Jessica Durkin, a Media Policy Initiative fellow with the New America Foundation, has put together her video coverage of the Brooklyn Zine Fest 2012 (embedded below).  Jessica is a relative newcomer to the world of zines, recently learning about self-publishing and then attending the L.A. Zine Fest in February.

We were happy to be the focus of her very first video journalism piece (link), and are looking forward to seeing more coverage of events and triends from Jessica.  We've also included a handy viewing guide in case you'd like to check out a certain part.

NOTE: You may need to let Vimeo finish buffering a particular section before skipping to it.

00:00 - Intro featuring excerpts from Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture by Stephen Duncombe

00:53 - Arrival at the Brooklyn Zine Fest

01:15 - Montage: Found Magazine, Little Garden Comics, Slice Harvester, Thicker Than Blood, The Bushwick Review, Alone on Prom Night, Gabriel Kendra, Morgan Pielli

02:40 - Interview with Alycia Sellie of The Borough is My Library

03:10 - Interview with Matt Carman, BZF co-organizer and I Love Bad Movies co-editor

04:45 - Steady stream of attendees into the Fest

07:05 - How to craft a zine with Alycia Sellie

09:15 - The economics of zines with BZF co-organizer Matt Carman

10:40 - Painting with Dre Grigoropol

11:40 - Interview with attendee Ally, a zine reader and Riot Grrrl fan. Favorites include Lower East Side Librarian and Twinks for Sale

13:40 - Foot traffic and end credits

Lyra Hill is a comix and film artist living in Chicago. She writes about dreams, gross things, sex, gross sex dreams, and science fiction. Her comics are painstakingly crafted to be as beautiful and bizarre as possible.

You are fond of using color separation in your artwork. What about the technique appeals to you?

Color separation means a couple different things. In my films, I use it to create a lot of optically printed psychedelia; in my comics and posters, it's more about the printing process and how I want the ink to sit on the page. I do a lot of what I call 'fake offset,' which is a way of using a standard color copier to print each color, separately, on the same copy paper. The thing that really appeals to me about all of these processes is the finicky detail work and technical finesse. I've always loved getting OCD over my creations, and spending hours in a dark room with film strips and color filters all over the place, sweating over ledgers, or making five tracing paper overlays for five different kinds of drop shadows, feeds that hunger.

Are you looking forward to anything in particular while you’re in New York? Have you already started researching the best NY-based deep-dish style pizza to mockingly tell your friends back home in Chicago about?

I'm excited about seeing all my friends who live in New York! I'm also super pumped to be part of a show, and to bring my comic performances to a city other than Chicago. I actually can't eat pizza because I'm gluten-intolerant, but if I did I would most certainly NOT brag about New York pizza to my friends in Chicago. I would spit on your pizza and tell you all about some Chicago pie. (I'm joking. Truthfully, I couldn't care less.)

It's really great to work in both mediums. My ideas usually come to me through one of two routes: either the story comes to me first, or I get some grand idea about a new technique or difficult composition, and the narrative emerges from there. When it's the story that's first, I get to picture it as either a comic or a film, and beta-test in my brain how it would work in each form. Things like storyboards and panel layouts may seem really similar, but the pacing of a movie and the pacing of a comic feel completely different and are structured with different concerns in mind. Still, elements of each find their way into the other. I often think about intertitles as word balloons, and shifting perspective in comic panels would be so much more difficult if I didn't know how to frame a shot and edit a sequence.

What can people expect to discover at your table at the Brooklyn Zine Fest on April 15th?

I'll have my most recent comic, which is a compilation of a lot of work I made between 2008 and 2010. There are five comics and a short story in it, and it has an awesome offset cover with this big organic spaceship on it. I'll have a poster titled 'Motion Sickness' which is a drawing of the moon barfing on the Earth, and I'll also have the newest Brain Frame poster, which has this gross muscle-mass eyeball monster chasing five different characters in a sweet hell-scape I drew with Jeremy Tinder. There will also be some finely crafted mini-zines available.

Last summer, a friend of mine from out of town asked me to set up a comic reading. I gathered a few local friends to read as well, choosing people based on their work, but also the fact that they're weirdos who I expected would be fun to watch. That was the first Brain Frame. And that first show was such a success! There was an hour long black out in the middle of the third performance, but people stuck around anyway - the vibe was really intense, and you could tell people were excited and just so happy to be there. It was so hot, everyone was sweating, sitting on the floor. It felt like we were nomads watching shamans cast magical light shows. There was no question in my mind after that that Brain Frame had to continue as a series.

The thing that makes Brain Frame so exciting is that it's something I've never seen before. There's something to the mix of giant visuals (usually readers project the panels of their comics as a slideshow) in combination with artists finding a unique way to bring their work to life - whether it be with soundtracks, costumes, audience participation, giant props or whatever - that's challenging and unexpected in the most thrilling way. The main thing I tell the readers is to be as ambitious and weird as possible. I make sure that I can provide all the equipment needed, so they can dream big and don't have to worry about the more petty logistical concerns.

Running Brain Frame is a huge amount of work, but the reward is worth ten times the buckets of sweat I shed for this gig. Recently, I've taken a break from reading my own work, at least until Brain Frame 7, which will be the first anniversary of Brain Frame. I have started performing at other events around Chicago, and I'm actually going to be doing a Brain Frame performance in New York the weekend of the Zine Fest! The details are still being ironed out, but everybody should keep an eye out. You're all invited.

Lyra Hill reads Go Down from Lyra Hill on Vimeo.

Sure, we all know Denver, Colorado as the place where Dynasty was set, and for its famous nickname "The 5,280 Feet High City."  But did you know that they also have a first class zine library?

Billy McCall over at the Denver Zine Library has created a new video explaining the importance of donating your zines to them.  Mainly, so that when whatever city you live in is invaded by paper-eating locusts, at least you'll know that a copy of your zine Fern Gullyver's Travels will remain safe in Denver's vaults.

Thanks to Davy Rothbart of BZF 2012 tabler FOUND Magazine for the tip!

Q&A with a Brooklyn Zine Fest 2012 exhibitor.

Put A Egg On It is an irreverent digest-sized art and literary magazine printed on green paper out of New York City. It’s about food, cooking and the communal joys of eating with friends and family. The biannual magazine features personal essays, photos of dinner parties, special art projects, illustrations, as well as practical cooking tips and recipes. 

Put A Egg On It is made and created by Ralph McGinnis and Sarah Keough of R&S Media.

What inspired you to start Put A Egg On It?

 We wanted to make a zine, so we picked a subject that we'd been particularly blabbing about a lot. "What did you cook last night" seems to get asked more than "how much is your rent" in NY lately.  Obviously other people are as interested as we are.

 We love paper and we're interested in the art of editing. The Internet will never be able to showcase editing the way print does. Print is about artfully making choices, while the internet is about immediacy. Put A Egg On It does have a blog though, and we hope to be improving our website. I think it's important to have the two kinds of media feed into each other. They both have something to offer.

You work with a Brooklyn-based distributor to stock Put A Egg On It in food- and bookstores.  What has been your experience working with such a wide-reaching distributor, and how did you establish that relationship? 

 We work with more than one distributor - one for nationwide, one for the Northwest and another for worldwide. We also self-distribute to a few stores worldwide, who don't work with any mag distributors. That involves a lot of tedious emailing, calling and trips to the post office. Basically it just takes researching on the internet and emailing people with a few images and a description, then mailing copies to them. Strangely, every distributor we've asked has accepted us. We recently started with our worldwide distributor which is located in the UK, and they've been very nice.

One problem though, with all the distributors, is finding out exactly where the mag has been placed. We only know if someone tells us they bought it somewhere, or if the store contacts us directly.

Put A Egg On It #2 on Vimeo.

Put A Egg On It was one of Gothamist's “Six Killer NYC Zines Worth Reading.”  What kind of response have you had since that article?

 We got a one-day surge of hits, but actually the single greatest amount of generated hits and sales we got was when our contributor Heidi Swanson blogged us and a contributing recipe. That was a crazy week. We've also been mentioned in NY Magazine, Food & Wine, and Tasting Table. In December Put A Egg On It sold subscriptions on fab.com, which created a crazy amount of new interest. 

What is your favorite thing to put an egg on?  And what would you recommend not putting an egg on top of?

 A fried egg is pretty great on any savory food - it's only on desserts where it might not work. But who knows - MAYBE IT WILL. I will always put a egg on leftover next day chinese take-out, cold nachos or a leftover half-eaten hamburger.

MMM! on Vimeo.

Short excerpt from a GRITtv interview with Kathleen Hanna (of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, etc) on the subject of zines. Take a look!

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An excerpt from one of Hanna's zines, My life with Evan Dando: Popstar, can be found here.

(more info: ZineWiki / IMDb)

Just found this great clip from $100 & a T-Shirt: A Documentary About Zines in the Northwest

Really curious about the zine mentioned around 3:20 about shoes. If anyone knows what it is (and/or where it's available), please comment.

Second question: when will the East Coast get its zine documentary?