![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So we went to Canzine yesterday. Canzine is a long-running zine festival put on by Broken Pencil, the Canadian magazine of zine culture and independent arts and music. It was a huge show, taking place in two halls in the Art Gallery Of Ontario, jam-packed with zinesters selling zines and browsers.
When I first moved up here we did one of their shows, because we still had JUKUs to sell and wanted to, you know, meet some people and get into the zine culture. The Canzine we did was in the drafty pre-renovation Gladstone (or was it the Drake?). We paid for a third of a table crowded up into a hallway, and most of the other tablers were selling crafts, paintings, pottery, macrame. It was light on actual print zines.
This 2015 Canzine was a big change; lots and lots and lots of comics and artwork. The artists alley culture seems to have caught on with the zine crowd; not in a fan art way, but in the way the tables were filled with prints, buttons, colorful artwork, and generally more visual and more accomplished work than I'm used to at zine shows. On the flip side some of the prices were kind of nuts; people were selling zines for $10 and $20, which is way more than I'm going to drop on a book that doesn't have a spine and may or may not actually be any good. I picked up two zines, one about Black Flag and another about urban exploration, and if I'd had more money I'd have bought more.
I don't know if we'll ever table again at a zine show, but if we do, it's nice to see things are ticking right along nicely, as they are at Canzine.
When I first moved up here we did one of their shows, because we still had JUKUs to sell and wanted to, you know, meet some people and get into the zine culture. The Canzine we did was in the drafty pre-renovation Gladstone (or was it the Drake?). We paid for a third of a table crowded up into a hallway, and most of the other tablers were selling crafts, paintings, pottery, macrame. It was light on actual print zines.
This 2015 Canzine was a big change; lots and lots and lots of comics and artwork. The artists alley culture seems to have caught on with the zine crowd; not in a fan art way, but in the way the tables were filled with prints, buttons, colorful artwork, and generally more visual and more accomplished work than I'm used to at zine shows. On the flip side some of the prices were kind of nuts; people were selling zines for $10 and $20, which is way more than I'm going to drop on a book that doesn't have a spine and may or may not actually be any good. I picked up two zines, one about Black Flag and another about urban exploration, and if I'd had more money I'd have bought more.
I don't know if we'll ever table again at a zine show, but if we do, it's nice to see things are ticking right along nicely, as they are at Canzine.
