Issue 99

Features

Overtime and Improv Classes: Aisha Franz on Work-Life Balance and Berlin’s Tech Culture Clash

Berlin is now home to more than 600 startups, modeling themselves after successful American businesses, many tried to import American workplace culture. Cartoonist Aisha Franz' latest book is a satire of the calamity that ensued.

Hazel Jane Plante on Any Other City, Re-Writing a Life and The Museum of Jurassic Technology

"As I’ve gotten older, I’ve also realized that I’ll never have time to create all the projects that bubble up in me, so they often come alive in my fiction."

One Day We Will All Die. Who’ll Make Comics Then? David Galliquio and Comix in Unpredictable Peru.

"People thought I was a degenerate, I did what I did only because the one underground rule was that there were no rules." How the perilous, conservative rulership of Peru shaped its counterculture.

Walking Tall: Boots Riley on the Utility of Absurd Art

“What I want to do is use this exaggeration to point out contradictions and to point out ironies and skip over large swaths of theory and just smack it in your face. That’s the usefulness to me.” The activist, musician and director tells us how to speak to a world that's gotten strange.

NOW What: Is There A Future for the Alt-Weekly?

The loss of local voices goes beyond arts scenes and progressive op-eds as trusted legacy publications become propaganda for your city's worst actors.

Review: X: A Novel

This speculative novel provides a window into a fictional New York's BDSM subculture in an apocalyptic world. Where X shines is in its unique observations.

Review: Trains

2021 Zine Awards winner O. Ashby skillfully weaves together the tangible, unignorable presence of trains with the subtler substance of the time and place in this unnamed part of the Chicago in ways that evoke its status as a home.

Review: Falling Hour

Over-educated and nominally leftist in his beliefs, Hugh Dalgarno waits around for someone to buy a picture frame from him. It’s a book that’s about nothing, but it’s also a book that is stuffed with ideas and opinions.

Review: Solidarity Beyond Bars

If prison labour did not exist, it would have been invented by a philosopher playing with employment as a concept: Imagine there were a group of workers who were not permitted to leave a compound for months or even years at a time

Review: A Shot in the Dark

Zinester Karin Panther produces this series in a quest to reunite people with their long lost photo slides. She combines analog and digital methods to scavenge and print these vintage pictures for public consumption.

Review: Spread Love Comix

More so than the numerous instances of porking and bodily fluids flying about, the passion of each of the contributors to Spread Love is clear. There’s a lot of passion on full display and I’m not just talking about the smut!

Review: Hi-Fi Anxiety

Jason’s memories of his first time hearing a band always seem to occur in some hole-in-the-wall record store in the ‘90s. It seems the real trick here is that this unassuming zine sneaks up on you with its grassroots charm.

Review: Fledgling

What seemed like an entertaining vampire adventure with somewhat sophomoric social insights blossomed into maybe the most poignant metaphorical commentary on racial politics I’ve ever read.

Review: Greater Power: A Vince McMahon Zine

Speaking as something of a lapsed wrestling fan, Greater Power makes a compelling case for once again investing oneself in the strange, strange world of sports entertainment.

Art Holes: Boss Nass KFC Drink Topper

Cartoonist Alexander Laird gives us a tour of his goblin den, laying in wait for the right opportunity to watch Kevin Costner's Waterworld.

Review: Brutes

With sharpness and ephemerality that could only have been harnessed via cliquey 13-year-olds, Dizz Tate writes a class-act debut about the divine knowledge of girlhood, the claustrophobia of adolescence, secrecy and the curious need we have to observe and be observed.

Review: Mario 69

Mario 69 is part of multidisciplinary artist Jon Clark, a series of faux home media covers that each express ‘cursed’ feelings in their own way. Here, a ‘lost’ Super Mario game through lay-outs of the various enemies, characters and girlfriends.

Review: Love at First Sight

Great poems move different people in different ways. Nobel-poet Wisława Szymborska’s pieces trace a reliable arc from simple seeds, through surprise development, and land in the subtle neighbourhood of the sublime.

Review: Blue 4 U

Nicholas Teixeira is like a hyper Max Headroom, be-bopping his way through an explosion of pop culture and its intersection with the self.

Review: Refugia

Told in fragmented, rapidly oscillating points of view, Refugia muses on the insufficiencies of language in the face of a vast and unexplainable island.

Florida Tries to Ban Book About Banned Books

As contentious book bans spread throughout America, Kim Hyun Sook's book about her experience with book bans ended up in Clay County's crosshairs.

Review: Contagious Imagination: The Work and Art of Lynda Barry

Contagious Imagination contains a collection of rigorously researched essays and artistic texts that reify Lynda Barry’s teachings. Like Barry’s own idiosyncratic work, it touches on memory, relationships and the everyday.

Folio: Catalina Cheng on Ceramics and Preservation of Queer Art History

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 Catalina Cheng, whose work in ceramics bridges familiar traditions, radiant pride and honouring the queer artists erased by history.

Stop Saying I Look Like The Zinester American Girl Doll!

Jenn Woodall has had it up TO HERE with these cherubic luxury nostalgia-baiting mall dolls being passed off as DIY 'girl power.'

Review: On Writing and Failure

Orwell, Joyce and Austin could barely get jobs, never mind publishing deals. Stephen Marche asks: “Why would it be any different for you?”

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: 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.

Toronto Zine Library Reopens

“To me the space is important as an example of creativity, community and solidarity coming together without commercial expectations.”