The mini-comic exists where comic book culture meets the do-it-yourself punk culture of the 'zine. “Mini-comic” itself is something of a misnomer: mini-comics can be small, folded booklets, large fold-out accordion books, or even narrative posters and maps. As with early punk music, in the mini-comics scene most fans are also artists, and many mini-comics exchange hands through trading rather than purchase. Kevin Huizenga, one of a small handful of artists whose mini-comics have led to deals with commercial publishers, defines the mini-comic as “A self-published comic book, usually Xeroxed and assembled by hand. Content varies widely. Valued for idiosyncrasies and the personal touch” (Huizenga 2006: 11).

The other types of comic Huizenga defines in this pamphlet, which help define the mini-comic by illustrating what it is not, are the single panel gag cartoon, the comic strip, the ‘one-pager,’ the short story, the comic book, and the graphic novel (2006: 11). Readers of this essay need not be familiar with each of these categories. It is worth noting, however, that mini-comics, as part of the “alternative” or “underground” comic scene, are partly a rejection of the stories and aesthetics of the mainstream comic book, which in the U.S. is dominated by the monthly adventures of superheroes. The sixties and seventies underground scene that gave birth to mini-comics was notable for its sexual content, radical politics, drug culture, and autobiographical stories (see Sabin 1996: 92-129). Mini-comics still show this influence, though the confrontational style of the underground has made room for quieter narratives such as Huizenga’s own stories of suburban mythology, Sudanese refugees in Midwestern strip malls, and sunsets at the library. Mini-comics now share creators, readers, and retail space most notably with so-called “graphic novels,” the book-length comics of many genres that, with the success of works such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, have traveled from the edges of popular culture into major bookstores across the U.S. and around the world.

Huizenga’s definition of the mini-comic is as sufficient as any I have seen so far, in part because, like the object it defines, its hallmark is a very targeted incoherence. Huizenga uses two phrases, “self-published” and “assembled by hand,” that allude to an entire constellation of artistic concepts: authenticity, the vision of the single artist, originality, and craftsmanship. Sandwiched between those terms, however, we find a strange beast: the word “Xeroxed.” “Xeroxed” refers to duplication, mass production and reproduction, the intrusion of the machine into something Huizenga is also calling handmade. We ought also to note that Huizenga uses the trademarked word “Xeroxed,” not the brand-neutral “photocopied.” This one word, then, signals not only machine production and duplication, but also that these “self-published” objects are defined, again somewhat paradoxically, with reference to the corporate.

Industrialization and modernism brought an end to the idea that art existed in its own sphere, free from the “taint” attached to the commodity, systems of exchange and social relations. In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin (1998) claimed that mass production signaled the shedding of the “aura” of originality, tradition, and authenticity that one-of-a-kind artworks project. The related distinction between hand-made and machine-made, which Huizenga scrambles (in the service of accuracy) by using “assembled by hand” and “Xeroxed” in the same sentence, has often been used to reinforce the much more long-standing division between “art” and “craft” (see Frank 2000).

Starting with Huizenga’s definition, we can see in the lives of the mini-comic the extent to which these binaries have lost, in the postmodern and advanced capitalist landscape of today, much of the opposition that made them relevant. Where reproduction once signaled the destruction of originality and authenticity (Benjamin 1998: 1108), and machine production seemingly threatened to end the world of the hand-made, we now live in a strange landscape of hybrid forms like the mini-comic. These forms weave our former oppositions into a dialectic, and we can now speak of items that are “handmade” on the Xerox machine. The modernist storyline of progress and replacement, which Benjamin as well as Le Corbusier (2000) predicted, has not played out in so singular a fashion. Let us not be fooled, however, into thinking the object landscape of postmodernism is a happy synthesis of all the opposing forces that troubled and excited modernism. The mini-comic, like other hybrid forms of mass-produced “authenticity,” suffers from a bad case of nostalgia. Even as it looks to the past with nostalgia, it also speaks our fears of contemporary and future forms of reproduction, doubling and cloning.

But why the mini-comic? After all, ‘zines, mix tapes and CDs, along with many other objects we find in the booming market for crafts made by hand or with a handmade aesthetic, share the same contradictions as mini-comics. They also mix the authentic with the duplicated, the handmade with the technological. Many of them also traffic in nostalgia; some, like “retro”-style lamps and tumblers, have almost no other narrative.

The question of narrative leads to my reason for singling out the mini-comic from among its object peers. It also brings me to the second, until now unaddressed, half of the word “mini-comics.” I argue that the comics always dramatize reproduction in the way they build narrative, through the repetition of the grid and the graphic doubling of the subject. Though these aspects of comics highlight their status as a popular art form born of modernism, they also points to ways in which the medium speaks to the anxieties of what W.J.T. Mitchell (2003), updating Benjamin, calls the “Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction.” Just as, in Benjamin’s account, the artwork lost hold of originality and authenticity, we now feel those qualities slipping away from the individual subject.