9/2025 by MJ Hibbett

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