#zine reviews

[starkittyzines]

zine review #1

Ada / @theowllien

my first zine review post - read more ! 👇

starting longer, actually blog-like blog posts to talk about the zines i read! my plan is to do it for every new zine i acquire and have enough thoughts for a post about it, but i also plan to go back and do reviews of zines i've already read. i have 150+ zines in my collection so that might take a while 🫣 so i won't pressure myself to do all of them, of course. but there's some i'd like to share in particular. all love to the zines i won't share maybe i just don't have enough to say but i love them all

these posts will also have some ramblings so be prepared for that!! they'll be under #zine reviews on my blog

i'm starting with zines received in a recent zine trade with @theowlien 🌟

Ada sent me zines of different formats printed on white and green paper. I loooove a zine printed on colored paper it's fun and changes things up a bit

three of them are art zines with drawings and sketches, i love the frogs but maybe it's biased by liking colored paper zines because all of them are great. i like zines that are collections of illustrations and art, i want to make more of those myself so it's always inspiring to see someone else's.

i was also intrigued by their "annoying bottle caps" zine, about those bottle caps that stay attached to the bottle. it's supposed to prevent bottle caps from getting separated from the bottle and get lost in nature and injure animals that might eat them or something. but yeah I don't know how effective they are for that purpose and they make drinking a little awkward. one reason i do like them is at least i can't drop or misplace my bottle cap. great zine subject to ramble about

also check out that cover!! the hand movement of opening a bottle cap is such an awkward thing to draw. i'm always so confused at drawing hands anyway, but this one in particular i wouldn't have attempted. and look how cool Ada made it :)

ok sidenote, mid-writing this i came home and poured some soy milk into my tea and. the new bottles have these caps. the old ones did not. NOOO

i really liked the mix of drawing and text in these next two zines specifically. not sure you can read the title of the boots one super well in the picture on mobile, it says "boots and why it's the only punk thing about me"

first i was interested in the one about kokeshi dolls because i was quite into those when i was a kid and completely forgot about them! i think i first came across them when i won a book at a reading comprehension contest, and picked one about the dolls. i was quite interested in everything to do with japan (up until being a young teen). my older cousin was very into manga and drawing characters from anime and I started learning how to draw with her, although i had always been drawing, i gained more interest through that. so anything related to japan peaked my interest.

i found the book!!!!! it was this one

i did go by yumi online + sign art with that name for a few years (i know, french white girl using a japanese name for no reason, classic, i was young yikes) but i can't remember if i was already doing that and that's why i was drawn to the book, or if i picked up the name from the book. anyway, i learned some japanese words from it and started drawing these dolls, and eventually was gifted one (from some mass produced trash store most likely).

kokeshi dolls were a bit of a lost memory so it was fun to read this zine :) i had actually never learned much about them at all as i had more of an aesthetic interested in them (and was a child) so i know a little more now

back to the zines - "boots and why it's the only punk thing about me" was a fun read too, it also reminded me of some memories. teenage years memories this time. i wanted to be edgy so bad but wasn't doing much that was defying the rules in any capacity. i got my first and only pair of dr martens boots when i was 13-14yo (i still have them today! over 10 years later. the soles are so thin i feel the gravel i step on so I can't stay they're in good shape, i very rarely wear them nowadays and have new boots). at the time i hated being a "girly girl" and felt socially pressured to wear dresses, but had a very hard time finding ones i was comfortable wearing. my compromise was to wear them with my boots, which luckily my mom supported and thought was really cool. Ada talks about wearing boots with a wedding dress, that was the idea for me then. and if i were to get married in a dress, i'd probably do it in boots. but i'm most likely wearing something closer to a suit if that ever happens anyway.

i liked all the drawings of boots, like this one on the cover is so cool

i better learn how to draw boots this cool bc i'm going to be drawing people's outfits for a collaborative zine project, and it's about queer fashion so i know these people will all be wearing boots #not stereotyping my own at all

i think i'm starting to be actually a little more punk myself, aside from boots and all. well there's probably a lot i'm doing that would be considered punk depending on your definition but i'm actively trying to learn to break pointless rules. so that's something

