Contributions: drawings I’ve made for other zines and projects

I make a lot of zines on my own but sometimes I contribute to other zines as well. I’m also an illustrator so I regularly make illustrations for a variety of projects. I actually have a blog for my drawings but I don’t keep it up to date very well… So instead I’d like to make a list of recent illustrations here (even if just so I don’t forget).

Here are some zines and other projects I’ve recently made drawings for:

Summer of zines: new ECHO zines

The Covid-19 quarantine has proved to be an excellent time to make zines for me. I made a bunch of of new ECHO publications and also collaborated on others.

It started small: in the beginning of the lockdown I created a mini-zine about herbs called Witches’ Brew #1 which allowed me to retain some connection to nature while staying mostly at home. Thanks to a herb patch at a local park, I could draw and write about rosemary, lemon balm, thyme, and other herbs, and create a little booklet.

New zines: Forever Incomplete #12/Same Heartbeats #16 (split zine) + Same Heartbeats #17

Exciting news: I have not one but two new zines for sale!

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Let’s start with the split zine:

Same Heartbeats #16 is a new split zine which comes together with Forever Incomplete #12! So the zine consists of two halfs, one made by Kirsty and one by me, and we each made a cover for our half. After tableing at a zine fest in the UK last summer, Kirsty of the Forever Incomplete zine series and I decided to make a split zine on the theme of love. In the following months we wrote about a variety of topics including friendship, food, and fandom, and we published it all in this split zine.

It’s A5 size, 36 pages, colour cover on both sides, inside black & white on recycled paper.

So what’s inside?

Kirsty’s half:

• Crushes and relationships
• Food
• TV shows
• Pokemon
• and more…

My half:

• Why I ❤ the band Alice in Chains
• Zine ❤
• Friendship vs social expectations of what ❤ is
• What I ❤ about Berlin
• My growing collection of guitar effect pedals
• Recommended films and tv series about (female) friendships
• and more…

How to order? Scroll down…

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And then there is another one!

Same Heartbeats #17 is a regular issue of my ongoing feminist perzine series. It’s filled with the usual zine fests and craft fair reports, band stories, and other things that I’ve been doing or thinking about. There are articles, drawings, a comic, and a how-to manual, so plenty of zine goodness to enjoy!

It’s A5 size, 32 pages, black & white, printed on recycled paper.

 

So what’s inside?

• The further adventures of my band Lavender Witch, including a comic about us going to the studio to record our album “Awakening”
• Tableing at Swindon Zine Fest and North West Zine Fest
• Chainsaw Bunny cartoons (making up for the lack of bunnies in Same Heartbeats #15 because we’ve received complaints…)
• Bad experiences doing freelance work for feminist NGOs (and what we can learn from that)
• House plants
• How to make a podcast + podcasts about zines
• and more…

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HOW TO PLACE AN ORDER?

Mail me to order one or both of these zines. Thanks! ❤

I accept bank transfer and paypal (different email address!). Trades welcome too!

More info on how to place an order.

Prices:

SHB#16: 2 euros (postage included: Belgium: 3,96 € – Europe: 6,65 € – World: 7,31 €)*
SHB#17: 2 euros (postage included: Belgium: 3,96 € – Europe: 6,65 € – World: 7,31 €)*
SHB#16+17: 4 euros (postage included: Belgium: 5,96 € – Europe: 8,65 € – World: 9,31 €)*

*Postage prices valid until the end of 2020

You can also buy Same Heartbeats #16/Forever Incomplete #12 from Kirsty’s Etsy shop.

Distros: get in touch if you are interested in distributing my zines.

Interested in more zines? Check the complete list/catalogue of all my zines that are still available.

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Recent contributions to publications: books and zines

Apart from creating my own zines, I sometimes contribute drawings or writings to other zines (and sometimes books or other media). For compzines (compilation zines: zines which contain work by several people) contributions are vital and I feel happy and honoured to see my work printed in them.

So, more or less recently I contributed illustrations and essays to the following publications:

 

Recent contributions/mentions in books, diaries, magazines, and zines

I seem to have been quite busy lately and I’m very proud to announce that there are a few (semi)recent publications to which I contributed artwork/illustrations/articles, for which I was interviewed, and/or which mention my zines. I haven’t written about these publications on my blog yet so I decided to write about all of them in one post instead of spamming you with lots of separate ones. I also plan to make a list of all publications (books, magazines, zines, etc) I’ve ever contributed to here.

So here we go:

Article about feminist zines as activism in DiGeSt journal

Some cool news: My second research article was published a little while ago in the new issue of the journal for gender studies and diversity DiGeSt (published by the Leuven University Press). The article focuses on the ways zines can benefit feminist activists resisting body norms, often in unexpected or less traditionally-activist ways. My first research paper (for Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies) set some definitions of feminist perzines and delved into what makes them what they are. This second article highlights the importance of these “unruly booklets” for feminist activists who are fighting body norms.

Mail me if you’re interested in reading the article.

