From A to Zines
Expozine 2010 to Put Print Media on a Pedestal
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Enough has been written about the death of print media to fill a Kindle. But like the common cold, Rasputin and the Road Runner, print media refuses to go down easy.
“I think we’re starting to get past this notion dating from the Internet bubble days that the Internet is bound to eventually replace all media,” said Louis Rastelli, the founder and organizer of Expozine, Montreal’s largest and loudest zine fair.
“Another major, overlooked factor is how professional publishing software and equipment is now cheap and widespread,” said Rastelli. “I can only wish I had the printers, photocopiers and Photoshop I have now back in the ’80s when I started doing zines.”
With 300 exhibitors this year alone, the statistical probability of finding something you’d like at Expozine is fairly high.
“Expozine is hands down the most exciting weekend of the year,” said recent Concordia creative writing graduate JP King, the cofounder of PistolPress and author of We Will Be Fish. “It has always been an incredible opportunity for me to make friends with other print-dorks, and find people to love the orphaned objects we all make.”
Graphic artist Sherwin Tjia, who will be premiering his zine The Little Cancer That Could: 38 Things You Can Do Every Day to Destroy the World, says you can really get to know people through their zines.
“No matter what kind of person you are, you can usually pick something
up that will
amuse and delight you.”—Sherwin Tjia,
Zine Editor
“No matter what kind of person you are, you can usually pick something up that will amuse and delight you,” said Tjia. “Unless you’re an asshole.”
Getting sufficient funding for Expozine remains the only really unsatisfying aspect of putting the fair on every year, Rastelli admitted.
“Our projects, clientele and milieu are still seen as ‘weird,’” he said. “[The promoters often] want us to limit Expozine to ‘real’ publishers and poetry books or whatever.”
“We see their point—tax money is involved and they want to make sure ‘real professional artists’ benefit from it. But we’re all about being there for the person just starting out, or the artist with the crazy weird idea for a publication or miniature artwork.”
“There is a myth that great writing is created by isolated loners,” said Jeff Miller, the author of the long-running zine Ghost Pine: All Stories True, a compilation of which was published in book form this year by Invisible Publishing as simply Ghost Pine.“But the truth is that every writer belongs to a community, and the stronger that community, the better the writing,” he said.
“In the early years of Expozine it was amazing to see just how many creators of printed matter there were in the city, since they had never before all been gathered in the same place. Without it, who knows how many zines might have gone unpublished?”
Part of Expozine’s success in drawing vendors and browsers has been dealing with the volumes of people that show up. Unlike last year, Rastelli
promises there’ll be no overbooking this time around, though.
“It tends to be comfortable except for the last two or three hours each day, when it can get very crowded,” he said. “Anyone with claustrophobia should pass by between noon and two on Sunday, before all the hungover hipsters show up.”
Expozine will be held at Église Saint-Enfant Jésus (5035 St-Domnique St.) from Nov. 13-14 from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. The Opening Party will be held at La Sala Rossa (4848 St. Laurent Blvd.) on Friday, Nov. 12 at 8:30 p.m. Admission is $5.
This article originally appeared in Volume 31, Issue 13, published November 9, 2010.
