OZine  

Soul of a new printmaking magazine online  

For months on end he has speculated about the form and startup of a new printmaking magazine online. Writing about it puts him in the same mood as when he wrote the bible for his game, Emeralda. Essays too lengthy for blogs may become chapters in a bible.

What mean, Ozine?

OZine is the word I tried out to describe a hybrid that results by combining the ‘Zine with Online magazine. It’s the same as when electronic mail became e-mail, and then simply email. Ozine is also the name of an annual convention produced in the Philippines for Cosplayers, a performance art based on sources such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manga anime, comic books, video games, TV shows and movies, i.e., any entity from the real or virtual world that lends itself to dramatic interpretation . 

British benefits

Last October, Rachel Bartlett, in Great Britain, wrote an article for journalism.co.uk called “10 tips for running crowd sourced magazine projects,” and I copied it, and then copy-wrote over it. Copy-writing is one of the benefits of the age of digital reproduction so you can glean ideas from other people who publish digitally. The immediacy of typing words with your ten digits that become digital words is one of the wonders of the age of digital reproduction.

Our PrintmakingWorld Online magazine (PMWO) . . . I started this sentence with “my,” then—remembering I owe Rachel Bartlett and numerous other people for teaching me this is not only Bill Ritchie’s idea, but the sum of the parts thousands of other people have given me to work with . . . must show the social and communal nature of printmaking. Being able to use a British writer’s help, and thinking also about Warren Ralls in England who is helping the press-making business along, is one of the benefits of the age of digital reproduction.

The PrintmakingWorld Online magazine must also inherit the genome of printmaking if it is to be valid—the fact that printmaking is the ancestor of all media arts, a channel for individual expression that allows for repetition over time and space.

It follows that financing PMWO should come from its subscribers. How to begin? One way is to offer my legacy—artworks, memorabilia, videos, etc.—as incentives in a crowd-funding scheme.

Zines

Individual expression is a much hallowed (some say ballyhooed) thing. In screenplay writing I was taught by books that you can succeed in the movie business only if you write from the outside in, not from the inside out. You must, in other words, use the tried-and-true formulae that have been part of story-telling since Aristotle laid down his principles of the three act play.

It makes sense. However, as the media evolved to the point where anyone can be a printer, thanks to cheaper printing, then anyone who wants to write from the inside out may do so—as long as he or she does not expect anyone to pay for it. To fill five-hundred, $10 seats at a movie theater, your story had better be good!

Zines

According to Wikipedia, zines started a long time ago. In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin started a literary magazine for psychiatric patients at a Pennsylvania hospital, which was distributed amongst the patients and hospital staff. This could be considered the first zine, since it captures the essence of the philosophy and meaning of zines. The concept of zines clearly had an ancestor in the amateur press movement, which would in its turn cross-pollinate with the subculture of science fiction fandom in the 1930s.

I used the word Zines to describe my ten magazines that are published in my fictional (some might call science fictional) Emeralda Region—one on each island devoted to some aspect of the study of multimedia arts. The origins of the word "zine" are uncertain, but it was a term widely in use in the 1970s, as a shortened version of the word magazine, a time period coinciding with the transformation of printmaking into multimedia.

So it must follow that PrintmakingWorld Online is as much a part of the zine movement that started in the revolutionary days of Thomas Paine (“Common Sense”) and Ben Franklin (“Poor Richard’s Almanac”) as it is today’s online magazines that are adding to the paper-based magazine industry. Thus, I say, Ozine, but this is different than the Philippine Ozine Fest, an annual anime convention organized by the editorial committee of Otakuzine Anime Magazine.

Amateurish

The pejorative, “amateurish,” fits what every beginner is—usually youth but may also be applied to people enjoying printmaking at an advanced age, such as myself—in the arts. No doubt the term is applied when there is money at stake. No theater owner in his right mind would show amateur films in an expensive movie theater, and few art galleries can afford to show children’s art or student printmakers’ work. It’s not economical.

What, then, of the Ozine? Actually, every blogger may claim that their musings constitute “online magazines” as much as they are blogs, without the bother of advertising or trying to make money. The fact that many bloggers have gained notoriety due to their blogs—even becoming stars on TV shows as they are experts, thanks to their blogs and the huge followings they accrue.

A printmaking blog may become an online magazine if it fits the definition of a paper-based magazine: LFCPTC. However, with “writing from the inside out” in its genome, the same self-ish expression such as may have inspired the first handprints on the walls of caves made in prehistoric times, you face the probability that a printmaking magazine will have features of the zine. It may not be professional printmaking as it is known by the insiders of art schools, art museums and art galleries.

In her article, “Ten tips . . .,” Bartlett gives expert advice from those experienced in using crowdsourcing to work hand-in-hand with readers on the work of magazine production. What follows is a more or less copy of her words; as time goes on, I will adopt some or all of these into a plan for financing PrintmakingWorld Online. Her chapter will greatly assist in my planning for the launch of PMWO.