$100 and a T-shirt is the best documentary about zines I've seen. It's actually a 45 minute doc, from the late 1990's or early 2000's, I think, from the Pacific Northwest. But this is only a 5 minute promo for it. I can't find the full documentary on YouTube anymore. Zines are what turned me from a dreamer into a doer. Publishing my first zine changed the course of my life, for the better, though it may not seem like that to a lot of people, looking at my life now.
This blog you're reading, Steve Emig: The White Bear, is creeping up on the 1,000 blog post mark. I've published well over 2,800 blog posts total, across more than 50 blog ideas I've tried, since 2008. About a week ago I noticed I was getting close to 1,000 posts, and I started wondering how to best celebrate this milestone. My original Freestyle BMX Tales blog, published from 2009-2012, got to just over 500 posts (here's FBMXT version 3). This blog, which I honestly thought hardly anyone would read when I started it in 2017, is now nearly double that.
After thinking about the 1,000 post milestone for a few days, I decided to write a series of posts about some of the things I've done that broke some new ground, in some way. Looking back now, from age 57, some things in my life seem like they were meant to happen. Over the years, I was drawn to several ideas and trends early on in their existence, the weird little sport of BMX freestyle being one of them, in 1983. This sounds weird now, as a fat, middle-aged, broke, homeless guy. But there were a bunch of times in my life where I got into something early on, or had an idea and acted on it, in some trend that got much bigger later as time passed. I've written about some of these things in this blog, but in bits and pieces over several years.
Writing and self-publishing is another one of those things. I published my first Xerox zine, as we called them back then, in September of 1985. Xerox (pronounced ZEER-ox, kids) was the best known brand of photocopy machines, which we used to copy pages for our zines. Somewhere in one of the early issues of FREESTYLIN' magazine, editor Andy Jenkins talked about zines. He said there were some skateboarders, and a few BMX freestylers, that self-published little, handmade booklets, about their local scenes. I didn't dream of being a writer when I was a kid. I liked taking photos, but I didn't even have a 35mm camera. I took pretty good snapshots. Something about the idea of making a zine appealed to me. I thought about publishing a zine for several months. I drew pictures, and designed what it the cover page would look like, while living in Boise, Idaho, in 1985. But I didn't actually make a zine. I just thought about making a zine. That's what I did as a kid. I had big ideas, and I daydreamed all the time. I thought about doing cool stuff, and then I didn't actually do it.
I graduated from high school in Boise, Idaho, in 1984, and didn't have any money to go to college. So I decided to "take a year off." I worked one job all summer, then worked at a big Mexican restaurant and lived at home, through 1984 and into 1985. My dad got laid off in the spring of 1985, and soon found a new job, in San Jose, California. He flew there and started working. My mom and my sister moved there in June, right after her school was out. I worked my summer job in Boise, managing a tiny amusement park called The Fun Spot, and rented a room at my best friend's house. The Fun Spot closed for the season in the middle of August, right before school started up again. Once that job was over, I packed up my ugly, brown, gigantic, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo down to San Jose. Just over a year out of high school, and a month and a half after my 19th birthday, I moved in with my parents and sister in San Jose, a place that was just beginning to be called Silicon Valley.
I didn't have any money for college, so "taking a year off" turned into a second year. I got a job at a local Pizza Hut, working the evening shift. I knew there were some pro riders, and a bunch of good amateur freestylers, in the Bay Area, but didn't know any of them, or where to find them. The San Francisco Bay area is huge, and this was long before the internet. So I decided to finally publish a BMX freestyle zine, as a way to meet other freestylers.
I had never actually seen a real zine, I only read about them in FREESTYLIN' magazine. I used some photos from a trip to Venice Beach for an AFA contest that summer, and spent a few days making my first zine. I put a few copies each in several bike shops that carried BMX bikes. The idea worked, I met some riders who lived in San Jose, John Vasquez and his friends. They told me when and where the meet-ups happened with other riders from the region. I started making it to the Beach Park ramp jams, and later to Golden Gate Park on the weekends, when possible. I became the "zine guy" for that scene, from late 1985 into mid 1986.
I published that first zine, San Jose Stylin', shooting photos with a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera, and typing on a 1940's era, manual (as in NOT electric), Royal typewriter, that I bought for $15 at the swap meet. The first couple of issues were just three pages, black and white copies, with stories and photos on both sides, and stapled in the upper left hand corner, like a test at school. Then someone told me zines, generally, were folded in half, like little books. Around issue #3, I started laying my zine out sideways on typing paper, and folding them into book-style zines. I soon bought an extra long stapler to complete the zine publisher's kit. I used that Royal typewriter, and one single silk ribbon, for all 11 issues of San Jose Stylin'.
