One has to let go of perfection when making zines. Even “simply” attempting to print out and assemble a batch of zines results in the messiness of margins being off, staples not ending up exactly on the center crease, and corners never quite aligning during the folding process.
That “letting go,” that diving into the deep end of messiness, is what—at their best—makes zines have a deliciously scrappy, handmade, and down-to-earth quality but also unleashes the imagination within their humble pages. And imagination, in turn, is both key to thinking outside all boxes, including statist ones, and something that makes us deeply human. Not that a zine with typos or a funky layout is going to single-handedly bring down all nations or defeat AI. Yet there’s something about reclaiming our ability to experiment—aka get messy—that points past the present, opening up possibilities we hadn’t imagined on first setting out to create something.
The fact that zines generally aren’t perfect, and aren’t necessarily meant to be, gives them a forgiving nature. They can make mistakes, and nobody seems to mind. Then they can try, try again, learning and growing, which is critical to any kind of imaginative experiment that just might lead to better and better versions of this world and ourselves.
For instance, last summer at a queer convergence, I ran across a zine on a sensitive topic that usually gets treated badly. It boosted a “5.0” on its cover. Turns out that this zine had gone through a creative rethinking—five times; each version improved on the last by sharing the messiness of the journey, as explained in 5.0 (perhaps there’s now a 6.0!).
So go wildly imperfect on your next zine, seeing it a place to cut-and-paste all the good you can imagine, messily playing with it, experimenting imaginatively as if you were already free. And maybe, just maybe, a bit of messy beautiful freedom will arise from the haphazardly folded pieces of paper on which the copy machine didn’t quite manage to ink well but it’s still readable enough to inspire someone you don’t even know to (also) dream big.
(photo: “the only good nation is imagination” tag, Athens, December 2025)
