Ink, Paper, Rebellion: Inside the Trnava Zine Scene That's Flying Completely Under the Radar

The first thing you notice is the smell. Ink and paper and something faintly mechanical — the specific perfume of a risograph printer working through a stack of hand-fed pages. In a second-floor apartment a few minutes' walk from Trnava's main square, Petra Šimková is running off the latest issue of her zine Prach ("Dust") in an edition of eighty copies. She'll sell maybe sixty of them, give away fifteen, and keep five for her own archive. The whole print run will be done by noon.

"I could put it online," she says, not breaking her rhythm at the printer. "But then it would just be content. This is an object. There's a difference."

Petra is one of maybe two dozen artists working in Trnava's independent comics and zine scene — a loose, largely self-organized creative community that has been quietly producing work for several years with minimal institutional support, zero mainstream coverage, and a stubborn commitment to doing things by hand. They make political satire, surreal graphic fiction, personal essays illustrated in scratchy ink, experimental poetry with hand-lettered type. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it is deliberately ugly. All of it is deeply, specifically itself.

What Even Is a Zine in 2024?

For American readers who grew up in the Xerox-and-staple era of 90s zine culture — or who know the tradition through its music scene associations — the contemporary European zine scene might look slightly different than expected. There's continuity with those older DIY traditions, but Trnava's zinemakers are also drawing on a broader lineage that includes Central European samizdat publishing (the underground literature that circulated in hand-typed copies under communism), the tradition of artist books, and the global resurgence of interest in analog making as a response to digital saturation.

The results are often more visually ambitious than the stapled photocopied newsletters of zine history. Risograph printing — a process that uses oil-based inks and produces a distinctive texture and color overlap — has become a favorite tool because it sits in an interesting middle ground: more tactile and variable than digital printing, more reproducible than pure hand-production. The aesthetic imperfections are features, not bugs.

"Every copy is slightly different," says Marek Žitný, who produces a comics anthology called Trhlina ("Crack") with a rotating cast of contributors. "The ink registers a little differently on each page. I love that. It means each copy has its own small history."

The Characters Behind the Ink

The Trnava zine community defies easy categorization, which is probably part of why it's been difficult to profile until now. There are students from the local university's art program. There are working professionals — a graphic designer, a librarian, a pharmacist — who make zines on weekends and evenings. There are a few artists who've been making self-published work for twenty-plus years and have watched the scene grow around them with something between pride and bemusement.

Petra Šimková's Prach started as a personal project during lockdown — a way to process anxiety through image-making that she could share with friends. The early issues were simple: a few drawings, some handwritten text, photocopied at a local shop. The current issue, number eleven, is twenty-four pages and features contributions from three other artists. The design has evolved considerably. The core impulse hasn't changed at all.

Marek Žitný came to zine-making through comics — specifically through frustration with the limited options for publishing experimental graphic work in Slovakia. The mainstream Slovak comics market is small, and it tends toward genres and styles that didn't particularly interest him. Self-publishing was less a philosophical choice than a practical one. "I wanted to read comics that didn't exist yet," he says. "The only solution was to make them."

Trhlina has published work ranging from psychedelic wordless narratives to sharp political satire that probably couldn't find a home in any mainstream Slovak publication. The political content is rarely explicit — it works through allegory, absurdism, and visual metaphor in ways that feel distinctly Central European. There's a tradition in this part of the world of saying difficult things sideways, a habit developed under systems that punished directness. That sensibility hasn't entirely disappeared.

Samizdat Echoes

The connection to samizdat — the underground self-publishing tradition of communist-era Czechoslovakia — is something several of Trnava's zinemakers are consciously aware of, even if their own work isn't operating under anything like the same political pressure. The idea that publishing something yourself, distributing it hand to hand, refusing to wait for institutional permission — that carries resonance in a country where that act was once genuinely dangerous.

"My grandmother kept samizdat texts," says Veronika Klimentová, whose zine Slepé Okno ("Blind Window") focuses on personal narrative and illustration. "She didn't think of herself as political. She just wanted to read things that weren't available through official channels. I think about that when I'm printing. The medium has its own memory."

Veronika's work is less overtly political than some of her peers — Slepé Okno deals primarily with memory, family, and the experience of living in a city that layers the past so thickly over the present that it can feel hard to breathe. But the choice to make something physical and pass it directly from hand to hand is, she argues, its own kind of statement. "The internet makes everything equally available and equally disposable," she says. "A physical object demands a different relationship. You have to decide to keep it or throw it away. That decision means something."

Where to Find It (If You Can)

The Trnava zine scene doesn't have a storefront or a dedicated venue, which is partly what keeps it invisible to casual visitors. Work circulates through informal networks — friends, events, a few sympathetic independent bookshops and cafés that keep a small selection near the register. There are occasional zine fairs, usually organized with minimal advance notice and held in borrowed spaces.

For visitors willing to do a little digging, the rewards are real. The work being produced here is genuinely interesting — visually sophisticated, locally rooted, and entirely unlike anything you'll find in a museum gift shop or a mainstream bookstore. A copy of Trhlina or Prach is both a souvenir and an artifact: something made by hand in a specific place by people who cared enough to do it the hard way.

"People sometimes ask me why I don't just post this stuff on Instagram," Petra Šimková says, pulling the last pages off the printer and stacking them with practiced efficiency. "And I think — would you ask a potter why they don't just photograph their bowls instead of making them? The point is the thing itself. The point is that it exists in the world and takes up space."

She holds up a freshly printed page — a dense, ink-dark illustration of a city that looks something like Trnava and nothing like anywhere real — and inspects it in the light from the window. Satisfied, she adds it to the stack.

Eighty copies. Noon. Done.