Happy Zinesommar, y’all!

So much has been going on in my zine-y world, and I’ve got a lot to catch y’all up on! First up, today. Today is the summer solstice, midsummer, the longest day of the year… and this year, we’re celebrating zinesommar, too!

My friends and I at the KC Zine Collective are hosting a day full of Zinesommar festivities, a way of bringing our local zine community together, raising funds for KC Zine Con (our annual fest), and building the lore around Bernie, our raccoon mascot.

In a few hours, we’ll be gathering on the lawn of our local art museum for a picnic, fun, and games (including a zine trade under one of those giant gym class parachutes!) Our new merch will drop on the website — baby tees and baseball caps for summer. And then, we’ll be ending the day with a screening of The Wicker Man (the OG one, not the Nic Cage vs. bees one) at Stray Cat Film Center in partnership with Andrew’s Video Void (and Andrew will be screening his A Very Pagan Mixtape montage and I am SO EXCITED for that!) In Stray Cat’s lobby, we’ll be setting up both a merch booth and a live screenprinting station (for custom OOAK merch!) and I’m bringing a compzine spell we crafted at last Tuesday’s Zine Club for some solstice magic. The screening is a fundraiser for KC Zine Con #11, and I’m hoping we raise enough to rent a big tent to host this year’s fest in.

And about that aforementioned Bernie lore. I volunteered to design the event flyer, and doodled some forest creature Zine Scouts making zines at the foot of a Bernie-shaped midsommar altar. A few years ago for KC Zine Con, we created Zine Scouts as a way to try and build a zine community year-round outside the annual fest. We hosted events and meet-ups in the months leading up to KCZC and gave folks a Zine Scouts passport mini zine that we would stamp at every event they attended. If you had enough stamps (I think it was three?) we would give you a custom Zine Scouts embroidered patch at KC Zine Con! The patch featured Bernie wearing a scout-style sash, as the Zine Scout troupe leader. And so, years later and in the spirit of Zinesommar, I decided to bring the Zine Scouts back… and now they’re a gang of forest critters who love DIY. I’ll be building their narrative across the next two event posters (for another yet-to-be-announced fundraiser and the zine fest itself), so you’ll have to tune in to see what this rowdy gang gets up to. My favorite of the bunch is the possum trying to chase down all the zines that have been swept away by the wind!

And that’s just today! I’ve also been busy working on my own zines: everything from new monthly issues of my catmothcrow chronicle newsletter (June’s shipped with a snail mail society star-exclusive minizine all about how my music taste has/hasn’t changed since high school), to a brand new minizine about the baby birds that nest on my front porch. I’ve been contributing artwork for Razorcake columns (which, hey, they’re currently having their June Subscription drive, so if you’ve ever been curious as to what Razorcake is all about, now is a great time to find out!), and I wrote 2 movie reviews for Lazer Attack Dave’s Gorilla Movies #2. Oh! And Kurt (also of Razorcake!) interviewed me for issue 11 of his Room Tone zine (what an honor!) That one is worth picking up just for the interview he did with zine-legend Donna Ramone (yet another Razorcake contributor! We’re everywhere!)

And last, but certainly not least, I’ve got a brand new episode of catmothcrow – the show for you to enjoy! (I know, I know — about damn time!) This one is all about music zines…. plus, there’s a teeny vlog, a quick tip for cleaner collaging, and some first impression zine reviews from the mail bag. I’m trying out a segmented approach with a little bit of everything in each episode, and I think it turned out pretty cool. I’ll have more to say about that all in this episode’s dedicated post (coming to this blog in a few days), and it’ll hit Youtube tomorrow morning, but you can watch it ad-free right now and right here: