Tl;DR zine archive: Navigating zine culture in an academic institution

The TL;DR Zine Archive is a collection of graphic design and illustration zines located at Washington University in St Louis (WashU). Curated by the authors—respectively, a graphic designer and an illustrator—the collection has three parts: the archive, in WashU Special Collections; a touring collection, travelling to other institutions through designed exhibitions; and a teaching collection used by WashU faculty. TL;DR (“too long; didn’t read”) privileges short-form writing, picture-making, narrative comics, and integrated text-and-image essays, encouraging practitioners like us to explore critical questions, enact authorship, and build an intellectual community. Here, we discuss the process of making and running the archive and address the tensions that we navigate in situating such a project within an academic institution.