Final Gravity: Launching a Zine When the World Lives Online
Melinda Guerra (left) and David Nilsen. All photos courtesy of the zinesters.
This is the second of two unrelated posts that nevertheless manage to comment on one another. Both involve technology and how we use it. Superficially, the two technologies would seem to be polar opposites. Scratch the surface a bit and I’m not sure that’s true. They are tools humans are using to express themselves. On Tuesday I discussed how breweries are using AI, and today we go in the opposite direction, to a wonderfully tangible recently-launched zine, Final Gravity.
Almost exactly one year ago, writer David Nilsen announced that he and his wife Melinda Guerra had launched a zine. Not a blog, not a Substack, not a podcast, not a neural implant that received his coded messages subliminally, but an old school, hold-it-in-your-hand zine. This news caught my attention. The heyday of the zine was pre-internet. Indeed, you could say they were proto, analog blogs. Zines were put out by people who wanted express themselves but couldn’t use the normal, very limited channels available at the time. Zines were little bursts of life that flourished for as long as a store had them on the shelf. With no internet to order back copies, they were one and done. If you missed them, you were out of luck.
“Zines have been around since the early 20th century, and have been an enormous part of underground and non-commercial publication. Characteristically cheap to make, often photocopied, they have a distinctly “DIY” look. Often, they represent the voices of people on the fringes.”
The calculus has shifted in the 21st century. Today people have an infinite number of ways to express themselves. We have roaring torrents of information coming through our screens. Today, the challenge isn’t getting your word out there, but trying to find a way to cut through the noise. For David and Melinda to launch a zine is an inversion of the normal thinking. Why choose a 20th century technology and an 18th-century distribution model and limit yourselves to hundreds of people when the internet will deliver your words to millions? It seemed so counterintuitive.
I wanted to learn more, so David and I sat down to chat—digitally, naturally—to discuss this project and why its very tangibility may have salience in a world where the rest of words we read are mere pulses of light.
Out of the Digital Jungle
Full-time writers create careers by launching different projects that in an ideal world inform one another. David writes about beer and food and has developed a focus on the intersection between beer and chocolate. I was curious about the origins of the project. Where did the idea of a zine come from in the first place?
He acknowledged that it was an unusual choice, but pointed out how difficult the typical paths have become. “There’s definitely a relationship between blogs and zines,” he said. “A freedom to write what you want. But both have small audiences, too.” In 2024, writers don’t have a lot of good choices. They can write for other outlets, which means low payments and a loss of freedom, but potentially bigger audiences, or write online using blogs or newsletters. The latter option means even lower payments, small audiences, but lots of freedom.
David wondered about a third way. His wife, Melinda, is a Chicagoan who was familiar with zines in part because there was a famous store selling them there. David had also experimented with zines in the past. A zine made sense in terms of crafting their own vision and maybe, possibly, offered reliable if modest revenue stream.
“Making money on blogs today is absurd,” he said. “The other side of that illusion is, theoretically it could reach anyone, but the reality is that it’s so difficult to get anyone to look at a web page.” This has been true for a decade or more, but it’s getting worse now. With few exceptions, media is in decline on the internet, in some cases catastrophically. In an age where everything is digital and there’s just so much available, it can feel disposable (my word, not David’s). But offering people something tangible is “a different proposition. It’s more of a challenge to grow readership, but because it’s a physical object, it’s easier to ask people to pay for it.”
Building a Community
Zines can take many forms, and they’re often the work of a single individual. Final Gravity is a more ambitious project. Its form is a zine, but they’ve really launched a proper magazine, with writers contributing stories, as well as the work of a featured artist. That grew partly out of David’s interests: “A zine allows me to personally pursue stories I can’t get a commission for.” But he and Melinda also saw a gap in coverage. “I just wasn’t seeing the kinds of stories I wanted to promote.”
What stories did he want to read? The most recent issue has eight articles along with the art pages. The zine is 48 pages long and has stories on more familiar beer subjects like cask ale in Manchester, German zoigl brewing, and a meditation on a pub. But it also has a personal piece about friendship in Hong Kong, an article that quotes from the poet Rilke, and a lengthy report about starting a museum. Beer is always involved in the stories, but sometimes well in the background.
“I was really intrigued by people working inside the industry, writing about their experience,” David explained. “Even if it’s not about beer, it is interesting because they’re in the industry.” Of those eight writers, five are women. Articles have touched on lives confronting bigotry, but I also observe a strong current of meditation and joy in the editorial vision.
It’s possible for single-author enterprises to build a community, but it’s easier when people are working together. “I wanted to have something to build” he said. “I like the idea of having a community.” That connection arises between writer and reader, but also in the community of writers. Something happens when articles appear together inside the pages of a magazine, even—perhaps especially—when the topics are so diverse. It does present a challenge in working with part-time writers for whom an article is a second, or fourth, priority, but that connection builds bonds—something increasingly absent in our screen-centered lives.
Physical Pages
As counterintuitive as Final Gravity seemed to me, I began to understand the logic when I received my copy of Issue 01. This overly digital existence has created a yearning for tangibility. Ten years ago, I don’t think anyone saw fragile vinyl records, with their popping and crackling, making a comeback, but here we are. Physical books didn’t die, either—and in fact seem to resist the move to e-readers. There’s something about holding a book, feeling the soft page between thumb and forefinger, seeing the texture of the paper. It’s seductive.
It may also be a better way to read. People who read the physical copy of a book, magazine, or newspaper both understood the information and trust it more. With phones come distraction. While we’re reading something, they buzz and alert us of about something else to read. We scan more, read less, and absorb less. With a book or magazine, there’s no way to scroll. Distractions exist, but they’re out there in the real world, not being generated by the thing we’re trying to read.
I wondered if this love of the physical world played a role in starting a zine. David laughed and agreed immediately. “My wife and I have an extensive library. Whenever we go anywhere, we visit bookstores. I’m not a snob about it, but for myself, though, I love print media. I love books.” In starting a zine, he’s now immersed in that physical world. “We design it and print it and staple it all at home,” he said.
So far, the subscriber base is small, but it’s growing as that community comes together. It was such a small project they didn’t worry about a business plan, but I’m happy to report that it’s in the black; they’re making it work. “When we envisioned it, this was the idea all along.”
If you’d like to explore this world of zines, to hold a copy in your own hands, consider buying a copy or subscribing. Of course, you can do that online. The internet still has its purposes.