Roctober #50

www.roctober.com

I originally wasn't going to review Roctober. It's the size of a magazine! It has a colour cover! It's full of ads! But, they were invited to be at the Zine Pavilion at the ALA conference a few weeks ago, and they do only have a print run of 2,500 (though when does print run determine if something is a zine or not?), but what finally changed my mind was that this was an anniversary issue filled with content from every issue of Roctober up to this one, including when it was just a small photocopied thing (I think...).

Roctober is primarily a music magazine, though it's got a pretty eclectic mix of stuff. This issue features loads of reviews (most of which I didn't read, though I did check out the one of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, which terrifyingly made over $400 million dollars internationally, and seems to be in the top 150 grossing movies ever...), interviews (such as with the White Sox organist and a member of the New Monkees), in depth bios/retrospectives of artists, and way more.

There is _a lot_ of content here, and I didn't actually read all of it as that would have taken forever, and a lot of it I wasn't that into. There were some pieces I didn't even try to read due to the formatting (I think I've read enough huge walls of text with no paragraph breaks), but overall the layout works pretty well. I wasn't super fond of the way font sizes and faces sometimes changed from page to page, but I understand that this is reprinting older material, and that other people like it when that sort of thing happens (I generally prefer a more consistent look throughout zines I make). If you're into music more than I am (which honestly wouldn't be hard), you might want to check this out.

Photocopy Press #2 The International Zine Maker Issue

By Elizabeth J. M. W.
petitspoissons.etsy.com

Since I read a lot of zines, and go to a lot of zine events, and write about zines all the time, I’m clearly interested in zine culture. Elizabeth’s zine starts off with reviews of zines (and zine related things), and since there’s been a bit of discussion about it on the internet (including on this blog) I thought it was interesting to read that she only prints positive reviews. She says that she doesn't “see the point in wasting ink and paper on a zine I’m not excited to tell others about”, which is a legimitate argument. (I, however, have the infinite space of the internet!) She also says that she doesn’t want to make people upset by printing negative reviews of things that they've worked hard on.

But that’s not the interesting thing about this zine! The interesting bits are the interviews done with zinesters from around the world (including me!). Elizabeth sent out email questionnaires to zinesters who responded with answers about how they discovered zines, what the zine scene in their area is like, and other questions. It’s a bit English speaking country-centric, but that’s to be expected. There is some pretty cool info in there though, about the scenes (or lack thereof) in Israel, Austria, and other countries. Plus you can read my response, which is somewhat confrontational, devil’s advocate-y, and questions the very wording of the questions themselves. I am predictable.