Contrary to popular belief "zine" is not so much a shortening of "
magazine" but a shortening of "
fanzine". Although we tend to think of zines and ezines as being largely devoted to
indie bands, poetry, and artsie stuff, the original zine movement sprang from the world of
Science Fiction.
Starting in the 1920s, the Golden Sci Fi era magazine
Amazing Stories used to publish the full mailing addresses of people who wrote letters to the editor. This had the effect of allowing sci fi fans to write to each other, trading critiques about the stories published in the magazine and early "fan fiction".
This impromptu correspondence organized into a club called the Science Correspondence Club which incorporated letters and fan fiction into a newsletter called
The Comet. This is the world's first official fanzine, first published in 1930. Many well know sci fi writers got their start in the fanzine realm first, the two most notable being Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. (So take heart you little maladjusted security guards who work nights so you can write for your sci fi fanzine... you too can become the next
Robert Heinlein ... or at least the next Ray Bradbury!)
{errr say, sport, why did you hotlink Robert Heinlein and not Ray Bradbury? I mean Ray Bradbury only wrote--} (--I'M AWARE OF HIS WORK!)
World War II introduced not only technological innovations like the nuclear bomb and radar but it introduced the ultimate weapon into the world of military and government
bureaucracy: the
mimeograph. Like the photocopier of the '80s and your company's web server of today, hundreds of people started using their office mimeographs to crank out (literally) their own Sci Fi fanzines.
The '60s introduced North American society to radical politics. The
counter culture adopted the skills learned by the sci fi fanzine publishers of the decades before to create their own fanzines. Major fanzines of the time were
The East Village Other,
Oracle (San Francisco),
Fifth Estate (
Detroit), and
Seed (Chicago). Fanzines at this time were devoted to left wing politics, protest, and druggy talk.
With the punk movement in the '70s and '80, fanzines turned away from counter culture politics to straight out music
rags.
In the '80s, a sci fi fan
Mike Gunderloy was writing for a number of sci fi fanzines and began to notice fanzines were published on a broad range of topics. He began to voraciously read every fanzine he could lay his hands on. He soon started writing his friends, tipping them off to interesting fanzines to keep an eye out for. However, he soon grew weary of writing so many different letters to so many different
friends. He decided to create his own
quick 'n' dirty newsletter about fanzines. He called it "
Factsheet Five".
Gunderloy noticed many of the fanzines in
Factsheet Five could not exactly be called publications for
fans. Is a person reading an
amateur publication about death penalty politics a fan of the death penalty? No. He dubbed these small amateur publications simply "zines". And the name stuck.
In the '90s, the cost of newsprint and paper skyrocketed. Coincidently, the
World Wide Web came into being roughly at the same time and the zine movement -- nearly ruined by a
recession (no money... no job... no access to office photocopier... no zine) -- was saved. Many-a-destitute-yet-aspiring zine editor, left highly in debt by the recession and student loans taken out to ride out the recession, quickly discovered a) the net was cheap b)
HTML was not a programming language after all. Why anyone could learn it!
Zines became
ezines.
Zines are distinguished from professional magazines (or "prozines" as the sci fi fanzine writers of the '30s used to call them) by their lack of
commercial intent and generally amateurish qualities (cheap paper, cheap art, cheap binding). Although with improved print technology today, some zines can be hard to distinguish from prozines based solely on production quality. Zines have limited distribution and a limited
subscriber base. There is little separation between the zine's production team and the community that it serves. Your average guy spanking it to
Playboy has little connection to the photographer/model involved. Zines tend to provide greater contact information regarding writers, artists, and letter to the editor writers.