They had names like Putang Pop!, Toxemia and Track Marks. They covered topics ranging from comics to punk rock to shoplifting tips. Angsty teens (and some middle-aged enthusiasts) armed with X-acto knives and glue sticks spent late nights in Tampa copy shops carefully arranging them.
You remember zines, right? Those self-published, cut-and-paste, photocopied booklets that resembled collated ransom notes? During the '90s and early '00s, you could find them in nearly every Tampa Bay coffeeshop, record store and music venue bathroom. But today you can find nary a one. What happened to Tampa's zine scene?
First, a history lesson.
Zines, or fanzines, evolved from the small newsletters that music and science-fiction fan clubs sent out in the '70s. During the '80s, the punk rock culture adopted the zine as an extension of its anti-corporate, Do-It-Yourself ethic, and by the '90s, when nearly everyone had some access to desktop publishing, zine culture hit a, uh, zenith.
"In the '90s, there was a zine explosion all around the world," says Bob Suren, a longtime enthusiast and owner of Sound Idea Distribution, an independent record store in Brandon. "Florida really had a pretty rippin' zine culture. There were a lot of really good ones coming out of Tampa, Brandon, Valrico, St. Petersburg and Clearwater."
Punk rockers, political radicals and amateur journalists passed out (or sold) titles like Catch Our Breath, a punk zine out of Brandon, St. Pete-based Not For Profit and the popular Attention Deficit Disorder. Zines came in a variety of forms, from simple, four-page comic books to the 8-by-11-inch ramblings of, say, a teenage Mormon.
"I liked the fact that you get exposure to all these different views, more than you would get in the mainstream media," says former Creative Loafing intern Caitlin Kuleci, whose zine I Was A Teenage Mormon chronicled her break from the Mormon Church at age 18.
For the area's suburban kids, zines were a way to escape, or embrace, their locales in an uncompromising way.
"Especially in Tampa because things here are so spread out and so dead, [zines] were a way to find those other creative-type people out there that were doing interesting things," says Cameron Worden, who put out the crudely drawn Dumpo-X while a student at Bloomingdale High in Valrico.
"It was freedom of speech, freedom of the press in the purest form," adds Dale Lee, who self-published comics under the moniker Andy Nukes for nearly three decades. "When you go to a copier, make copies, fold them over and staple it yourself, you don't have to answer to anybody."
Although most zinesters would agree that the vast majority of zines were crap, some gained such a following that the creators turned from making copies at Kinko's to real newsprint magazines complete with ads and a price tag. From 1989 to just a few years ago, Bob Pomeroy put out MOE, a music zine named after the Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker. At MOE's height, Pomeroy printed 4,000 copies, distributing about half locally and the rest around the world. MOE even received a mention in People magazine.
"In two phone calls, I could arrange an interview with David Bowie," Pomeroy, 47, boasts.
Zines were "a roadmap to the fringes," he says. "You'd find a couple bands you'd never know of. Whole genres of music you'd never find otherwise."
And for many years, local zinesters say, Tampa Bay's underground could be found easily overground. In the mid-'90s, Tampa had an all-zine store on Waters Street, and in 2001, St. Pete had the Center Of Radical Empowerment that hosted a large zine library.
"It was really cool, because you'd find them all over the place," says Josh Sullivan, a comic-book artist (see interview) who helped organize CORE. "You'd go anywhere, and there would be so many zines. It was so awesome being in the presence of so many creative people."
Five years ago, Sullivan brought Tampa Bay zine makers together with the first area zine fest. Ironically, his compilation zine from that event, Stand Together, was one of the last circulated zines in the area.
"What killed zines?" asks Darla Nunnery of the now-defunct zine Hostage. "MySpace, message boards, PDF files and the high cost of postage."
Just like CD-Rs replaced the mixtape, blogs have pushed zines even more underground. And zinesters' complaints sound remarkably similar to what you'd hear in a daily newspaper's editorial meeting.
"I think the Internet killed so much of it," says Sullivan. "There was just that allure of 'I don't have to spend money to print it.'"
At his Brandon store, Suren picks through stacks of zines he's collected over 15 years. He recently gave away about two-thirds of his zine library. Kids don't come in anymore looking for them, he says; they get all their band info from the Web now.
"I think punks and print is starting to part ways," he says.
But after a nostalgic pause, his voice brightens.
"I'd like to see zine culture survive," he continues, "and I think there will always be a kind of person that will prefer print over online. Someone who is going to prefer the homemade to the mass-produced. Someone who is going to prefer something gritty and personal to the glossy magazine."
Sure enough, posted on a corkboard behind his head is a handwritten flier:
I am in the planning stages of a local underground literary zine. Any poetry, short fiction or essays will be accepted. P.S. No wrist-cutter bullshit.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2008.