Punk declared –
”Stop consuming the culture that is made for you. Make your own culture.”
Sniffin’ glue was one of the first punk ‘fanzines’ it was produced by Mark Perry in July 1976 after seeing a popular US punk band; The Ramones. The zine was named after one of their songs: Now I wanna sniff some glue. Perry’s fanzine was the perfect punk form. it reported the moment immediately as it happened, reporting it from and insiders point of view. The zine rebelled against established forms of expressed and consumption: it was mainly expressed and experienced live
It was part of a very handson production. Everything Perry used was everyday tools that were immediately to hand, Sniffin Glue fir with the ‘do it yourself’ ethos which was already an important part of the punk culture. The punk zine came with obvious cut and paste graphics, typewritten or felt tip text, misspellings and crossing out. Photocopying did contribute slightly to the punk zine look by limiting graphic experimentation to black and white tones and imagery based mainly on collage, enlargment and reduction. Sniffin’ Glue was a pure form of showing anyone that something so personal can be done very easily, quickly and cheaply. Punk Zines not only looked DIY but also encouraged it’s ethic in all areas.
The zines were filled with a lot of content, things like photographs, writted analysis, quotes, slogans, drawings. There was a lot of defacing within the pages and things that were seen as controversial to the large number of people as this wasn’t a social norm, however, to punks, this was something that they could all relate to and that they felt they had a correlation towards. The way they were constructed in such a clever way that the content was creative and fun yet informative at the same time.
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