Personal Narratives

Personal narratives of young women are common in zines. Zines provide authors the opportunity to freely expressive themselves safely and anonymously. Doris is a long running zine written by a young woman that is known by simply Cindy. To make Doris, Cindy combines a variety of zine making techniques with hand drawn and handwritten covers and pages, text typed on a Smith Corona typewriter, scissors and a glue for putting the zine together, and photocopying the final product for distribution.

Hiller Goodspeed is a Portland, Oregon zinester. He combines both written narrative and graphic narrative into A Proper Introduction. This style of storytelling appears often in zines, with authors using a variety of art from comics to collages to express themselves. Here Hiller uses short comics, doodles, photographs, and found objects to tell his story.

Attitude Adjustmentuses a comic to tell a narrative. The story takes place through a conversation between a psychiatrist and his patient. The lesson from the zine is that meditation is a way to balance internal struggles, because our problems and the solution to these problems lie within ourselves. Ultimately, the zinester author wants readers to hear one idea: “Don’t let them crush your spirit.”

Tremolo tells the story of the Philadelphia punk scene through photographs. The zine focuses on shows held in summer 2006 by local bands. The zine follows the typical zine making method of copy and paste, but the dominance of photographs strays from the average zine. This type of zine is called a photozine.