Darin Johnson,
Shark Fear, Shark Awareness

Age: 26

Selection: "Market Research" (page 142)

Recent review:(from Zine World) "Two fins up—way up!"

Sample: No longer available.

Why publish a zine?
There are sharks in this planet's oceans.

What can you tell us about the selection you provided for "The Book of Zines"?
The Society of Shark Fear's Learn-to-Read series is an escalation of a single day's events which happened without much forethought.

Darin: Hey Dagwood, you want to take Robitussin and do something?
Dagwood: OK, what'll we do?
Darin: We can....survey people?
Dagwood: We can let them survey us, too.
Darin: Yeah, OK. What'll we survey people about?
Dagwood: Race car drivers?
Darin: Too political.
Dagwood: Hey, the other day I was thinking that the entire planet is one personality, right? And there's all these animals on the planet. Deer are meek, raccoons are curious, and whales are gentle, right. Well, look at sharks. They cruise around and eat anything in their path. People, garbage, whatever. They'll eat deer, raccoons, and whales in a heartbeat if they can. On the planet, everything eats something and is in turn eaten by something else. Pretend you're playing a game of rock-paper-scissors. Whichever symbol you choose is still vulnerable to defeat by another symbol. Well, the shark says, "Fuck symbols," and eats your hands, leaving you to wonder why you were using your opposable thumbs to play a game instead of fashioning harpoons.
Darin: OK, sharks it is.

Dagwood made up the surveys and we invited the illustrious Leif "Pygamalion" Hanson and the ever-fashionable Nathan "Godzilla" Curley to join A.H. Robbins and ourselves in a terrifying adventure to find important existential clues in local folks' knowledge of sharks, during the course of which we met a guy who had his calf muscle ripped off by a shark when he was a child.

Have you published any other zines?
I have a choose-your-own-adventure book in which the reader decides which drugs to take, and whether or not to seduce the Lovespider, and stuff like that.

Any general tips for aspiring zinesters?
Obsession is your friend.

What's your favorite part of doing a zine?
When all the writing is done and I can sit and drink coffee and play with office supplies. The result is getting mail from strangers.

In my other life, I'm a:
Space alien who drags logs through fields making crop circles.

Darin (Nick) Johnson died in Seattle on November 28, 2012.