Zine-o-phobia

No, I don't have zine-o-phobia... nor do I have xenophobia about Zines. I will admit though at my first encounter with Zines I found them to be quite foreign and strange. But by now (as my loyal readers know) I have created my own Zine page and I'm even so fortunate as to have it exist in the Special Collections at the Michigan State University library. I'm not trying to gloat, my work exists as a piece in the compilation that is the collective genius of my English class. While each page was sensuously unique (partly due to varying levels of artistic ability but mostly due to different kinds of creativity born from different heads of different people) there is was one page that struck me as both ridiculously complex yet sensibly simple.

For the sake of space I don't want to make the image huge, but I at least the complexity is apparent. The primary message as I read it was "Womanhood is an experience not merely a trait. We laugh about it, we vent about it, we yell about it, we joke about it, but most importantly we grow from it" with delightful visual enhancements to the italicized words. Additionally "Wimmens Comics" is talked about alongside a comic that further illustrates (pun intended) the way in which the comics allow for an expression of thoughts, voice, sex, and sexual identity.

I liked this page a lot because at a glance, I thought "wow, there is a lot going on here." Once I read what I called the primary message, I thought "that makes a lot of sense, I like that." Then I thought more about womanhood and the complexity involved. Then I thought back to the complexity of the page. Then I thought about how much time I had to think when our teacher said "take a couple more minutes find a page you like." Then I realized how the complexity of the page reflected visually the complexity of womanhood. It is not something that can be simplified with a lot of white space, but rather a complicated interplay of DNA, growth in society, anger, joy, sex and identity.