The Factsheet Five Corpus
Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024–2025
My most recent research project—The Factsheet Five Corpus and Its Legacies. An Archeology of Contemporary Zine Culture—explores the conditions of emergence of present-day zine culture through an examination of Factsheet Five, a review zine that served as a postal hub for international zine culture in the 1980s and 1990s.
Published quarterly with a circulation of over 15,000 and reviewing up to 1,400 zines per issue at its peak, Factsheet Five has for obvious reasons acquired a place of choice in zine history. Yet, its role in shaping zine culture as we know it today has attracted surprisingly little attention from scholars. The approach of its founding editor, Mike Gunderloy, centred around an emphasis on “cross-currents and cross-pollination,” enabled the meeting and hybridizing of formerly separate types of publication: science fiction fanzines and mail art, independent comics and the radical press, literary chapbooks and punk zines, etc.
By revisiting this imposing corpus, my intention is to study the formation of contemporary zine culture, paying particular attention to the way some zines are reviewed and characterized. My main hypothesis is that the unprecedented work carried out by the editors of Factsheet Five has had a twofold effect. On the one hand, it has opened the way to hybrid publications liberated from necessary reference to existing magazines and periodicals. On the other, it has laid the foundations for the institutional framework that clearly distinguishes today’s zine culture from its previous iterations since the 1930s.