Cut, Paste, Distribute: The Zine Underground Is Bigger Than It's Been in Decades

The instructions are simple, in the way that only slightly chaotic things can be simple: print forty copies, fold them in half, staple twice near the spine, leave a stack at the record store on Milwaukee Avenue, mail twelve to addresses on the list, trade five with the person who makes the one about cryptid sightings in the Appalachians.

No ISBN. No distribution deal. No SEO strategy. Just paper and ink and the stubborn belief that if you make something weird and real, the right people will find it.

This is how zines work. This is how they've always worked. And after a period where it genuinely seemed like the format might fade into pure nostalgia, something has shifted. The staple-and-photocopy underground is not just surviving — it's growing, diversifying, and in some corners of American subculture, it's functioning as a more trusted information network than anything you'd find in your social media feed.

The Format That Refused to Die

Zines — shorthand for "fanzines," though the format long ago outgrew its fan-publication origins — have been a fixture of underground American culture since at least the science fiction fan communities of the 1930s. They hit a cultural peak in the punk and riot grrrl scenes of the '70s through '90s, when photocopiers became widely accessible and suddenly anyone with something to say could say it at scale. Or at least at the scale of however many copies you could afford to run off at the library before the staff noticed.

The rise of blogging and then social media seemed like it might make the physical zine redundant. Why photocopy something when you could post it online for free and reach thousands of people immediately? For a while, that logic held. Zine fairs got smaller. Distros closed.

But something interesting happened. The internet got crowded, then corporate, then algorithmically controlled. And the qualities that made zines seem quaint — their slowness, their physical presence, their deliberate obscurity — started to look less like limitations and more like features.

Who's Making Them Now

Spend any time at a zine fair in 2024 — and they're happening again, in cities and college towns across the country — and you'll get a pretty clear picture of who's driving the revival.

Queer and trans communities are a major force. Publications like the ones coming out of collectives in Chicago, Brooklyn, and the Bay Area use the zine format specifically because it sidesteps platforms that have historically been unreliable hosts for queer content. "We've been deplatformed, shadow-banned, had accounts deleted," explains one creator from a Chicago-based collective who publishes a quarterly zine focused on trans joy and community resources. "A physical object can't be algorithmically suppressed. Once it exists, it exists."

Sci-fi and speculative fiction communities have also been quietly rebuilding a zine infrastructure that never fully went away. The tradition of the SF fanzine is genuinely ancient in internet terms, and contemporary versions range from beautifully produced literary journals that happen to be self-distributed to deeply chaotic, lovingly assembled collections of fan fiction and criticism that would make a mainstream publisher nervous.

And then there's the paranormal contingent, which honestly might be the most interesting development in the whole scene.

The Paranormal Zine Pipeline

If you've spent any time in the communities that cluster around ghost hunting, cryptid research, UFO investigation, and adjacent weirdness, you may have noticed that these groups have a complicated relationship with mainstream media. Their topics get covered, sure, but usually with a winking condescension that serious investigators find exhausting. The result has been a turn inward — toward community-generated publications that treat the subject matter with the earnestness it deserves within those communities.

Publications like Threshold Notes (a paranormal investigator's quarterly that circulates primarily through mail order and trades with other zines) and a growing number of regional equivalents have developed loyal readerships that would surprise outsiders. "Our last issue had pieces on EVP recording methodology, a reported sighting from a highway in rural Tennessee, and a pretty in-depth essay on the folklore roots of shadow people," says the editor, who goes by the name Vessel and operates out of Knoxville. "We printed 200 copies. They were gone in three weeks. That's not nothing."

It's genuinely not nothing. Two hundred dedicated readers who sought out a physical publication, paid for it or traded for it, and read it cover to cover represents a level of engagement that most digital publications would envy.

The Distribution Network Nobody Talks About

One of the most remarkable aspects of the zine revival is the shadow infrastructure holding it together. Zine distros — essentially small distributors that aggregate multiple publications and handle fulfillment — have come back in force. Online communities coordinate trades. Zine fairs, which function as both marketplace and social event, have become significant cultural gathering points.

There's also a mail art tradition that feeds into zine culture, where the envelope itself becomes part of the work — stamped, decorated, sometimes containing additional ephemera alongside the publication. For a generation that grew up with email and then DMs, receiving a hand-addressed envelope containing a zine and maybe a sticker or a handwritten note is a genuinely novel experience. Novelty, as it turns out, has value.

"The physicality is part of the message," says Marcus Webb, a 29-year-old in Nashville who makes a music-focused zine covering underground and experimental artists that get no mainstream coverage. "When someone holds something that another person physically made and touched and mailed to them, that's a different kind of connection than a streaming playlist. The music I'm writing about deserves that kind of attention."

This is a point worth sitting with, especially for anyone who covers music. The zine format has historically been one of the most important vehicles for documenting underground music scenes — punk, hardcore, noise, experimental — that mainstream outlets either ignored or misrepresented. That function hasn't disappeared. If anything, as streaming platforms flatten discovery and algorithm-driven playlisting homogenizes taste, the zine's role as a trusted, community-embedded guide to genuinely weird music feels more relevant than it has in years.

The Big Media Non-Threat

Here's the thing that the zine community seems to understand intuitively, even if it's rarely stated explicitly: they're not actually competing with big media. They never were.

A zine with a circulation of 300 isn't trying to beat the New York Times. It's trying to reach the 300 people for whom that specific, weird, specific-to-its-community publication is exactly what they needed. Scale was never the point. Depth was.

In a media environment where scale has become an obsession — follower counts, page views, engagement metrics — the deliberate embrace of smallness starts to look almost philosophical. You're not optimizing for reach. You're optimizing for resonance. You're making something for the people who will actually care about it, and you're trusting that those people exist and will find you.

Some of them will find you at a zine fair in a church basement in Columbus, Ohio, next to a table selling hand-dyed patches and a guy who's very eager to tell you about a cryptid he's pretty sure lives in the drainage ditch behind his apartment complex.

Which, honestly, sounds like exactly the kind of signal worth tuning into.