How a Zine Helped Me Deal With Anxiety From the Quarantine

Sometimes a new creative outlet comes along just when you really need it.

You may never have heard of zines, but they’ve been around for many decades. They are small pamphlets or booklets of a mini comic or any topic of interest that are traditionally made using a photocopier to be self-published in small circles.

I had read some zines but never got into them. Recently, I watched a video on The Kid Should See This where Austin Kleon showed how to make a one using just a single sheet of paper. Initially, I thought it be a different type of creative project I could do with my son later.

But, there was a day last week where I realized that anxiety from some difficulties working from home and transitioning my son to the now online schooling — along with risks and uncertainties of the virus — had blocked me from able to do much. The zine video came to mind as a creative outlet for dealing with some of my anxiety.

I thought of a light-hearted COVID-19 topic and got my wife to work on it with me and my son. It ended up also helping her vent some stress of managing a busy pharmacy during this pandemic.

Our first zine is pretty basic and rough, but we had a lot of fun doing it. I bought the book mentioned in the video and my family is looking forward to doing another zine together. Closer to the bottom of this page, I’ve shared photos of it and things we learned to improve upon next time.

I’ve just started on one about struggling to work from home again that I want to share with other members of the coworking space I joined at the end of the year.

Why I Think Zines Can Uniquely Help People Now

Making a zine ourselves was fun but there’s a lot of enjoyment from sharing yours with someone else. With the single piece of paper technique, it’s simple to share a physical copy of your zine with someone else by scanning your “master template” and emailing them to someone where they can easily assemble it in seconds.

I think the personality and messy uniqueness of the physical copy of a friend or family member’s zine would be an enjoyable way to connect with people close to us that we can’t be in person with right now. I don’t know how much longer our local quarantine will last, but I hope to convince a few people to connect through shared zines while it does.

My Family’s First Zine

Things We Learned After Making It

• Don’t write near the edges of the paper because most printers can’t do borderless printing, so those areas won’t show.
• We used an art pencil (so we could fix mistakes), went over it in pen (so it would show better), then erased the pencil lines. The pencil I chose was too dark, which made it harder to go over in ink as legibly. The book suggested a 4B, but you could also use a mechanical pencil. Just remember to write lightly with your pencil if you use this same technique.