Zining 101: A Questionable Top 5 List of Tips

 I’ve been creating zines for 30 years, give or take. I’ve done lit-zines, mini-comics, micro-comics, micro-pulps, ashcans, chapbooks, and gaming zines. We can even count ‘zining in an APA, notably the Robert E. Howard United Press Association (or, “REHupa,” if you will). That’s a lot of self-expression, even for someone like me.

A zine page from Tales of the 
Elvis Clones. Warts and all.

When I got started, computers were a thing, but not ubiquitous. For me and my friends, making comics in central Texas, everything was still done with Bristol board, pencil, and India ink. We did paste-up with Xeroxes and glue sticks. I learned to letter comics with an Ames lettering guide. We used proportion wheels to calculate how much to reduce artwork for printing. All things that take microseconds to do in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and InDesign. It was a different world.

But only in terms of production. Today’s all-digital marketplace means that there are no limits to how a project can look; indeed, there are ‘zines being produced now that have production values equal to or greater than a number of game publishers and small press outfits.

Ah…but what if you can’t pull that off? What if you have zero design sense? What if you have little (or no) budget for stuff like art? Buck up, little camper. That shit didn’t stop me (or anyone else) from making cool stuff back in the day, and it shouldn’t stop you, either. I can’t solve every problem, but I do have some general advice that you may be useful to you.

And just for grins I'm including several pages from my early zining days, to better illustrate that anyone can do this. 

Monty Haul Design Notes: Alchemy, Herbalism, and Poison

One of David Teniers; many paintings of medieval alchemists

I'm going to put a quick PDF doc here (because I like how it's formatted, and blogger will just make it look ugly, see) about what my thinking process was that led me to write new rules for alchemy in 5th edition. I wrote it originally for this blog, and so it's in my conversational style. I did this for a few reasons:

1. for those of you who don't know me, here's a pretty good snapshot of how I write, and also, how I approach game design.

2. Alchemists and Apothecaries are going to be one of the feature pieces in Monty Haul #1, and here's a bit of a preview.

3. The pdf is easier to distribute as a formatted object and it lets you download it now and read it later. Well, I do that; I don't know if anyone else does. But that's how I think, so, there you have it.

Here's the PDF link from my Google Drive: Design Note on Alchemy
Feel free to snag it and check it out at your leisure; it's a quick read. And if you are so moved to back my 'zine, Monty Haul, that would be great, too! It's already funded and right now I am flogging for stretch goals.

The Kickstarter is Nigh!

I love using "nigh" in a sentence, don't you?

Hey, just in case you missed the first notification, here's another one for you: the Kickstarter for Monty Haul, an old-fashioned RPG 'zine for 5e, starts on Wednesday, but YOU can get notified when it drops so as to not miss out. All you gotta do is follow the link below and throw your email into the gaping maw of the Kickstarter beast.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/markfinn/monty-haul-fifth-edition-zine-with-an-old-school-vibe

I will post major updates here, but if you want to stay tied into what's up with the KS, please back the project (even if it's just for a buck) and you can follow along with the updates I will be (hopefully) posting regularly in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks, oh my gentle readers. I'll see you on the other side.

Introducing my 'Zine Quest 2 Project: Monty Haul!

Last year, Kickstarter surprised everyone with a cool little event called Zine Quest, a celebration of the early days of Role-Playing Games and the 'zines that jump-started (and for a while, sustained) the hobby.

Their intention was simple: don't think, just do. Make a 'zine, old school, with folding and stapling and drawing and paste-up and so forth. Take two weeks to raise money for it. Then print it and move on to the next issue, or whatever your jam is.

It was very cool, and it produced some really interesting projects. I'm not the only one who thought so, either. In a stunning move that surprised absolutely no one, they are doing it again. And this time, I'm doing a 'Zine of my own. Meet Monty.