Zine Review

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.

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.

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.

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.

The latest issue in this rewarding compilation mega/meta-zine offers several contributions that detail histories and origin stories of other zines.

Outer space, as both a place and a concept, holds a great deal of significance for each of the artists in this anthology. Characters reflect on lost possibilities; moments of intimacy or insecurity, including Soviet space dog Laika.

At some point we have all worn some Chucks. Especially zinesters. Nicole Gruszecki’s XOX Converse zine takes you through their life in Converse, from their first pair to their latest.

Bent by the crystal ball we’re peering into as much as by the off-kilter discourse of the person who’s speaking, MLA Chernoff’s SCRIED FUNDAMENTS is is attention-grabbing, clever and regularly baffling.

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.

Through erasure, removal and additions, John Nyman create their own rendition of a 1985 choose your own adventure novel. The narratives found through their erasure is one that supplants the somewhat stereotypical and white patriarchal norms that hang over many 80s Americana quests.

Lunchmeat VHS’ survey of surviving American video stores reveals a hidden purpose behind these defiant movie paradises.