The Year of the Zine: Microcosm Publishing celebrates thirty years

Something that you might consider hopeful in this mess of a world is the persistence of brick and mortar bookstores. Despite obstacles such as online retail, people are still reaching for physical media. This month, Microcosm Publishing is celebrating 30 years of amplifying hundreds of independent authors across book, comic and zine formats. 

To celebrate, Microcosm plans to pay it forward, according to founder and author, Joe Biel, who grew up in the punk scene of Cleveland, OH. Biel, who now lives in Portland, also released an updated edition of their book, A People's Guide to Publishing, in hopes of removing barriers for aspiring publishers. 

“I'm so massively grateful that we were supported for this long and so bewildered that we all made it, but also feel like we're just moving along as we always have,” Biel, who also identifies as autistic with ADHD and OCD, said. 

Biel wasn’t diagnosed until their thirties, and writes a lot about the experience as a neurodivergent author and publisher. Although it made life difficult and “failure rampant,” Biel said it gave them a lifetime of experience to see that “adults don’t know what they are talking about.”

“This is particularly useful in publishing, where adults really don’t know what they are talking about,” Biel said. “As such, I threw out the rules that don’t make any sense or serve the stated goals. I rebuilt mechanisms for what was best for what I wanted to achieve.”

The types of titles that Microcosm publishes is diverse, to say the least. From Know Your Rights: Protect Yourself and Your Community from Police, ICE, the FBI, and the Justice System to How to (Not) Buy A Car: A Graphic Novel for a First-time Car Buyer, there’s fun for the whole family. 

There’s even some books about Ohio, including Ohio Enigmas, a puzzle book by Claire Mercer.

Upbeat Nonsense sat down with Biel to talk about 30 years as an independent publisher. Keep reading to hear what Biel had to say about zine culture and its Cleveland-based authors.

The Q&A below has been edited for brevity.

I grew up in a wee punk scene on W. 44th and Lorain, on the West Side of Cleveland when that neighborhood meant that you needed to bring a buddy with you to the gas station for safety. There were no artisanal brunch places yet. The kids were a bit older than me, and it captivated my imagination, as anything was possible. Some of the kids made zines and by 1993 I was hooked. School had been a total disappointment, so it was fascinating how cool reading could be, and I wanted to share that with the world. Zines felt within reach and less limiting. I wanted others to feel what I felt in those clubs. 

It always strikes me that it hasn't changed much at all. I mean, we publish more books, and some might argue that they are better or worse, but the people remain the same. One of the earliest surprises was that focusing on resources for at-risk weirdos like myself was that it appealed to lots of people who were treated as unimportant by society. So they came out of the woodwork in force to support us from the beginning. So, if anything, the world came around to our way of thinking in the past 30 years. That's a huge relief as I was hanging on by a thread for a while there. Politics are popular in a way that they weren't in our infancy. Those titles went from marginal to mainstream. And we're here for it. 

We want everything that we do to empower someone to change their life and the world around them. That takes many forms but mostly it's in projects and ideas that we could never conceive of on our own. We need the hive mind to bring the best concepts. We think the best projects are topics that most people think they already understand or consider boring but can be brought out to shine in new ways. That could be anything from the history of Hawaii, to coping skills for freaking out, to how to bookbind, to feeling less alone. Perhaps it's coming from a world of theatrical concepts, but all of that makes sense under the same tent to me. When we're tightening the screws on a project, we ask "Is this an audience that we can reach? Will this help people?", and that's when we green light it. 

It's funny. Danny Caine and I both hung out at Mac's Backs on Coventry but didn't know each other because there's more than a ten-year age difference. I didn't even know that he was from Cleveland when we started working together until I heard his accent! We've worked with tons of Clevelanders over the years. Some current ones include Jessica Mullen and Kelly Cree, and our cover designer, Ron Kretsch, lives in Cleveland and was someone that I knew from my 90s punk days. Nick Perry did a fantastic book with us, Hello Cleveland, about what makes the city so unique, and reporter Eric Sandy literally wrote the book on my childhood clubhouse, Speak in Tongues, for us. 

The "Year of Zines" was something that we did casually without thinking about it too much. But most of our best ideas are like that. And it turned out to be truer than we thought possible. Zines were massive in 2025. I think they help to make people feel like reading is something other than homework or an obligation. It shows you how cool the world is and you don't have to look at a brick of a book on your nightstand and feel guilty every night. So we're doing more of that in 2026.