I keep hearing about zines and how they're cool and awesome, but I've never really seen one, so I can't really get a sense in my head for what they are. Does anyone have like an online gallery of zines or something? Are they literally just a small, independently made magazine?
These days they tend to be single sheets of paper folded to look like a small 8 page book. That's the modern cute version. "Back in the day" - meaning the 70's and 80's a 'zine was a mimeographed or photocopied hand made full sized magazine, typically on what we'd call cheap printer paper today.
They were punk rock expressions, with large amounts of collage art, mix media art + poetry, and amateur fiction, and sometimes fan fiction. It was creative expression for people with no outlet: the punks, angry about economics. If you think punk was about music, that's the lie, it was about dead end careers.
Yes, it's literally that. Some are made with just one sheet of paper smartly folded into 8 pages.
you can find them in random art stands in small alternative markets. Sometimes music shop, art shops and small independent book publishers.
At your nearest city library if you're lucky. Christchurch's Tūranga public library has a stand of them although the stand isn't in an obvious place. Apart from that I've only seen them in local arty/hipster shops. I'm guessing avoiding publication on the internet is part of the appeal.
There was a TV show, Our Hero[0], that aired in the 2000s that was about Zines. I can't say I've ever seen a "zine" irl so I can't say how accurate of the "scene" it was, but it's definitely a blast-from-the-past.
