About

This is an archival collection of zines and ephemera from 1980s Bloomington, Indiana. The physical collection that is presented on the initial site launch is part of the personal holdings of Mike Whybark, who created and published the site beginning in early February 2022 while on the road in North Carolina.

Over time, Mike hopes that some of the missing issues for various runs can be found and digitized.

The impetus for digitizing these zines derived, in part, from the free time created by the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2019 and is one of several creative and publication-oriented projects that Mike has engaged in over the course of the pandemic.

Years ago, Mike created and still publishes another zine-oriented archive centered on the 1980s Bloomington zine Tussin Up. That site is at tussinup.whybark.com. He is considering how to blend the two sites.

Thanks and appreciation to everyone who created these publications, to Rebecca Kunin for catalyzing the digitization process, and to Euan McKay and Josh Larios for creating and updating the ImageMagick script which I used to deimpose the scanned images that form the basis of these PDFs.

The site is published using WordPress and uses a very heavily modified default WordPress theme, Twenty Seventeen. The PDFs were generated via export from Adobe InDesign. The zine thumbnails were generated from the PDFs using ImageMagick.

The site banner logo uses Synchro LET by Alan Birch for the main title and Merchant Copy Doublesize by S. John Ross for the subhead.

The body copy and heads use a sans font stack intended to emulate one of the commonly used font sets available to those of us working in type in Bloomington in the 1980s. The body copy starts in Libre Franklin, which emulates Franklin Gothic, in my opinion. Several of the people involved in the design and publication of these zines and programs work and worked for many years in graphic design and publishing and various photochemical typesetting machines were employed, by designers that include John Terrill, Steve Millen, Deneise Self, Paul and Jeannette Smedberg, and more.

One typical font set was the Helvetica set, which generally included full set of condensed figures as well as a Black headline variant. Much of that fontset has been licensed for public use as a webfont. However, the variant Helvetica Black has not been made freely available, and thus I have substituted Roboto Black 900 for that font.