Meet Forrest Martin, the skilled Portland artist and designer who makes ads by day, creates viral videos and record covers by night, and runs a magazine on the side. The magazine’s called Death. Remarkably well conceived and executed, Death’s features include writing and illustrations selected, commissioned, and sometimes created by Forrest.
Death is unique. It’s a labor of love. Contributors submit work without payment. The magazine is funded entirely without advertising. The final product is free to all and available HERE. How does such a system work. I asked Forrest a few questions about his idea-baby to find out:
SM: Why start a magazine at all? What’s your ultimate goal?
FM: First, to learn about magazine publishing and design from the ground up. Second, as a means of reaching out to writers and artists who are meaningful to me, and fabricate a reason to initiate a relationship. Third, to gather perspectives – and perhaps, then, evolve my own – on an issue that has monopolized my life and fears, in one way or another, always.
SM: Why start a magazine and not a zine, the common option for low-budget self-publishers?
Legitimacy and intention. A zine, to me, says it always wants to stay a zine, and wants to remain fringe culture. I want Death: a magazine for the enthusiast and non-enthusiast alike to have the opportunity to be a regular old glossy magazine. I love magazines, and the ability they have to influence and reflect culture in a temporal way.
SM: Was there more resistance or more support as you worked to create the initial issue?
FM: I haven’t met particular resistance, per se. It’s not a wildly successful publication in a “numbers distributed” way, so some could say that indicates resistance, but I was never delusional enough to think a magazine that references to death would be a blockbuster. For the most part, friends and colleagues have expressed support, advice, and interest – often in the form of links and personal stories. And I’m constantly surprised by contributors’ willingness, even enthusiasm, to participate in the project when they don’t know me from Adam. I think the topic resonates, and people respond to having a malleable theme to interpret. Reading Frenzy – the local independent press bookstore in Portland – has been immensely supportive in particular.
SM: Where did you scrounge your funding?
FM: It’s been a mixture of personal funds and a Stock Dinner grant awarded back in February; a monthly artist dinner where proposals are displayed and voted on by diners. The winning proposal takes home all of the entry money from that evening, which was approximately $450. I also managed to find the cheapest possible way to produce (digital, on-demand printing) and distribute (the printer takes care of physical orders, and it’s free to view or download online).
SM: Any fears when you decided to self-publish? Dish.
FM: Of course…that the magazine would be badly designed (by me), that the writing would be too shallow and remedial, that the whole thing would just feel gothic and gimmicky, that it would be too serious, that it wouldn’t be serious enough…
Any initial doubts have been proven irrational, since Death Magazine’s second issue was recently released, featuring psycho-sublime cover by Mark Warren Jacques, essays by David Rees (Get Your War On) and Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), artwork by Ian Stevenson and Michael Zavros, and a themed section asking contributors to comment on “superstition” as it relates to death.
Enter the Forrest: www.ForrestMartin.net
Access your Death: www.DeathMag.com
Spot the Forrest in this amazing ode to a typeface:
