ZX wins an award.

At this year's Comicdom Con, ZX was nominated for 'Best Fanzine'. You can see a video of the whole ceremony below. I'm the awkward person taking the award at around 8-9 minutes in and saying not very much to the microphone ("thank you very much" for you foreign barbarians). A few more thoughts after the video/jump.




The category was "Best Fanzine". In Greece, the term 'fanzine' is misused. What the term really means is a small (but not necessarily) print run publication, usually periodical (as in, there are more than one issues and they come out incrementally) whose subject is an examination of culture; Say, if I were a big fan of a football club (like AEK, or Olympiacos) and I put out 'Olympiacos Monthly' on a shoestring budget, that could classify as a fan-zine. Usually fanzines are about underground music, though. Most often punk and indie, and that's where we got the term from, as in Greece there is a tradition for the usual xerox'ed anarchopunk fanzine as there is all around the world.

Comics were gradually introduced in fanzine pages, and slowly comics-only fanzines started coming out. Again, it is valid to call something a fanzine if it's comics-only, but the comics in it deal with an item of culture. If let's say I were to put out a small run comic full of my own Superman stories, that's indeed a fanzine.

But ZX is not a fanzine in this respect. It is a privately funded small print comic book. I am not complaining or anything, in fact I am very grateful for the recognition. Just saying, for the future, the Greek scene should stop calling small press comics fanzines. Many 'proper' comics are small press as well. If the distinction is an economic one, then 'small press' is the proper term. If the distinction is a cultural one (subject matter and point of view related) then though I understand using 'fanzine' for historical reasons, there should be steps taken to use clearer terminology in the future. Self-published is a useful term.

There will be other, pertinent news in the next few weeks. This blog might be coming out of its hiatus soon.

All the best to you, readers. If there's any of you left.

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