Bremerton Zine Fest 2023
Zines were made and lessons were learned
Let me start by saying, BREMERTON ZINE FEST WAS SO MUCH FUN! It was great to see so many artists from the community come out from their secret hidy holes and show off their amazing work. Dani Gray did a wonderful job putting together a HUGE event for something so niche! Seriously impressed.
I really didn’t want to be one of those people who stayed up until the wee hours the night before an event getting their shit together, but alas. I ended up staying up late Friday night printing, organizing, and stapling zines. I am very grateful for my wonderful partner Zach who helped me cut paper with absolute precision and assisted with every printer mishap you could think of. I covered the house with scraps of paper and made the most beautiful mess.
For this festival I wanted to debut BAD SEAL, so I ended up drawing a ton of one page comics about my girl Stella, the baddest seal. I also had a lot of fun drawing Stu, a seagull committed to reporting the garbage scene in Bremerton. To be honest, I drew the entire issue in about ten days. Every day I set out to just complete one page of comics, maybe two if they were simple. Sometimes I even got four done. A few of them I scrapped. The lesson here is that if you just spend a few hours doing something every day you can complete something much bigger! And here it is!
My only mistake with this issue is that the cover was an absolute last minute doodle. I really didn’t think on it much. And because it was fairly simple, people tended to overlook it. So we had to do a bit of chatting with passer bys, and hook them in to take a peek. I had readers standing around laughing out loud at my comics, which was a pretty dang good feeling!
My more popular sellers by far were the little colorful one-paper-folded-into-eight page zines. These were actually ones I made a few years ago with spray paint and markers. They were colorful and eye catching.
My fatal flaw was that it was hard to just look and know what topics might interest a reader. And can you see how hidden The Golden Beetle is? Oh, you can’t see it at all? Yeah, that was my mistake. I still did sell some of those, and had a few empathetic readers get hooked and have to read the whole thing right there. I am proud of that comic and I think it came out nicely. Actually, I’m proud of everything I brought to the table. Which is hard to admit when you are a person perpetually plagued with self doubt! It’s difficult for me to share my artwork with others. It’s something I am working on because I know that people actually DO want to see what I am up to. And how I am supposed to find more like-minded artistic friends if I hide everything I work on? So here I am, SHARING! Well, now I’m over sharing…
Oh look, my shiny stickers came in just in time too.
So here is a quick list of the lessons I learned from my first zine festival.
Spring for the colorful cover, even if the inside of the zine is all black and white. You will sell more!
Don’t bring doubt to the table. The little one paper zines I made just to fill space and they ended up selling the best! You never know what will connect with people.
If the event is outdoors, bring a tent for weather protection and bring weights so your beautiful papers do not blow away! I think next time I’ll paint some rocks with price info on them so that they can be an informative weight. Feel free to borrow that idea.
Bring a friend. It was really nice to have a partner there so that I could step away for little breaks without abandoning the booth.
Print extra zines with the intention to trade. It’s so fun to trade zines and end a festival with a collection of work from your fellow artists! If you’re on a tight budget make a trade box like I saw one artist doing. It was a good way to set a boundary on what you are willing to trade. The riso artists were a little more reluctant to trade because riso prints are difficult and expensive! I felt a little guilty asking them for trades but in the end we found something that was fair (I shoved a bunch of awesome stuff in their hands).
Don’t forget small bills to make change, and snacks and water. Take care of yourself!
I could fill out more things to do for a zine fest, but this list is what I learned first hand. I was not as organized as I had hoped, but that all comes with practice. Overall this little zine festival was a lot of fun and a great first fest for BAD SEAL!!!!
Stay tuned for my next Substack post where I will share some other very exciting news for y’all!
And if you read this far, you get a little comic treat.
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I will buy the Golden Beetle whenever you have it available 💛