5 New Zines to Check Out

Venus Zine mines Chicago Zine Fest to find the coolest new DIY mags

By Senah Yeboah-Sampong
Published: March 18th, 2010 | 3:30pm

On Friday March 12 at Quimby's Bookstore in Chicago, the heat of the capacity crowd was stifling. With folding chairs full of folks, standing room was the only alternative for the majority of zinesters in attendance. To those with the ambition and hustle, a cheese and broccoli pizza offered the prospect of free slices. Such was the launch of Chicago's first Zine Fest.

Creating an outlet for small press and independent publishers to showcase their work, the Chicago Zine Fest is an independent event aiming to make DIY zine-making accessible and highlight the talents of self-published artists. Zine Fest also gave these artists from across the country the chance to interact, swapping skills through tabling, lectures, and workshops.

The Quimby's reading was Zine Fest’s inaugural event, followed by a reception at the Johalla Projects. Many who would be tabling for the second day of events were present, in addition to fans and creators from the local scene. Quimby’s manager Liz Mason awarded the Long-Arm Stapler award to the Queer Zine Archive Project, whose stated mission is to “establish a ‘living history’ archive of past and present queer zines and to encourage current and emerging zine publishers to continue to create.”

Alongside the life-size, plastic she-devil, one by one the authors took the stage and read from a diverse body of work, from poetry, to graphic novels to highly personal musings on body image or detective stories written by eight-year-old incarnations of the reader herself.

Anthony Marvullo of Boston was first up. “A man is not a man until he has exhausted all other options, until context becomes an afterthought and the line between bedroom and office fades to a comfortable opacity…” he began, reading from his latest work, Engineering, Design and Fabrication…

Monica Anderson, based in Minneapolis, read from Endless Escalators, a zine she began three years ago. Anderson also led a workshop on day two in the Conway Center of Columbia College. Not a single St. Patrick’s Day celebrator made it in, but people came out from all over the city. The enthusiasm permeated the flow of voices that could be heard the moment one stepped out of the wind.

Workshops took place within a ring of chairs in a corner of floor-to-ceiling windows, beyond which one girl was sketching inside hand drawn panels. Another man switched rapidly between knitting colorful pouches on a loom and furiously penning pages in his Moleskine.

Sara Titanic from Toronto came with a lot of her friends’ work in tow. “They were more than willing to give me stuff to take, which was so awesome ... a lot of it is from different people." She showed off Halo Halo, from Toronto's Jeff Garcia and the Wowee Zonk Collective.

From mini-comics to essays, political discourse, print-making and how-to guides, content remained flexible and control absolute. Anderson’s workshop on what is possible without censors or editors explained the zine’s do-it-yourself appeal.

“I'm a film major, and I like making movies but you have to depend on other people and the effort of everyone else affects the end product,” she said. “With (Endless Escalators) if I know what I'm doing and it's awesome, I only have to thank myself.”

She tabled with Marvullo, who clarified the personal appeal of print media in particular. “I do a bit of both. Most of the stuff here will be on the internet, but I like self-publishing and print because it's intimate. You can put a lot of love into something, and to be able to hand one of your friends a book and say, I made this."

Our 5 Favorite New Zines (in no particular order)

1) “Indigo,”edited by Michelle Aiello, out of Chicago. She’s been producing this zine for the past fourteen years and has recently published her seventeenth issue. Format is half-sheet and content ranges from the very personal to the lighthearted; check out the personalized Mad Lib!

2) "The coming insurrection,” from the Invisible Committee. This slice of French political intrigue led to the arrest of its authors on charges of criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity.” The work itself is a scathing political analysis from the ultra-left. Translated from the French, it makes clear the power of the zine as educational tool.

3) “Titus and The Cyber Sun,” written and illustrated by Lale Westvind. Extraordinary sequential art, without a word of dialogue. The story is haunting, action packed, alien, and yet somehow vaguely familiar…

4) “Endless Escalators,” by Monica Anderson. In a quarter-sheet format, this deliberate and distilled zine captures the highs and lows of a personal history that never fails to amuse the reader or the author herself.

5) “Really Gay!” by Erinfection. A series of articles, color-coded, telling the story of the author’s movement through underground gay, punk and DIY scenes. She looks at the crossroads and underlying principles of these groups as they relate to the creative process. This zine also served as her grad school thesis.