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PIGS, let's face it: If running a blog had been as easy and near-instantaneous back in 1993 as it is today, I'd no doubt have started a blog and The Inner Swine, beloved zine of dozens, would never have gotten started. I had this realization the other day whilst posting to the newsgroup alt.zines—yes, you bastards, I still post to a fucking newsgroup, and you can keep your dinosaur jokes to yourself, dammit. And for those of you who don't even know what the hell a newsgroup is, well, trust me, it doesn't matter much. Newsgroups were the forums of yesteryear, that's all you need to know. Anyway, someone posted to alt.zines asking a variation on the eternal question of whether or not paper zines still matter or if the Internet had killed them off for good. This sort of question pops up every now and then when people have that sudden realization that you can pretty much push all your writing and drawing on to the web and cut out all that expensive and tedious printing and mailing. What happens when everyone figures this out? Why, the end of paper zines, no doubt. This sort of post always gets the few people still lurking on alt.zines to post something—I posted how I thought the “spirit" of zines would still exist in other formats like web pages etc, and someone immediately called me a jackass for thinking that something like Cometbus could be replicated on the web. I get called a jackass a lot, actually. And not just on alt.zines. Anyway, this got me to thinking—would The Inner Swine exist if there'd been blogs and other internet options back in 1993? I mean easy options. I don't mean if I could have hopped up some sort of SGML and Kermit monstrosity—and if you don't know what Kermit is, don't worry—I mean if the sort of easy options that exist today existed then. I mean, these days all you need are basic motor skills and a free webmail account somewhere, and you too can be blogging in about five minutes. If I'd had the same option, is there any chance I'd have turned it down in favor of years of paper cuts, slaving over a hot photocopier, and wasting postage on people who moved out of their apartment months ago? The answer: Not a damn chance. No, I'd have signed up for some sort of free Blog account somewhere and started the Jeff News Daily Report. I'd have stocked it full of animated GIFs and I would have had a guestbook, this being the early 1990s. And I would never have started The Inner Swine. And while I think that Blogs and such can be excellent and entertaining and amazing, I do think that zines—paper zines—are better in some ways than Blogs and other web material. I'm kind of glad that I didn't have Blogger or Wordpress back in 1993. This might just be my advancing age, of course—maybe I just dislike the new hotness in favor of what I'm familiar with. Except, I have after all, embraced the web and all its evils. I run three web sites and I actually (shudder) blog these days. I enjoy doing all that. But I still think there are some advantages to a formal paper zine. One, creating my zine is a little more formalized and structured than blogging. Sure, I tend to ramble on in my zine just like on a blog, but for some reason the limitations of having a page count forces me to write with a bit more organization and clarity, creating actual essays with points and everything. For me, with blogs, I tend to just ramble. I can go as long or short as I like—in fact, short is better because no one likes to read long passages on a computer screen. So Blogging tends to encourage, in me, short, pithy posts that get right to the point but don't actually discuss or investigate it. In the zine, because I have pages to fill and more constraints on how to express my thoughts. I could of course just ramble on as I do in blog posts, but something about the physical structure of the zine stops me from doing that. This is, of course, likely just me—other people may not experience the same feeling of helpful constraint when faced with filling a physical and finite object with words. As always with anything having to do with this zine, it is all about me. Two, with a paper zine I don't feel that evil, amorphous pressure to post on a constant basis. The zine comes out on a regular schedule, three months between issues. I could alter that as I see fit, going bi-annual or annual or, in a fit of madness, monthly. What the hell—it's my zine. For some reason with a blog I feel pressure to post constantly because people will stop checking the blog if you don't have anything new for a while. With the paper zine, I mail the damn thing to you, or it shows up on a bookshelf somewhere, prompting you to mail me all the cash in your pockets. Right? With my blog, I get the feeling that if I don't have a new entry there every day or so, eventually you get tired of clicking the bookmark and give up. I guess I could blast out emails every time I update the blog and treat it more like an issue—write up all the material and then post it once every three months and send out announcements. Maybe someday that's what TIS will be. I suspect that having 25,000 words to read on a computer screen won't be attractive to people, or printing out 60 pages of material on their own dime. I'd have to subsidize. Jesus, I'd end up paying all of you for reading my zine! My pants just fell off at the thought. So, there you have it. I don't think blogging is better or worse than putting out a paper zine—I think it is different in both creative process and style. This is why I can blog and put out the zine at the same time. Well, that and my superhuman powers. While i don't think blogging is inferior or anything like that, I am glad I didn't have that option, because frankly I would have started a blog in 1993 and never gotten around to the zine, and I suspect I'd have 35 readers of my blog and I wouldn't have written some of the pieces that have appeared in TIS, some of which I think are really well done, some of which even other people—like the folks at the defunct Zine Yearbook—have thought were well done. Plus, I wouldn't have these permanent toner stains on my hands, which I know for a fact the ladies consider sexy.
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Nov 15, 2007