When I made it up to the Beach Park Ramp Jam, at the shop where Skyway pro, Robert Peterson worked, I met pros, Peterson, Maurice Meyer, Dave Vanderspek, and amateurs John Ficarra, Chris and Karl Rothe, Darcy Langlois, and a few other riders, on that first trip. I handed out my zines. All the guys said, "Cool... when's the next one come out?" My reply was, "Next one?" My whole idea with the zine was to use it as an excuse to meet the other riders of the Bay Area, so I'd have other freestylers to ride with on the weekends. I didn't really think about doing more zines after that.
This is one early lesson about both zines, and about meeting your heroes, or people you look up to in some way. It's always cool to have a gift, even a really small one, when you meet people, particularly famous people, or people you want to get to know. A gift of some kind sets you apart when you meet people. A zine, even a sketchy one, was a cool gift to BMX freestylers in those days. In September of 1985, there were maybe 4 or 5 freestylers publishing zines, across the country. They usually only made copies for their group of friends, and maybe a few to trade with other zine publishers. So most freestylers had never seen a zine, or maybe only a couple of them.
Another good thing about zines (and blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels today), is that they give you a great excuse to interview people you want to meet. Now, decades later, in adult life, I see this on YouTube channels all the time. People start podcasts and YouTube channels as an excuse to meet people in sports, business, tech, or some subculture, that they personally want to meet. Even famous people do this. Race car driver Danika Patrick has a podcast, called Pretty Intense, where, as famous as she is already, interviews people in all kinds of other areas of life that she's interested in.
Lots of other people do the same. That's what I did with my zine in late 1985 and early 1986. I interviewed Skyway and Curb Dogs pro freestylers like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzales, Rick Allison, and several more of the NorCal riders. I wrote about the contests we went to. I shot photos of those guys, first on my little Kodak Instamatic, and later with a 35mm Pentax. In the process, I got to know those guys, beyond just being one of the amateurs riding with them on the weekends.
My zine just kind of evolved naturally. One really good idea I had early on was to send my zines to the real BMX magazines, in Southern California. But I didn't just send one copy to each magazine. I sent one copy to each person on the editorial staff, and the photographers, too, I think. My thought was, to have them getting my zine in the mail, and checking their own personal copy out in their office. Then, on a coffee brake or lunch, they would tell the others, "I got this zine today from this kid named Steve up in San Jose, it's pretty cool." I wanted them to not only have a copy of my zine, but to talk about my zine, with each other. This turned out to have effects I never imagined.
In addition to handing out zines to the local NorCal freestylers, and mailing them to the staff at the four BMX magazines at the time, I made extra copies to take to freestyle contests, where I handed them out to other pros and the people I wanted to meet. This is also how I met other zine publishers at first. We traded zines at contests. Then we would mail copies of our zines to each other later on. Zine publishers was a tiny subculture, within the larger subculture of BMX freestyle. By issue 11 of San Jose Stylin', I had a snail mail list of over 120 people across the U.S. that I was sending zines to. None of them paid me, they just wrote and asked for a zine. I was spending half of the $450 a month I made at Pizza Hut on publishing and mailing my zines, and on long distance phone charges, which were a thing in the 1980's.
My life, for that year of late 1985 into mid 1986, was to wake up late, and often run errands with my mom, or do any chores around the house. Then I'd go ride solo for 2-3 hours every day, in the early afternoon. I'd go home, take a shower, and go work from about 5 pm until midnight, at Pizza Hut, five nights a week. Most of that year I was the shift supervisor for the night shift. All during my shift, I'd be chugging little cups of Pepsi or Mountain Dew (No Coke at Pizza Hut). I got home, often riding my bike the mile and a half, after midnight, wired on caffeine. I would do a few balance tricks in my bedroom on my bike, and then work on my zine, either typing, transcribing interviews (off audio cassettes), or laying the zine out with Scotch tape on pieces of typing paper. When an issue was done, then I'd do the folding and stapling, and labeling the copies that got mailed. To be honest, it's a good thing I got the job at FREESTYLIN', because I could not have afforded to keep publishing San Jose Stylin' much longer on my Pizza Hut wages. It was eating up half of my meager pay.
Eleven monthly issues of San Jose Stylin' landed me a job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, in the summer of 1986. Remember my idea of sending a copy to each of the editorial guys at the magazines, that helped with the Wizard Publications guys. With a bike, a suitcase, and $80, I got on a plane in San Jose, and flew off to a new life in SoCal. I was so nervous about starting work there, that I got the hives really bad, and wore long sleeve shirts to work for about a week, until they went away. That was about three weeks after my 20th birthday. Without ever going to a single college class, at age 20, I was replacing a guy with an English degree, and suddenly responsible for proofreading two magazines each month, among more mundane duties. Getting the job offer was totally because of my zine.
