From the Archives: The Queer Zine Archive Project

The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) is a non-institutional archive housed in the Milwaukee basement of queer activists and zine librarians Milo Miller and Christopher Wilde. It contains over 1,300 pieces of queer media history from zines to posters to comics. Each year QZAP hosts a cohort of summer residents who blend scholarly pursuits with art and activism. In what follows, I document my own residency at QZAP during August 2017 and detail my archival work on 1990s-era feminist and queer self-published minicomics. The rise of zinemaking in the 1990s lead to an explosion of minicomics self-published by women and girls, many of which live alongside the zines housed in QZAP. Two exemplary minicomics, Rachael House's Red Hanky Panky and Amy Ahlstrom's Sticky Crawler, highlight the queer and feminist discourse that played out in the pages of self-published comics during the 1990s.