Zine Reviews

Toronto photographer Mar Wan captures the damper that the COVID Era threw on city life and subculture. Street preachers, doom prophets, the masked and unmasked. All in a city where the sun is out but no one’s sure if it’s safe to play.

With its glut of glittery, girly stickers, fire photography, takedowns of Pretty Women and useful relationship advice, Literal Bimbos, a litzine created by sex workers, is a work of art.

Reading these poems feels like running laps in the author’s head. The external world has fallen away and we’re along for a destructive ride through the stages of breakup.

Writer, illustrator and designer Marie Blanchet collects 31 spooky, surreal stories set in haunted, uncanny, but somehow still commonplace offices. Snippets of bizarre larger worlds, where the weird and unearthly are taken for granted as everyday realities.

Yawn Temisev’s comic collection left me more with a feeling of intrigue than it did any truly spurring positive or negative reaction. Maybe that’s a good quality in and of itself.

They prevent cars from bumping into garages and pipes. Temporary Services explains that these protective objects are necessary given the alley’s value as a low-key modern day agora.

Readers might expect to encounter more about the Walkman itself and all the great cassettes she devoured back in those days. Aside from a surprisingly accurate drawing of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, the zine morphs into a story about memory, sound, and even grief.

Ryan Downum’s chapbook is a weird and wonderful treatise. It resists full comprehension and manages to do so with both elegance and gruesomeness.

Austin MacDonald’s colour choices give the pages of Squire’s Reunion a sense of foreboding. Houghton’s writing complements this. To make a recent reference for fans of swords, it’s as though the petite protagonist of Ranking of Kings popped up in Elden Ring.

Not only is Cleopatria hilarious, they’re the kind and generous sort of artist who will proofread your bad poetry for you before you commit to screen-printing it.

Created to challenge beauty standards, Rose Riot is a fashion and activism zine founded in Portland, Oregon that is by and for kids.

K.G. Wehri drums up fear largely in service of amplifying the sexual tension. None of it is gory but at some point, the fangs do come out. These stories yield themes of loneliness, hope, staying the course and the flexibility of time.