Some  of you have seen small, homemade publications devoted to a specific topic such as punk, feminism, fanfiction, politics, art, cultural protests, etc. These pamphlets are stapled, photocopied, black-and-white, and usually printed in small batches of about 100 copies. They have it a do-it-yourself quality and a style that becomes familiar once you've read a few of them.  Go to images.google.com and search out "zines" to get a sense of what these publications look like. For example, if you searched for punk + zine, you might find something like the these.

Zines are an old and honored form of publication; for example, Thomas Paine's Common Sense (a key document for urging Americans to revolt against England) might now be considered a zine, and innumerable religious and political protesters from the mid 1600s through today have used the form to make their views known.  Thus, it's accurate to say that zines have a long history in Western culture.

To produce our own zine, we will use materials from previous assignments to create the blend of image and text. We will plan and develop our publication using the steps of the writing process: mapping, identifying the gaps, re-drawing the map.

For a sample Purpose & Problem Statement and a sample Prospectus click HERE.

For a detailed description of the assignment, background readings, and sample materials, click HERE.

Zines take many forms. Ours will be a black-and-white, stapled  publication.

The page above is from a zine by students at MCC. Click on it for a full sized image.