Review: Blind Alley: The First Year
Visually distinct with a whimsical, costume-ish quality to character designs, there’s a comfortable tone of strangeness throughout Blind Alley that would feel at home in EarthBound or Twin Peaks.
Reviews
Review: Solastalgia
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.
Review: Literal Bimbos
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.
Review: Plumstuff
Rolli’s poetic voice is often likened to e.e. cummings’ light verse, chiefly in how he toys with syntax and nonsense. But there’s a keen sardonic edge, too — think of Shel Silverstein and Hilaire Belloc.
Review: Birds of Maine
The setting gives DeForge plenty to work with: the mechanics of a fungus-based internet; samplings of new lunar artforms; interplanetary and intercellular voyages. And of course, there are the birds themselves, in all their grand and ridiculous plumage.
Review: like every pillow flung off the bed
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.
Review: New Infinity
In Bára Hladík’s cross-genre debut, the reader is invited to witness the physical and philosophical implications of the autoimmune disease of a nameless woman, specifically ankylosing spondylitis.
Review: The Printer Whisperer
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.
Review: Flummoxtown
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.
Review: Take The Long Way Home
Jon Claytor’s main conceit is to bleed his unfiltered self onto the page. He bounces between dark suicidal thoughts and folksy vignettes about cute critters he sees on the road, but the flow feels natural.
Review: Car-Stoppers
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.
Review: A Brief History of My Walkman
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.