Review: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
Kim Fu has an uncanny talent for capturing the subtleties of interpersonal relationships between lovers, between mothers, between perfect strangers in the dark, between ourselves.
Reviews
Review: Fictional Father
Joe Ollmann’s latest work follows the mid-life tailspin of Caleb, a recovering alcoholic and only child of world-famous cartoonist. One would expect Caleb’s sad-clown shtick to get tiresome in this kind of long-form work, but it’s a testament to Ollmann’s storytelling power.
Review: Delightful Garden
An anthology consisting of pieces inspired by Hieronymous Bosch’s delirious triptych, Delightful Garden is a heavenly sight.
Review: The Butter Lamb News
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.
Review: Nightlight
Like peanut butter and jelly, dream poems may not be the most innovative recipe, but the taste of the two together is often much richer than their reputation.
Film Review: Bros Before
Bros Before is deliberately rooted in a 2020s punk, liberated-ish, white-ish trans culture. You can tell that everyone involved both has love for and is willing to gleefully prod with their arrows pointed inward.
Review: Bad Apples
Bad Apples describes itself as an audiovisual zine, but it feels more like a street-level, sensory experience of Philly in crisis, as witnessed by Kara Khan and Matt Williams in the wake of George Floyd and the 2020 BLM protests.
Review: Swollening
The vulnerability in Swollening is best described as teeth being pulled, leaving you “jaw detached and tooth emptied.”
Review: MANIFEST (zine) #7
This water-themed issue of MANIFEST (zine) makes way for text and art contributions from a number of “friends and fellow creative spirits” who all lived near the Connecticut shoreline.
Review: Dumb-Show
Fawn Parker ridicules the academy and unchecked privilege. She also takes more than a few shots at poisonous celebrities along the way. The result is a truly glorious mash up of the academia of a novel like Lucky Jim and the medieval sand trap from the film The Duel.
Review: Notes
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.
Review: Behind the Zines: A Zine About Zines #13
The latest issue in this rewarding compilation mega/meta-zine offers several contributions that detail histories and origin stories of other zines.