Ada also sent me one last zine titled IZMA, which i'll make a separate post about; this is already quite long and i can't find the time to write more so i want to just post this and give it a dedicated post!

i really like zines that include sketches and drawings, receiving and reading those made me want to draw more in my next ones again. and maybe pick up more sketching in general, i'm starting to miss it.

thank you again for trading zines with me!!

you can find Ada here on tumblr and on ko-fi :) here's a carrd.co too

[sm-selenographer]

Happens all the time, I’m tempted to pick up a new-to-me zine based only on the cover photo, a scant description, or its thrumming electricity zapping my hand, only later to find an unexpected personal connection. Such is the case for Moonshot #2, SM’s paean to her ancestral home, specifically her ancestral house, in a working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood. “Growing Up in Carrick,” SM lets forth in a stream of vivid prose poetry worthy of Dylan Thomas, evoking the pageant of sounds, feelings, and images of her upbringing: heat lightning in the close Pittsburgh summer; the aging linoleum and unfinished drywall of a Craftsman-style house; the sentience of wallpaper faces and framed puzzles. Childhood recalled as if projected in Super 8. Coming-of-age moments, significant in retrospect. SM’s family moves to another neighborhood; in her early 20s, she moves back in, with roommates; the house sits vacant for years. The city, the neighborhood, and the author change inexorably through the years, yet something essential remains, drawing her back to the house that witnessed many of her former iterations; that anchors ur-feelings of longing and belonging, A close friend of mine grew up in Carrick, and so I spent time there during college, on the 51C bus winding down Brownsville Road; picnicking at my friend’s parents’ house on Hazeldell Street; painfully underage, getting kicked out of an old-man dive called Doug’s Den. I don’t have the same depth of familial ties to the neighborhood that SM does, but reading Moonshot #2 still reminds me that we’re constantly leaving a wake of echoes, shedding shadows of past lives everywhere we go, and these imprints are often bound up in the buildings we love and that love us. This minizine has a hand-stitched binding, two color photos, and comes with a link to a field-recorded mini soundtrack that fits the mood and location of the piece. Available in Pittsburgh from Tangent Distro or directly from the author at selenographer.info

Oh man, I nearly cried in the breakroom when I read this review, what a mood-booster! :D Hopefully I will have time to stop by Tangent Distro when I'm in Pittsburgh next month! :D

[youngharridan]

I've been reading the zines distributed by Librarians and Archivists with Palestine all morning and can particularly recommend A Care-Centered Guide to Digitally Archiving Palestine. There's heaps more to dig into there, just wanted to share because it makes me really happy to see this work being done in my industry.

[julia-shephard]

piece i did a while ago for the Flame emperor zine!

leftover sales here!

[schibborasso]

eye magazine

[gamenburger]

Alright. It's here.

REVIEW OF THE KILLER is a (mainly spoiler free) zine review featuring commentary, analysis, comics, and various evil activities. It released on my itch.io page and will be free for anyone to download, as well as a convenient reader embedded in the page itself. It is releasing alongside the steam version of Anthology Of The Killer by @myfriendpokey.

It is available to print in both a4 and letterhead format, in color and B&W. All of these will be available in 600 or 300 PPI (as disgustingly high as Itch will allow) as well as regular old, web and storage friendly formats. I recommend vibrant pink and canary paper for greyscale copies. It is free to distribute as you please.

If you have liked any of the art I've done so far, please share this anywhere and everywhere you feel charitable to do so.

I hope you enjoy. I am always hoping you enjoy.

[titaniumions]

how bad can she possibly be ...

[zygon-commander]

If you wanna get to know John Constantine but don't know where to start, then this guide is for you! Get all the meat of the story without having to read the filler issue where he remembers turning into a horny werewolf.

I made this zine ages ago but completely forgot to upload it here until I was Hellblazer thirst posting tonight and suddenly remembered.

