FANZINES

Publishing in Mexico can be a very annoying affair, and because DIY, and because you like interesting context to surround your writing, and because you also write with images, and because you have accomplices in this kind of endeavour, and because you want to do what you want to do and because publishing is not maquila and because experiments are fun and since it was the nineties and the internet still did not make us jump into personalised advertising and because publications are not folders but objects and because hand-to-hand allows you to meet interesting people and because one likes to make things and because there are not enough spaces and because fuck everything else, well fanzines, right?

SUB: Subgenres of Underground Subliterature

It was 1994 and Bef and I were under-employed in a country that seemed to be in a tailspin, so we opted to get busy writing speculative genres. A couple of years later and already emboldened, we decided to make a fanzine that would also give us the chance to publish all the interesting people who were working on similar projects. Rodrigo Cruz helped us screen-print the covers, because we believed that a fanzine also had to be an object of desire (at least in my head, the screen printing sessions for the cover have become legendary). Without knowing much about anything, and with the help of Joselo Rangel, SUB was born, which took the "sub" as a compliment and extended it to the underground and alternative connections of the genres we were exploring (which was what interested us). Ricardo Mejía Malacara would join the team shortly after, and a whole generation of writers and illustrators appeared at SUB who marked, at least for a while, how the speculative issue was understood, both graphically and literary, in this strange country.

SUb

SUB 1, 1997. Cover: Bernardo Fernández BEF

SUB 2, 1997. Cover: BEF / Refugio Arriaga

SUB 3, 1999. Cover: Rodrigo Cruz

SUB 4, 2000 Cover: Bernardo Fernández BEF

SUB 5, 2002. Cover: Malena Barrón

NUMBER X: Media culture.

Swaying between fanzine and art book (low budget of course), Number X was an experiment issue after issue, which tried to explore media culture during the turn of the millennium. The magazine was edited by Deyanira Torres and myself, while Mónica and Nacho Peón designed it (although Miguel Murillo and Claudia Reynoso helped us more than once), releasing original fonts each "número". The agreement was that the design had to be as important as the written content, and that the point was to find an intermediate point in which both formed a particular discourse in each issue. Navigating between the high and the low brow, between non-fiction, the essay and the experimental, dotted with comics and hybrid formats, each edition had its own particular edge.

Numero X