Hidden Places: on Making a Zine in the Era of Gen AI

My precious.

It took less than six months in Portland for me to decide I needed to make a zine. There’s potentially something in the water here, or perhaps it’s just the dream of the 90s. Actually making the zine, of course, took a long time; I had never made a comic before, and apparently you’re supposed to walk before you run. I joined a small community comics class, read a lot of great graphic novels, started sketching, kept in touch with other makers, and eventually found myself at the wonderful Outlet PDX, printing a collection of comics poetry.

Making this zine has been like swimming up from deep water. An all-consuming pressure has eased, and I’m almost dizzy with gulping air. It doesn’t matter if it’s good, or terrible, or even if anyone other than my husband reads it. My little 50-issue run has reminded me of something that it’s frustratingly easy to forget: we are meant to create, not just consume. And as of late, we’ve conflated generation with creation.

My process for the zine was pretty straightforward: think, write, think, sketch in pencil, think, ink with pens, think, cleanup in Procreate, think, print, and then a lot of folding and stapling. The folding and stapling was extremely mindless and I listened to a podcast about the history of trading card art while doing it. The rest felt like ripping out my heart and slathering it on the page, and then holding it up for show and tell. It was great.

On paper, in a sketchbook.

I’m aware that doing things on paper, for no real acclaim or audience, let alone poetry, ugh, like some kind of angsty teen, smacks of a certain kind of passé. I could have been vibe-coding an app, building my brand on LinkedIn, or learning how to build an AI agent to teach me B2B sales or whatever. But if I’m honest with myself, what I really would have been doing is consuming. Vertical video, memes, how not to dress like a Millennial, Love Island, Severance, news doom-scrolling, rabbit holes, gory details about every serial killer who ever lived, hey did you know the oceans are dying?

You know what it’s like.

Wiser minds than me have pointed to connection as an antidote to the mind-numbing isolation of the all-consuming algorithm, which has hacked our brains and led many of us to rot alone in our beds. But connection on its own is a bike in the wrong gear. What do I even have to say that isn’t a reflection of a meme, or a mere observation of what’s around me? And how am I to connect with others when I need to be hooked every 7 seconds with a steady hit of dopamine?

What makes creation powerful is all that think, think, think in the process, which I’ll call authorial thoughtfulness. This thought curates the work and forms it, which transforms the base elements (in this case, words and lines) into something that affects the viewer, as they see, consider, react to, and interpret the final product. I’m talking about art here. Art, as I see it, is when we imbue things with intent and create space for meaning. Engaging with meaning as an artist or a viewer builds taste, opinion, reflection, and discussion. As an artist, spending hours cross-hatching really builds up those attention-span muscles, and there is incredible pride in creatorship. Anyone who makes or consumes a lot of art will find themselves with a lot of things to say, which is food for connection.

All of this feels like the opposite of mere generation. AI slop is merely generated, which is to say that if it has meaning, it’s created only by the viewer—the same way a viewer can find meaning (e.g. the face of the Virgin Mary) in the coincidental (e.g. the texture of a piece of toast). On its own, it’s thin on meaning and thin on connection. But art is exceptionally slippery, and someone could take a burnt piece of toast that kinda looks like Jesus’s mom and post it on eBay for thousands of dollars, creating a beautiful piece of performance art about the commodification of the sacred that, frankly, does it for me.

Which is to say, I’m not a purist here. I do think art requires an artist, and an artist will think, think, think about what they’re doing, and LLMs aren’t really thinking in a way that matters. Perhaps there are artists out there using generated works as base elements, creating that authorial thoughtfulness through combination and curation, in the way of a conductor or film director. Total control isn’t a requirement. But putting in the effort to make something just so absolutely is.

My point is to recenter creation as part of the antidote to a very modern blech. Time and care matter, and taking them, on whatever little thing, is curative.