I’ve been having fun making little hand-drawn zines. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re basically little folded paper booklets. Often printed in small batches and folded by hand, they’re a chance to hand out information on whatever topic you choose, or just to be a bit silly. There’s something really fun about handing someone a tiny book that they can take with them, and it makes a really fun project for kids, too.
There are a bunch of different sizes you can make, depending on your starting paper and how you cut/fold it, but I was inspired by the extra-tiny microzine that Leah Velleman made for the linguistics podcast Lingthusiasm. Gretchen McCulloch, the linguist who is particularly enthusiastic about zines, explained that kids seem to be really drawn to the tiny hand-sized booklets. So I thought, why not use the zines to explain science that kids really need to know? I’m speaking, of course, of the worm ramisyllis multicaudata, and how it can have more than 100 butts.
Yes this is for real! Here’s a couple of links where you can learn more.
Gizmodo article by Jake Buehler
Video by Bizarre Beasts
I had a lot of fun putting these together and I’m thinking it would be really fun to hand some of these out to trick-or-treaters.
Print your own!
Blank micro-zine template so you can draw and fold your own!
How to cut and fold (for this micro version you’ll first want to cut the page in 4 along the solid lines).
Bonus content for AI Weirdness supporters: I also made a much more niche zine for a local music group, and I think the drawings are pretty fun.
