Re-reading old Eddie Campbell and Ilya and Phil Elliott and Glenn Dakin comics recently has me thinking about zine culture as-was and the ways in which I’m missing an entire series of cultural touchstones from decades past that the internet replaced, before the internet itself became dominated by singular powerful forces that restricted the all-access nature it once had.
For example, the odd thrill of getting a zine or a small press comic in the mail, and holding it in your hands. (And seeing what, if anything, had also been snuck into the envelope as a thanks for buying.) Or the record marts, which happened every couple of months in some communal space or another and would just be filled with tables of crates, each one with albums and CDs and tapes of things you didn’t quite know about or know if you wanted but looked cool enough that you were willing to spend money on it. Or the weekly music papers that you bought for the reviews and maybe an interview or two but ended up finding new favorite writers in when they’d end up ranting about something you didn’t really care about but read, over and over, transfixed.
I feel oddly contrarian about what the internet did to everything, considering, you know, it’s how I got the career I have now and also why I moved across the world; the internet of the 2000s changed my life in practically every conceivable manner. But that’s not the internet that we have anymore, and what happened in the process between, say, 1990 and 2020 was that the alternate spaces that allowed non-mainstream culture to flourish and find an audience were wiped out and replaced by an online dream that itself got wiped away as the internet became more obsessed with control and profit. There are entire eco-systems and cultural streams that just aren’t there anymore, with nothing replacing them.
I read stories of how favorite creators got started and get sad that paths like theirs literally don’t exist today; I feel sad for today’s newcomers and outsiders who don’t have anywhere to make a name for themselves and find their people. Every now and then, I read a story (online, of course) about how Gen Z and Gen Alpha is abandoning the digital for the physical and all I can think is, it can’t happen quickly enough.