Hi, My name is Lennon! I first started making zines in college, or if you wanna be REALLY specific, middle school. I think it was because of a book series called Just Grace that showed you how to make those little one page zines and I was obssessed with making them into comics. Anyways, I forgot about it for a while. Eventually I went off to college and took a Creative Writing course where we made and traded zines all semester. This was around 2018. Again, I forgot about them, until 2023. I moved to Chicago in 2022 and quickly discovered the underground zine scene and became obsessed once again. I was making them daily at one point, anything to really keep those zines flowing. And thus, Zines by Lennon was born! I've slowed down quite a bit since then cos I accidentally burned myself out, but now I have a semi-regular publication about music called Stacks, and make whatever weird idea I have in my head to print. Zines are a great medium for that.
I love making those collage zines. I started perfecting my style of collage around when I made the TRON zine and Music is My Religion (both downloadable on this site) The process involves printing and cutting out images and making a collage that follows the layout of sorts of a 1-page zine. As such, they can be viewed entirely unfolded, or as a folded zine. I don't stop there tho. With TRON, I scanned in the raw collage and pulled it into Photoshop. Originally my idea was just to fill out all the white space with black, to keep that TRON vibe. But after playing around with Photoshop features I found that content-aware fill produced some really really weird effects that I quite like which gave the zine its glitch-y artifact look which I felt meshed perfectly with the source material. Below you can find the original raw scan for All Is Lost, a zine made with the same style using old photos I found in an antique store.
If you've printed out any of my printable zines, and you don't know how to fold them, here's a handy little diagram I found on the interwebs :O For now, all my printable zines are one page mini zines, but if I release any in different folding styles, you'll find their instructions here as well.
