Last November, I drew a bunch of comics about Linux / computers / various systemsy things. One every day, about 30 of them. (link 1, link 2). They’re also at https://drawings.jvns.ca.

Since then, people have been asking me to write a book. I have not yet written a book. (one day!). But! This morning I woke up and thought, “well, what would happen if I just formatted all those comics from last year into a small zine that folks could print?

So I put 24 comics together, ran my booklet-generating script, printed them, and voilà! A cute little zine with 24 fun comics in it!

Flipping through it, I noticed a few factual errors here and there, so it’s not perfect, but I figure better to have it out in the world and imperfect than on my laptop where nobody can enjoy it.

get the linux comics zine!

The zine is 24 comics like this:

View it online

Print version

“so you want to be a wizard” zine

In other zine news – I also have a new zine called “so you want to be a wizard”. It’s about how to learn hard things and get better at programming. You can get it for free here now if you want early access to it.

a script for formatting zines

I mentioned a “booklet-generating script” earlier in this post. What’s that, you ask? I have a script I’ve been using to format all of my zines into booklets. It’s just 50 lines of Python (mostly argument parsing), nothing fancy.

It took me quite a while to try to figure out how to wrangle all the PDF tools to do what I wanted, so here it is: https://github.com/jvns/zine-formatter

One day I have to write a love letter to pdftk – I’ve used pdftk to do so much pdf wrangling and I do not know how I would make zines without it.