Emma Burn creates zines under the moniker, “Emma Anticlimax.”

By Catie Byrne, Staff Writer

Published in print Jan 14, 2015.

As zines are taking off in the independent art world, there’s still a lot of curiosity among the general student body as to what a zine actually is, and what it actually does. Emma Burn, a freshman at UNCG, makes and distributes her own zines.

“[It’s] a mini-magazine”, said Burn, revealing a box of materials for her latest project, “The Way You Walked Was Thorny.” Since August, she’s been working meticulously, carefully folded printing paper in a six square pattern, gluing and stapling pages together and cutting out printed images of monsters edited with captions written in typewriter ink. It’s incredible how versatile a creative outlet zines can be, especially as a low budget means for writers to distribute their work.

Zines, like magazines, have an enormous range of themes, styles and topics contingent upon the tastes of their target audience.

However, as handmade, indie media, zines have numerous distinguishing factors; a price of about two to three dollars, no ads, markedly more personal and densely compact with content specific to each niche topic.

The kind of zine that Burn makes is a personal compilation of images, commentary and poetry about emotional abuse, metaphorically represented through Universal Horror monsters, a line taken from the 1941 film, “The Wolf Man.”

Under her pen name, Emma Anticlimax, Burn masterfully cultivated representations of monsters and humans through poetry and humor as well as imagery portraying the effects of monster-like humans.

In November, Burn submitted “The Way You Walked Was Thorny” to Pioneers Press, a zine and book printing press in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia. She received a personal email from company head, Adam Gnade, who wanted to buy twenty copies of her zine and promote it on his blog.

In the promo article titled, “Five Questions We Always Ask People We Love”, Pioneers Press interviewed Burn about her interest in writing, college life, books and new projects. In the interview, Emma details her future zine pursuits.

“One zine [is] about my experience as an abortion clinic escort in Richmond, Virginia, and a pre-zine of rambling stories about my wild, wild friends and family called “Die-Hard Alaskan Fisherman!!” for reasons I’ll explain if it ever becomes a reality. I get a lot of questions both online and in person about what escorting is like and how to get involved, so I’m hoping it will be informative and encouraging for folks looking to pitch in at their local clinic.”

Burn’s passion for zines inspired a friend, Kidd Vial, to explore their artistic abilities in their own zine, “Spooky at Heart.”

In the interview, Burn describes Kidd’s Halloween inspired zine as, “A cute comics zine about monsters and skeletons and loving yourself and others.”

The content of “Spooky at Heart” is lighter than “The Way You Walked Was Thorny,” and showcases Kidd’s comic-styled artistry and is similarly priced at less than four dollars per zine.

Burn is currently working on a short piece for a collaborative fanzine for the upcoming 10th anniversary of “The Sunset Tree,” an album by the Mountain Goats, and Kidd’s current project will focus on their strange religious upbringing in a pamphlet-style zine available in March. Zine enthusiasts can directly contact Burn or Kidd for an order or details regarding their upcoming zines.