I had a super fun time putting it together so I hope there are some nerds on here who enjoy it!! Feel free to leave recs as well

(The quiz is serious btw, I wanna know)

[doctorcurdlejr]

I've been working with my students to build this hangout area in the library with like fun lighting, student book reviews, comfy seating (we're getting bean bags in a few weeks), and fidgets as a soft launch on the general vibe I'm thinking for the rest of the library. It's been going SO WELL, students love it so far, but they've been slowly trying to squeeze in more desks than can really fit so they can all sit there 😭 anyways some pics 😋

[oleandrsstudio]

This week’s #zine #review is of “Do It Yourself: Self-Publishing from Letterpress to Laser Jet,” created by Christine Jacobson and Kristine Greive (text) and Zoë Pulley (design)!

Lately I've been thinking about our role in relation to the art we experience. "Media consumption" places the audience as a passive spectator: approach, consume, move on. Creating fanwork is one way people try to become active participants in culture. Making zines, especially ones independent of corporate intellectual property, is another way.

This zine goes through the history of self-publishing and the DIY philosophy. It was informative and easy to read. If I remember correctly, this zine was a guide for a museum exhibit about self-publishing. It felt nice to be part of a loosely-connected community as described here. DIY! Create the culture you want to see!

#zinereview #diyzine

[youngharridan]

This is kind of a funny one. I'm going through my old zines at the moment as I'm thinking of doing some kind of bigger archiving/cataloguing project later this year. I'm going to throw away or give away a lot of things but first I need to just go through everything and remember what I've even got.

So this zine is a republished Susan Stryker piece. I love when people do this, take something that they really love and try to share it with more people. I think it was from the shortlived Sydney/East coast trans women distro Bitch Please, as there is a little stamp of theirs on the back. It was probably free or by donation. What struck me is that this is so hard read, the font is teeny tiny, and also it doesn't utilise the space very well, there are three blank pages in the second half of the zine. So I'm thinking of taking the same piece and making it into a zine with bigger font that doesn't have any blank pages! Maybe this is a crazy thing to do with something that I was thinking of giving away or recycling, but I think it would be fun. Kind of in the same vein as my Zahra Stardust zine but without my own personal writing in it at all. Will experiment and report back.

[deadeyedfae]

Look I got a review on Dead Eyed Ivy! ShiftyMagpie on Instagram was my first customer outside of my little town (I had the zine up on Etsy but there is a printing mistake so it's been removed 😭) but look what they had to say about it 💜💜💜

[rizwalda]

one of my two pieces for @eamesie That's Cinema!: A Dimension 20 Movie Poster Redraw Zine - created as part of @d20zinejam 2024 get this zine and 67 others in a bundle and help support humanitarian aid for the people of Palestinee

& there is a really cool letterboxd list to go along with it 🎞️

[desirepathzine]

Pentiment: Now Look What You Have Created

A note: THIS ESSAY WILL INCLUDE SPOILERS FOR PENTIMENT. I highly recommend you experience the story however suits you best before reading this.

Pentiment is a tricky little video game. On the surface, it is a beautifully crafted point-and-click mystery game set in medieval Bavaria over a period of twenty five years, revolving around a series of mysterious deaths that traveling artist Andreas witnesses, and in turn must judge the town based on his (and your) observations. But it presents concepts and moral quandaries that I find video games of its nature often refuse to acknowledge.

Games sometimes have trouble placing weight on the decisions that any given player makes. Permanence in choices can close off large swaths of a game that so many people worked so hard to bring to life. Save scumming and cloud saves can help get around this concept, but Pentiment asks you to make some extremely hard choices, oftentimes without the most solid of evidence that you might expect from a mystery game.

And not only do you have to see through the carrying out of your judgements, you must watch the wide branching consequences of these decisions over the entire period of the game. And in a story that lasts over two decades, those consequences feel weighty. Further more, you never discover if you "guessed correctly". The game never tells you who actually committed the murders. It simply asks you to make a judgement.

That is not to say that it does not give you a variety of motivations. You must be convicted in your own beliefs, your own judgements. And you will see the bloody results of those judgements. Much has been made of how Pentiment makes you watch the execution of whoever you accuse of the crimes in its first act. It's one of the most brutal moments in a largely beautiful and pastoral game. It's one thing to cross of somebody's name in a list of characters. It's another to watch them speak their last words in the town square before their beheading. You have to look. And it feels so strange, because in most video games, you get a CORRECT or INCORRECT prompt when you make a decision like those in Pentiment, or a character will lecture you, or there is some in-universe way to tell you "hey good job" or "you messed up". There is a right and wrong answer. Pentiment does not give you such a privilege. You only have your reasoning. There is no amount of story you can uncover that will reassure you more than your initial investigation.

