Boulder Zine Fest 2026

Intro

Hello! In this post I talk about the following:

• Boulder Zine Fest 2026
• Debuting my OMNIGUS series
• Some recent drawings

Boulder Zine Fest 2026

Earlier this month (Sunday, April 5th) was the first ever Boulder Zine Fest!

If you're reading this post, then you probably know me (or have at least seen some of my work online), which means you probably have already heard/seen me talk about zines before. But just in case you haven't and don't know what a zine is: a zine (pronounced zeen, like in magazine) is a DIY, indie publication containing thoughts or art of some kind. I think about them a bit like physical blogs in the sense that anyone can make them about pretty much anything. Zine fests are art fairs focused on zines, but often including other types of art, too.

This fest was hosted at Junkyard Social Club, which is an interesting and artsy space that is part coffee shop, part bar/restaurant, and part playground. Seems like the perfect place to bring kids and hang out or get some work done. I didn't take many pictures of the venue or the fest, but it was set up such that when you enter, you are facing a cafe counter, with a seating area with tables off to the left. The counter makes a right angle before the seating area and if you walk past it, there are some couches before a portal-like structure adorned with color lights that's probably eight feet in diameter and two feet deep. The portal leads to a bigger room with a high ceiling where there's a stage in front of some more tables. These tables are arranged with a clump in the center where a zinemaking station was set up and a ring of 12ish tables around that where the vendors were setting up. On one wall were some big garage doors that were open, leading to the junkyard themed playground on the side of the building.

I was tabling with my friend Earl as UFO Country Press and we had a good selection of zines available! Our half-page zines were Earl's UFO Country Press origin zine and my Color Palette Compilation, Galactic Transitway, and OMNIGUS zines (with the OMNIGUS being brand new). Our minizines were Continent 64, No Cows Involved, Welcome to Beauty, The Slime, Dino Facts, Redacted, Zine Nights vol 2, Planting by the Signs, and a new workbook minizine full of prompts!

I made this zine based on struthless's video Replacing your phone is easy when it feels punk. In the video, he suggests replacing screen time with zine time by by rubberbanding a zine and a pen to your cell phone. Replace the bad rectangle with a good rectangle!

In addition to these other zines, we were also giving away some free "how to fold a minizine" zines that had info about the CO Creatives Club meetups on them.

The OMNIGUS

Zines, the DIY magazines that are so often full of art, are a flexible format that can serve many purposes. Lately I have been thinking about three reasons in particular that have motivated me to pursue this series I'm calling OMNIGUS (an omnibus of work created by me, Gus):

1. The linear, paginated, and discrete nature of zines can be used to create a record of work that I create in a specific period of time.
2. The print-ready format is easily reproducible and enables cheap sharing with others.
3. The flexibility of the format can serve as a laboratory to test if compositing different types of creative work has any positive cross-media benefits.

Zines as records

I love projects. Drawing, making art with code, collaging, taking photos, writing poetry, and probably some more things that don't come to mind right now. I go through phases of different preferred creative outlets. I also like making zines, but to me, zines are more of a format for my other creative projects. I can make a zine full of drawings, I can fold a blank minizine and use that as the base for a collage, etc.

Generally, the ability to toggle between different media has been beneficial to me because it allows me to pick a medium that fits my mood. However it also means that my creative work is all over the place, instead of being in one sketchbook, or one folder on my computer, or on one camera, etc. That's not to say everything would be in one place if I did only use one medium, but things would probably be in far fewer places.

Zines, for everybody!

I was first drawn to zines after I got into digital drawing. I realized it was a way I could make my digital art more tangible. You can't hold a JPEG, and even if you print out a JPEG, a single piece of paper, while technically physical, almost feels less substantially than a file. But if you arrange a bunch of JPEGs together and print them out in a way that lets you fold them into an eight page minizine, the JPEGs become a physical object. An artifact that can be hefted, traded, put in a pocket, displayed on a shelf. In addition to a front and back cover, a minizine has three spreads: a beginning, middle, and end. Suddenly a single piece of paper has been imbued with magical potential.

The small size and light weight of zines makes them easy to carry around, which is exactly what I do. I always try to have zines on hand. I almost treat them like business cards--except not for business purposes. I like handing them out to people that I feel like I have shared a moment with; times when exchanging phone numbers or Instagram handles may not feel appropriate, but I still want to mark the moment in some way. Almost like a token of appreciation, or an acknowledgement of human connection.

Zines = science??

The last motivation for this project is a little bit of science. My hypothesis: if I collect together different kinds of my creative work, then I will see some kind of benefit in future projects because I will see possibilities in the physical juxtaposition that were not clear before.

The experiment is simple. I will put different kinds of media in this zine, then I will observe how this intentional mixing of work affects work created and juxtaposed in future issues. There is no control however, and the experiment is flawed in that the results may be skewed towards my desire to create more multi-media work. But since that is my goal anyway, I will count that as a success! I hope to conclude my results of this study in a future issue.

Some recent drawings

This first drawing is a collection of doodles that came together at a recent Creatives Club meetup!

This next drawing was from a random coffee shop drawing session. At first I had a blank background, but shortly after "finishing" the drawing, I came across a "matt + megs" animation that had a really neat style with full color foreground and a two-toned, simple line drawing background, which I really wanted to try out! I like the resut a lot and I think I will keep trying this.

Thanks for reading!

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