Features
Power to the Profiles: The Indie Sellers Guild and Protecting the Interests of Online Artisans
Etsy emerged as an opportunity to capture the feeling of zine and art fairs online, selling a diverse catalogue of pieces from a universe of uncanny creators. But a zine fair and a multimillion dollar enterprise are rarely the same entity.
Your Own Personal Joker
Filmmaker Vera Drew wanted to reclaim the clown prince of crime with The People’s Joker. Now she has to fight the real supervillains to bring her Joker to the people.
Faith and Comics. Love and Rockets.
As someone who looked up to female punk music icons and also struggled with her own Catholic faith, I felt like Love and Rockets was attuned to me and my sensibilities.
Review: The Birth and Death of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl
Despite a few odd omissions, this is a crisply presented fanzine and final exhumation of the exhausting early-aughts archetype.
Review: Ticket for Reference
Prolific Australian zinester Kate Dunn writes a frank but sentimental mini-memoir of her call centre work. Drawing on several years experience of frontline phone wrangling, caught between customers, bosses, and a year of middle management.
Review: Pacifique
Sarah L. Taggart's remarkable debut plays with being a psychological thriller, working in elements of a love story. Never patronizing or judgmental, what sets Pacifique apart is how Taggart writes about mental health.
Review: Run Wolf Run
Run Wolf Run is a well done comic-and printed in nice risograph package to boot, but does that make it worth howling over?
Politics is for the Nuts
In 1974, Vancouver artist Vincent Trasov ran for mayor of Vancouver. Or, at least, Vincent Trasov dressed as Mr. Peanut ran for mayor of Vancouver. Nearly 50 years later, documentary filmmaker Andrew Muir brought the performance piece back into the spotlight with Peanut For Mayor.
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.
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: 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.
Art Holes: Kreal’s Cartoon-Zone
"It's been strange taking inventory of all this, I feel like a spoiled brat. And worse yet, an embarrassed spoiled brat." From gas stations to animation, Kreal shows us where the magic is made.
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: 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.
Folio: Olivia Mae Sinclair on Text, Textiles and The Neverending Story
Folio asks artists and curators to gather works made with unexpected materials and adapt them for the printed page. In this issue we speak with Olivia Mae Sinclair, a textile artist binding books and zines with frayed fabrics, exploring a textured meaning of the text within.
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: 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.
Review: Queer Little Nightmares
Queer Little Nightmares accomplishes what mainstream media has historically feared: placing queerness at the forefront to tell human stories of creatures that seek love, vengeance, autonomy, and the reclamation of their ugliest parts.
Review: I Wear My Face in the Field
Ryan Downum's chapbook is a weird and wonderful treatise. It resists full comprehension and manages to do so with both elegance and gruesomeness.
Review: A Kid Called Chatter
Westerns are populated with larger-than-life characters, but children are notoriously difficult to write convincingly. Kelly’s Chatter and his orphan companions are adult minds in small bodies, making grave enigmatic statements while stone-facedly witnessing the world’s cruelty.
Sleeze Zine History Archived in No Toner
New anthology from Hal Kelly memorializes the obscure, taboo, filthy trash zines that were once abundant throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.
PEOW Ends Print Run After 10 Years
Beginning with risographed books and fanzines made internally, PEOW would go on to publish a vast assortment of contemporary, international cartoonists, such as Thu Tran, Jane Mai, Linnea Sterte and Ville Kallio.