Rivas’s text — which remix actual Nextdoor posts into fictional dialogues — are both hilarious and alarming. Conversational and matter-of-fact, they reveal obsessions with securing their property, scrutinizing minor disturbances, and calling the police.

This dispatch on the intersection of longing and holiness carves a palindromic path from church, to heaven, to bodies, to desire, back to bodies, to holiness and back to church again. These concepts are thoroughly entwined, at least for writer Despy Boutris.

In tracing how homebrewed filth developed into the corporatized sex trade of recent years, Samantha Cole does a valuable service. Despite its focus on the past three decades, the book feels almost as much a work of archaeology as pop history.

What if there was an app that could tap into your brainwaves and wash all your worries away? Help you manifest your dreams at the touch of a button? And what happens when that app is made by the densest men on the planet?

Craig Berman outlines an inspiring — and, quite frankly, increasingly necessary — approach to creativity that questions whether the labour of design must always be in service to others.

Cecilia Gentili writes of being dirt-poor, a dysfunctional relationship with her parents, and sexual abuse. At times one wonders how she managed to escape with her life. But it’s not a downer of a book—Faltas is funny, and tells its story with charm and grace.

Monster and Hero, you can be both! Gina and Joe’s delight in ‘80s horror movies is infectious and their perspective is uncommon.

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.

A look into small-town life with a magical air, The Animals reminded me a little of my own travels through some of Ontario’s tourist destinations, and even the game Night in the Woods.

Despite a few odd omissions, this is a crisply presented fanzine and final exhumation of the exhausting early-aughts archetype.

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.

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.

Run Wolf Run is a well done comic-and printed in nice risograph package to boot, but does that make it worth howling over?

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ryan Downum's chapbook is a weird and wonderful treatise. It resists full comprehension and manages to do so with both elegance and gruesomeness.

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.

New anthology from Hal Kelly memorializes the obscure, taboo, filthy trash zines that were once abundant throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.

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.