factsheetfive#29, Originally uploaded by pirano.

Via boingboing I found this blog post Before the blog – zines from the 80s…. The blogger has scans of zine covers from the late 1980s from his collection–a collection which apparently has spent the last 20 years or so in Jugoslovenski Aerotransport carry-on. (Are those archival? Because it’s way cooler than a Hollinger box.)

He has also created a flickr group called The Piran Café zine repository for cover scans of zines that are no longer published (i.e., just about all of them). Perhaps when I have a spare moment, I’ll pull some of my mid-1990s zines out of the boxes under my desk and shoot a few covers for the pool.

In other zine-related news, I expect to attend the Denver Zine Festival, a week from Saturday, where I hope to buy some zines for the Colorado College Zine Collection and meet up with one of my heroes, John Porcellino, author of the self-published comic King-Cat Comics and Stories. While we go around celebrating our blogs’ first or second birthdays, Porcellino has been self-publishing King-Cat since 1989.

My own zine from the mid-1990s, Fiasco, lasted two issues (which I think is the median for zine longevity), though I’m thinking of dusting off the imprint for a special issue this summer. We’ll see.