Joshua Barton

2021 Zine Awards winner O. Ashby skillfully weaves together the tangible, unignorable presence of trains with the subtler substance of the time and place in this unnamed part of the Chicago in ways that evoke its status as a home.

Amidst loss, struggle, and pain, Douglas owns her experience and contention with mental health with a true gift for language. Her facility with the narration of emotion is moving and resonant.

This full-colour, richly collaged mini-zine is a touching tribute to a real-life friend, Atticus, and a rendering as fable of Atticus’s coming out and transitional journey.

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.

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.

In just a handful of words, Andromeda skillfully sketches Maria as a brash teenager, in a Puerto Rican family in New York City, and then as an equally brash ghost haunting the halls of their old apartment.

The Butter Lamb News stakes out a delightfully bookish zine niche, championing print dictionaries over their digital conquerors, even while acknowledging the battle is lost.

The form and name of the zine come from the out-of-the-box app Notes, available on Apple devices. It thoroughly assumes the clinical, sanitized trappings of Apple paraphernalia, with white glossy paper and rounded corners, like a manual found tucked inside a freshly-opened iPhone box.

Brenton Gicker is a registered nurse, a journalist, an EMT and a crisis worker — roles that, taken together, make him a witness to and testifier of struggle, injustice, disappearances and abuses of power among police.