📚 When Zines Go Big
Rolling Stone • Bust • Giant Robot • Short Stacks • Poster Zine
📚 When Zines Go Big
Not every zine stays stapled.
Some start on the photocopier and end up on newsstands, bestseller lists, or pop culture timelines. This week on ZineStack, I’m sharing a few of my favorite examples of zines that didn’t stay small; projects that began with lo-fi, DIY energy and evolved into something much bigger.
Rolling Stone launched in 1967 with the feel and function of a political music zine and Hunter S. Thompson’s political reporting among its early claims to fame.
Bust and Giant Robot followed in the early ’90s, both born from copy shops and punk sensibilities, eventually turning into widely distributed retail magazines with loyal followings.
And one of my favorites: Short Stack Editions, which first appeared in 2013 as a Kickstarter offering three small cookbooks—Eggs, Tomatoes, and Strawberries—each a single-ingredient deep dive written by a different chef or food writer. It started tiny but struck a chord. Thirty-three volumes later, they published a hardcover cookbook of the same name and became a beloved staple on kitchen shelves.
Each of these started as zines. Not in name, maybe, but in spirit: small, specific, self-started, and driven more by passion than profit.
Not every zine wants to scale and I’d argue most shouldn’t. But it’s fun to trace the ones that do. They remind us that zines can be the seeds + soil: for ideas, communities, and entire publishing ventures.
(pictured above: that’s my beloved collection of Short Stacks!)
📏 When Zines Literally Go Big
We think of the mini-zine as one of the smallest and simplest zine formats out there: a single 8.5 x 11 or A4 sheet folded into eight tiny pages, often made on a home printer or photocopier.
But what happens when that same format gets supersized?
This video shows the classic mini-zine structure, with the exact same folds, cuts, and layout only this time, it’s printed as a full-size poster with big-budget ink and die cuts. Like a zine that accidentally wandered into a commercial print shop… and came out fabulous.
It’s a funny twist: a zine that went big not by selling out, but by sizing up.
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If you’ve got a favorite example of a zine that grew into something bigger or a zine that stayed small but went deep, I’d love to hear about it.
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The classic: “The Onion.” i remember when it was still a little newsprint zine in the early 1990s. As for ones that started small, went big, and then blew up on the pad before the 20th Century ended, I’d include “Ben Is Dead,” “Film Threat,” and “Science Fiction Eye.”
Loved Bust! They gave me my start in crafting when they featured my jewelry company Naughty Secretary Club! Still have all my old issues.