Zine Reviews: September 2022
Posted on September 16, 2022What a month September is shaping up to be!
It all started with zines, as I tabled the inaugural Paper Plains Zine Fest in Lawrence, Kansas. The first-annual festival made for a busy day of sales, bingo, paper plane shenanigans, and good times with friends new and old (including an anthropomorphic copy machine!)
The rest of the month has flown by in a whirlwind of long weekends, bucket list concerts, and bike rides. Now I’m on the precipice of one more adventure to cap off this brimful month, jetting off to Dallas to see my absolute favorite band play a return gig. (The last time I saw My Chem in concert was 2007 — 15 years ago! — so to say that I’m excited is an understatement.) In a few months, when I’m looking back on this year, I just know that September will standout, a highlight.
Before I leave town and the sun sets on September, I wanted to share a bit about the zines I’ve read this month. There’s a little bit of everything here: history, photography, writing, art. Take a gander, then pick up some of these titles, give ’em a read, and form your own opinion.
Did you know that 30 million gallons of oil sit under a neighborhood in Brooklyn, a remnant of the third largest oil spill in US history? This little-known tragedy is the subject of the descriptively titled "The Greenpoint Oil Spill & some of the people who died in horrible fires along & on Newtown Creek for Standard Oil and others as covered in the newspapers + other interesting items discovered." Sharing newspaper clippings covering factory fires and oil ooze in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, the zine is a great compilation of primary sources that sheds light on "an accumulation of more than a century of unregulated disasters and disposals" and a deep history of racism, environmental degradation, and inequity in one of New York's most gentrified neighborhoods. The zine is only 20 pages long, but it shares such a wealth of research and information. 📓 Details: half-size, 20 pages, full color🛒 : $5 🔗 : website |
Did you know that 30 million gallons of oil sit under a neighborhood in Brooklyn, a remnant of the third largest oil spill in US history? This little-known tragedy is the subject of the descriptively titled "The Greenpoint Oil Spill & some of the people who died in horrible fires along & on Newtown Creek for Standard Oil and others as covered in the newspapers + other interesting items discovered." Sharing newspaper clippings covering factory fires and oil ooze in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, the zine is a great compilation of primary sources that sheds light on "an accumulation of more than a century of unregulated disasters and disposals" and a deep history of racism, environmental degradation, and inequity in one of New York's most gentrified neighborhoods. The zine is only 20 pages long, but it shares such a wealth of research and information.
📓 Details: half-size, 20 pages, full color
🛒 : $5
🔗 : website
“Rumin8or” is a project by Haydn Larson: these half-fold freebie zines feature the author’s poetry over inky blots and swirls, with strange creatures adorning each cover. Hadyn’s poetry is often reflective and soothing, like a walk thru the woods on a temperate day. In fact, some of my favorite poems presented here — “LOVE”, “Near Water”, and “Within the Heart” — transport you to “jeweled forests” of “silky soft springs” and “pygmi trees”. The rhythmic “Roof Rust” transports us out of the forest and back to the city, and poems like “Castles Built on Sand” and the sly “End of Time” critique our modern age. Haydn, you can hand me your little masterpieces anytime. 📓 Details: quarter-fold zine, b&w on creme paper🛒 : website |
“Rumin8or” is a project by Haydn Larson: these half-fold freebie zines feature the author’s poetry over inky blots and swirls, with strange creatures adorning each cover. Hadyn’s poetry is often reflective and soothing, like a walk thru the woods on a temperate day. In fact, some of my favorite poems presented here — “LOVE”, “Near Water”, and “Within the Heart” — transport you to “jeweled forests” of “silky soft springs” and “pygmi trees”. The rhythmic “Roof Rust” transports us out of the forest and back to the city, and poems like “Castles Built on Sand” and the sly “End of Time” critique our modern age.
“End of Time” is especially successful, critiquing the absurdly corporatized nature of creator-spaces on the Internet, with Hadyn wishing they could just “hand you my / little masterpiece and / you carry it home and / let it vibrate there / ’til the end of time.”
Haydn, you can hand me your little masterpieces anytime.
📓 Details: quarter-fold zine, b&w on creme paper
🛒 : website
"Short & Sassy" by Yuko Weiner is a Japanese/English bilingual perzine. Yuko has a feminist revelation when her husband calls her new haircut "short and sassy" — she questions why short haircuts on women are considered "sassy", while the same haircut on a boy is just hair. This leads her to examine her own relationship to gender, feminism, and identity through ruminations, poetry, a Tweet, and illustration. She grapples with what others have told her feminism is, but comes to the movement on her own terms. Feminism as "a tool to look inside, not a weapon to attack others...", a tool to question the past and to find empathy and empowerment. Each spread features writing in English on the left side of the page and Japanese on the right. I like how this format mirrors the themes that show up in Yuko's writing. In the essays "Japanese Feminism" and "Japanese Feminism 2", Yuko contrasts American individualism with Japanese commonality, but points out that how both systems can be suffocating or exhausting, and that misogyny and patriarchy exist within both. The images may be mirrored, but what they show (or what the pages say) stays the same. Yuko's reflections on the chasm between the cultural norms of where we grew up and the people we've grown into being are relatable and ring true. 📓 Details: half-size, full color🛒 : $5 + s&h via website 🔗 : instagram 1 •instagram 2 • email |
"Short & Sassy" by Yuko Weiner is a Japanese/English bilingual perzine.
Yuko has a feminist revelation when her husband calls her new haircut "short and sassy" — she questions why short haircuts on women are considered "sassy", while the same haircut on a boy is just hair. This leads her to examine her own relationship to gender, feminism, and identity through ruminations, poetry, a Tweet, and illustration. She grapples with what others have told her feminism is, but comes to the movement on her own terms. Feminism as "a tool to look inside, not a weapon to attack others...", a tool to question the past and to find empathy and empowerment.
Each spread features writing in English on the left side of the page and Japanese on the right. I like how this format mirrors the themes that show up in Yuko's writing. In the essays "Japanese Feminism" and "Japanese Feminism 2", Yuko contrasts American individualism with Japanese commonality, but points out that how both systems can be suffocating or exhausting, and that misogyny and patriarchy exist within both. The images may be mirrored, but what they show (or what the pages say) stays the same. Yuko's reflections on the chasm between the cultural norms of where we grew up and the people we've grown into being are relatable and ring true.
📓 Details: half-size, full color
🛒 : $5 + s&h via website
🔗 : instagram 1 •instagram 2 • email