Once I got to Wizard Publications, I was suddenly working with two experienced zine publishers, Andy Jenkins and Gork (editor of BMX Action at the time), and one zine connoisseur, Mark "Lew" Lewman. It was only then that they showed me how to really have fun and do zine-style Xerox art, blowing up and shrinking and distorting letters and photos. While my first zine had solid content, it flat out sucked in the design category. I got to practice Xerox art while working at the AFA later on, as editor and photographer of their newsletter, and with the 30 or more zines I've published since 1986. From 3 full size, 81/2" X 11" pages, (12 zine pages) for that first zine, I've published several zines that clocked in at 48 pages or more, which are basically little, handmade books. You can put a hell of a lot of content in 48 or 52 zine pages. My first poetry zine in 1992 was over 80 pages, and bound with duct tape.
More than anything, publishing that first zine, month after month, turned me from a big daydreamer into someone who could actually finish projects. After a while, actually starting... and finishing projects, became a habit. Sure, they were small projects, but I became a guy who did things, I didn't just think about them. That made a huge difference in my life. Maybe I wasn't doing really big things, but as a zine publisher, I began to actually do projects.
I've been doing that ever since, at one level or another. And little projects add up, over time. Publishing one blog post isn't a big project. But it's a project. I've published well over 2,800 posts now, plus another 50+ longer posts/essays, on my Substack.
However sketchy my living situation may be these days, I actually am one of the most prolific bloggers on the whole fucking planet. For real. Seth Godin is the most prolific blogger I know of, but it's hard to find any other single bloggers that have written thousands of blog posts actual original content, no one seems to keep stats on the most prolific bloggers. But with 2,800+ posts written, I'm up there, probably in the top 1/10th of 1% of the 600 million blogs online. And it all started with publishing a six page zine, 39 years ago, because I wanted to meet some BMX freestylers in San Jose. Like the tortoise and hare fable, slow and steady work really adds up as the years go by.
I only lasted a few months at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, I was a really moody, uptight, dork then, and not the right fit for that business. They hired 17-year-old Spike Jonze after I left, he was the right fit for Wizard Publications. Meanwhile, I was editor of the American Freestyle Association newsletter for most of 1987, so I didn't publish any zines then. Then I got a job at Vision's video company, Unreel Productions. After a few months, I got the urge to do a new zine. So I started a zine called Periscope, and published a few issues over the next couple of years. The idea behind Periscope was that everyone sees the world differently, like a submarine commander looking through a periscope. So that zine was my little view of the world during that era. I've published somewhere over 40 separate zines, including the 11 issues of San Jose Stylin'. As I write this blog post, I have a master copy of my latest zine in my backpack right now, which I haven't made any copies of yet.
My most popular zine ever was The White Bear's Very, Very Unofficial Guide to Huntington Beach. I published that zine in 2007, I think, for passengers in my taxi. Back then, every summer, maybe 300 college age Irish kids came to Huntington Beach for the summer. They lived with 8-10 guys and girls renting one house or apartment, to keep rent cheap, and they all found local jobs. I kept picking them up in my taxi, and they were always asking where different things were. So I made a zine that had a whole bunch of the history of Huntington Beach, and also listed the best restaurants, dive bars, clubs nearby, weird places, and different stores and stuff. I actually learned a lot about H.B. while making the zine myself. I handed those zines out, over 250 of them, that summer. People heard about the zines, and would come up to my taxi when I was sitting downtown. "Are you the guy who wrote that book about H.B? Can I get one?" I probably spent $350 publishing those zines, and got $2,000 or $2,500 worth of taxi rides from it. That's the one time a zine made me money.
When I started publishing zines in 1985, the only zines I had ever heard of were BMX freestyle and skateboarding zines. Then I heard that the "zine thing" started with punk rock fanzines in the late 1970's. In the 1990's, zine culture exploded. While I was making BMX freestyle zines, and 1980's skaters were making skateboard zines, and punkers were making punk zines, the whole idea of zines spread. I remembered Thomas Paine's "anonymous pamphlet" called Common Sense, that was self-published and played a role in the American Revolution. We all learn about this as kids in school, and it could definitely be compared to a zine in its day. Ben Franklin published Poor Richard's Almanac, which I wouldn't call a zine, but he also published less popular things, and so did other people who had access to a printing press in the 1700's. So DIY (Do It Yourself) writing and self-publishing has been around as long as the printing press, invented way back in 1440.
But the true roots of modern zines seem to have been rooted in 1920's and 1930's science fiction fanzines, what we might call fan fiction today on the internet. In the 1960's, there were zines called "chapbooks" with beat poetry or maybe political or activist ideas. Then came the punk rock fanzines of the 1970's, leading into the hardcore punk and DIY spirit as a key element of punk rock. Those fanzines inspired all kinds of weirdos, like myself, who began to write and publish all kinds of zines, including BMX freestyle and skateboarding, in the 1980's. A bit later came the feminist world of Riot Grrrl zines in the early 1990's, along with many other niche zines, from subcultures like activists, vegans, LGBTQ, and others.
In those years right before the internet came along, the early and mid 1990's, there were so many zines being published, that a magazine listing and reviewing zines, called Factsheet 5, was available on newsstands. The Factsheet 5 database ultimately had over 10,000 different zines listed and reviewed in it. Zine culture got its own theme song in 1998 with the release of Harvey Danger's song "Flagpole Sitta," where the singer sings that he wants to publish zines, among other things.
Then came the mass adoption of the internet, and first blogs, even before "Flagpole Sitta" hit the charts, and we all thought the zine days were over. I mean, why spend the time and money to actually type up, print out, put together, and distribute zines, when you can potentially reach half of the population of the Earth, by publishing a website or a blog, for free?
As much as I like blogs, because they are easy, free, and can incorporate video and audio, it turns out blogs and zines are very different animals. You can't physically hand someone a blog. There's a weird kind of fun and craftiness about actually making a zine by hand. And people read zines. Blogs are much more hit and miss. With a blog, you have to not only publish it, but you have to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization), continually direct traffic to it, and keep active on social media to promote your blog, so readers will actually find it. Plus, your latest blog post is fighting for attention against the other 12 million blog posts published today, among the 600 million or so blogs already out there online.
You can make a zine, hand it to someone, and chances are they will read it, cover to cover, sooner or later. Even people who don't read much, will read a zine. Zines are much, much less intimidating to read than a book. All of that means that there is still a place for zines, and they still work well in all kinds of subcultures, for niche groups of people. Zines are still popular in groups ranging from BMXers to graphic designers to comic artists, to today's version of the 90's Riot Grrrrls, independent writers and thinkers, poets, artists, and 20 other flavors of activists. Just today, working on this blog post, I learned that Amy Poehler directed the movie Moxie in 2019, where a high school girl sees her mom's zines (90's Riot Grrrl stuff), and starts her own zine. I haven't seen the movie, but the trailer makes it look like a zine-inspired feminist revolution takes place at her high school.
Anyhow, now thirty years into the internet age, as Web 2 is fighting Web 3, and people even I think are old still run way too many businesses and much of national politics, zines still have a place in the world. There will always be independent thinkers and writers, and all kinds of subcultures and niche groups. Zines are a good way to cover those scenes. And I, for one, love that.
Publishing a zine changed my life, mostly just by teaching me that I can have a good idea, and put it out in a way some people can check it out, tosee if the idea catches on. Some ideas do, and some don't. Zines were a really fringe thing when I made my first one, 39 years ago. Zines are always fringe, and always a way for DIY thinking to get out to a small audience. Actually publishing zines is a great way to begin to share ideas on all kinds of niche subjects, and zines play a role that blogs, websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels just can't play. While blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube videos are quickly forgotten, zines are treasured items. They get tossed into boxes, the backs of sock drawers, and other places, where they often get rediscovered months or years later.
One of my favorite magazines of the 1990's, the Asian pop culture publication Giant Robot, began as a Xerox zine. I bought a re-pop version of Issue #1, with a sleeping Sumo wrestler on the cover, at a zine convention in the 1990's. That first issue was an epic zine, and the beginning of a whole Asian culture movement and popularity trend. Giant Robot lives on now as a shop and art gallery.
To bring this full circle, I was one of the early zine publishers in the new sport of BMX freestyle, in the mid 1980's. San Jose Stylin' was listed as the top BMX freestyle zine in the U.S. in the August 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, which also contained my first freelance article. Just for the record, Mat Hoffman's very first editorial photo was in that article. For real. Cool coincidence.
BMX freestyle was only a couple of years old as a competitive sport when I published my first zine. I was one of the early pioneers of BMX freestyle zines, and still love both BMX freestyle and zines, decades later. Zine publishing is one of the things BMX freestyle led me to, that I got into early, and learned a lot from. I lost my zine collection in 2008 (with everything else from my BMX life), but I'll keep putting out zines now and then well into the future. I got to watch zine culture grow and spread, and keep going even with the internet and billions of web pages. That's pretty cool.
Here are some other videos and an essay about zines...
The History of Zines with Kate Bingaman-Burt (Look at the still shot of this video)
The Wonderful World of Zines - a written post on my Substack with more of my thoughts on zines
Shout out to Brian Reed, though I forget the name of his zine, he's the one zine publisher from that era, that I traded zines with, and am still in contact with today.
I've been doing a lot of more in depth writing on a platform called Substack. Check it out:
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