Of course, you later find out that Father Thomas, the local priest, has been manipulating the town to advance the Church's agenda, using what he hears in confession to blackmail and agitate townspeople, as well as manipulating Sister Amalie, the anchoress of the church who is plagued with ecstatic visions. But as ever, you can discover motivations and reasoning, but not THE CORRECT ANSWER or even THE TRUTH. Just your intuition.

Pentiment also prompts you to consider what happens to this town after the game itself is over. Video games only exist as you play them, and usually do not task you with considering what you have wrought after your time in their world is done. You save the day, solve a puzzle, destroy some great evil, and then credits will roll. Not here. The core of the third act, with a surprise protagonist change, revolves around creating a mural that chronicles the history of Tassing, a town you have now spent quite a bit of time investigating, both its known and approved history from the church, and the wilder corners of its history that are starting to be erased. It's up to you what to focus on, what to leave for Tassing to remember forever in its town hall, amidst pressure from the church to present their approved vision. The final sequence of the game is a long and detailed pan over the mural that you crafted with your decisions (set to music featuring Desire Path fave Kristin Hayter).

This is hardly a surprise from the excellent folks at Obsidian, responsible for some of the greatest role-playing and choice based games of our modern era. There are so many incredible touches to the game that completely transport you (the script that the characters 'speak' in changes based on their level of education and background. They will occasionally misspell words that are then corrected and when they are angry, ink blots will dot their speech bubbles). This was clearly a labor of love that accomplishes so much and charts new territory.

I completed a playthrough in February of this year and think about the game at least once a week, whether it be someone else I could have accused of murder, a sweet conversation with a townsperson, or the delightful characters populating the illuminated menus (I am especially fond of a silly cat illustration). It is well worth the journey, but be prepared to sit with your choices, and to see what kind of Tassing you create, for better or worse.

[gamenburger]

Oops i got home yesterday today, actually. accept this bonus warm up sketch i did in a diner on the road instead of "9 days"

[apebellica]

Last night I finally watched I saw the TV glow and, in a very short amount of time, It has become one of those movies that makes me both want to rewatch It over and over again and simultaneously pill my skin off. This movie has quikly became one of my favorites, hands down. But! It's so intense and terrifying and dense that I think I need time to fully digest it.

Right now I can only say that I have never seen something like this (ok, maybe yes if we count We are all going to the world's fair, Jane Schoenbrun's first film), I never consumed a media SO damn dysphoric. You can feel it, clearly. It's in the cinematography, in the script, in the lighting, this sense of incongruity, this feeling of "there's something wrong, something doesn't add up, life shouldn't be this way". It's insane how a viewing like that satisfied a deep desire inside of me and incredibly shook me at the same time. Themes such as isolation, nostalgia, escapism, dissociation and the fear of not being able to distinguish what is truly real are brought to the screen with an imagery so extraordinarily beautiful in all its horror that I really don't know what to say other than ... wow. The more I think about it, the more I feel understood by this film. It's a strangely thrilling and exhilarating experience. This movie, among other things, like I said erlier in this post, is about dysphoria. The type of dysphoria we feel pre coming out (to ourself and to others), before realising this is why we feel this way, before accepting it and before deciding what we want to do in terms of transizioning.

I think the final scene, above all, while extremely disturbing, is a perfect representation of that realization: it pictures the panic, the fear associated with it. The protagonist sees something they cannot unsee and, at this point, you can never look back.

Don't mistake me, being trans, being non-binary is beautiful (I absolutely don't want to be cis) but sometimes it feels like that, like in that final scene, when you can't breathe and all you want is to scream. When you feel distant from other people, not understood and, all you want to do, is to open yourself up.

So yeah... This are my 2.00 AM toughts on I saw the TV glow.

The only thing I can say right now is that I need to rewatch this movie multiple times.

Aaaaand if you have toughts on this movie or you want to discuss It let me know!

PS: plz forgive me if the english is weird, It's not my first language O⁠_⁠o