Chicago is already home to a thriving alternative publishing scene, and the Sulzer Regional Library will join the party when its Teen Leadership Council hosts Comic Fest this weekend.
Zines, handmade and easily reproducable books (think Xerox machines and staplers), go hand in hand with indie comics, and the two-day event will exhibit local artists who create this kind of work. To spark the audience’s creativity, Saturday features a lineup of kid-friendly workshops, including a “Doodle Jam!” There will also be a handful of panel discussions about art careers, comics production and alternative publications like zines geared toward older students.
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Aimee Norris and Deanie Adams, Sulzer’s two teen services librarians, say that the students they work with were the ones to initiate the program.
“A lot of these kids were born in the 2000s and grew up with computers all around them,” Norris observes. As a result, she and Adams have both seen the students take a great deal of interest in comics and zines’ handmade, tangible, and distributable qualities. Norris says that is why an event like Comic Fest was such a natural fit.
Borrowing concepts from established events like Zine Fest and the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE), the teens reached out to comics artists and zine producers from around the city. Isabella Rotman, an artist who draws and writes comics often intended to teach college-age students about sexual health, will speak on one of Saturday’s panels. She says she is excited to see a public library embrace comics and zines, especially in a place like Chicago where she sees the DIY publishing community steadily growing.
“The comics scene in Chicago is very supportive and kind. We want to read and buy each other’s stuff,” she says. “You can wind up with so many zines that you don’t know how to store them.”
Rotman believes the public library’s involvement offers an accessible means of preserving these texts. Norris and Adams hope that Comic Fest helps raise awareness of zines’ official circulation within the Chicago Public Library system.
“We used to have spaces where you can sit and read them,” says Norris, “but I don’t think many people know that you can now check them out with your library card.”
And, if the teens and their zines are any indication, we are in for a whole new era of doodling, copying and stapling.
Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Sunday, 1:30-4:30 p.m., Sulzer Regional Public Library, 4455 N. Lincoln Ave, Chicago; www.chipublib.org