Amazing, Zany Zine Reviews! Yeah!

By Tina Armstrong

(tinathehyena (at) gmail.com)

Hello world, I am here to review your zines! Feel free to contact me by e-mail to get my address to send me your zine. All submissions will be reviewed. In the meantime I will start reviewing zines I already have that have found their way to me. I promise I'll be gentle...unless I really hate it.

Purge #1

Find it: on Etsy and tumblr

Author: Marta Lapczynski of Fat Heart Press

A nice half-size zine with around 40 pages. No cut and paste, but the layouts are clean and easy to read. I love that there's an “obligatory trigger warning” but that she rounds out that opening paragraph with “but let's continue to learn good coping mechanisms while we work toward a better world, shall we?” Sold.

Inside she talks about impulse Pez-buying, starting her own publishing company, and leaving an abusive partner. I think what I love most about this author is her brutally honest quipping about her inability to keep having sex with steady partners(“I can't fuck, because I'm too fucked up, because I've been so fucked.”)to her childlike innocence when she asks the question “What does it look like to transcend?” It's all written beautifully in perzine fashion. A definite must-read.

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Mini Majellan-Found Things

Got it: from a friend, but you can find it at www.shelbyville.com.au

Cute little zine with a big focus on layouts, visual aesthetics, and images rather than words. There's maybe 100 words in the whole thing. While it does look pretty, I tend to be more partial to zines with a lot of substance in them or that are somewhat word-heavy. It does make up for that a little by adding a “found” thing on the front cover of all it's zines. Mine was a button.