I’m very happy and proud that my articles were published in these scientific journals and it was a sometimes hard but ultimately great experience: helpful peer reviewers, patient editors who were willing to give my articles a chance despite not being an academic myself, amazing interviewees with super interesting and important stuff to say, learning to craft/build/edit my articles in the structure required for journals, reading other relevant (and less relevant but still very interesting) research, and hoping to convince readers who’ve never heard of zines of their amazing potential. I want to keep writing and researching about this stuff (zines, feminism, activism) but right now I’d like to focus again on writing for DIY and more accessible publications. The journals I wrote for are probably some of the more accessible (to write for) and are interested in gender stuff but all academic publications have the disadvantage of not reaching a lot of people* because of their excessive cost (unless you’re a student who can find them at their university library or database). That said, do contact me if you want to read my articles.

*It’s funny how people sometimes criticise zines for their limited reach (something which I wrote about in my article too) but I think that my zines will probably find more readers than my articles will…

Comic about abortion rights in Mine Anthology

The MINE Anthology is a book full of engaging, creative and colourful cartoons, comics, and illustrations from various international artists, published to support the Repeal the 8th campaign by Irish feminist organisations. The project demands to repeal the 8th, provide true reproductive freedom and install legal and accessible abortion services in Ireland.

Our bodies are OURS!
My body is MINE!
So I get to decide what happens to it!
MY body MY choice!
Bodily autonomy now!

This amazing book was published a little while ago and you can still buy it here. There are also some cute bags for sale. Check it out and support MINE!

I happily participated in this project by contributing a comic for the publication. Here you can see the comic I made, depicting a short herstory of abortion rights in Belgium (it was only semi-legalised – legal under some conditions – here in 1990!):

Please support MINE and reproductive freedom for all!

 

New zine: Same Heartbeats #12!

Same Heartbeats #12 is out and for sale! ❤ ❤ ❤

I’m happy to have finished a zine this month, as it’s ZineWriMo: zine writing month! And it’s not just any zine, but the 12th issue of Same Heartbeats!

Same Heartbeats is a zine series I’ve been doing since 2006. It’s part perzine, part feminist/DIY/political/fan/travel/archivist zine. It has followed me during all things feminist, activist, and DIY that I’ve been involved in or interested in these past 11 years. You can still order all previous issues from the back catalogue.

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Same Heartbeats #12 contains:

• article on (non)femininity
• article on archives and activism
• comic about Ladyfest Maastricht
• map of Maastricht
• comics about making music, sexism and feminism
• comic about the herstory of abortion rights in Belgium
• report of F-word festival in Amsterdam
• photos from zine events
• DIY: zine tools
• and more!

It costs only 2 euros (+ postage) for 36 full-packed pages and golden stars! Trades are welcome too and distros can get in touch.

Mail to: flapper_grrrl@yahoo.co.uk to place your order.

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What people said about Same Heartbeats?:

• Same Heartbeats was mentioned in an article Arte Y Cultura Visual about contemporary zines made by women, among such great zines as Culture Slut and Fight Boredom:
  “Same Heartbeats, de la artista e importante activista feminista belga Nina…”
• The British newspaper Morning Star reviewed my zines:
  “In Same Heartbeats, anarcho-feminist Nina shines a light on activism and self-publishing in her native Belgium and across Europe. Her long-running personal zine has just celebrated its 10th anniversary and in it she champions the DIY communities which fight discrimination, host gigs that push women to the forefront and celebrates being feminist and being queer, while also challenging notions of women’s bodies and identities. As well as publishing her comic-led zines, Nina also runs a punk tape label and she draws inspiration from, and carries the torch for, the riot-grrrl scenes of the 1990s.”
• At the indie music website Indiestyle you can read:
  “Uiteraard met een feministisch activistische insteek vind je in dit gevarieerde magazine zowel vlot verteerbare, luchtig gebrachte verslagen van Ladyfests en andere bijeenkomsten als uitgebreide interviews en zwaardere, goed gedocumenteerde en beargumenteerde maatschappelijke artikels terug. Daarnaast wordt het geheel nog opgesmukt met onder andere een aantal nuttige tips & tricks en een heleboel uitmuntende illustraties.”
• Zinester Hadass Badass wrote some super sweet things:
  “Nina (aka Zina) makes a slew of amazing zines and comics through her indie publication project Echo. […] She writes a pretty awesome zine called Different Heartbeats about feminism, punk shows, zine fests, DIY projects, and more. […] I recently wrote her an email telling her that I wish I had half of her skills in comics, and that her art simply inspires me to try and create more of my own. Amazing talent, great sense of humor, endless inspiration, a feast for the eyes, and pure fun! I highly highly recommend you check it out!”
• And even legendary punk zine Maximumrocknroll wrote a review of Same Heartbeats:
  “This is a really cool feminist zine outta Belgium that reminds me of radical zines from the ’80s and early ’90s, pre riot grrrl. Nina wants a feminist revolution, and this booklet details that fact in detail from a historical perspective covering feminist rock collectives of the ’70s that sprang from the women’s lib movement, and from a perspective of a radical feminist that is trying figure out how her actions can bring about change now… The drawings sort of look like the illustrations on early Raincoats records, so it has this nostalgic early ’80s feel, including the language and pro-collective building styles of feminism she espouses. There’s even writing in here against academic/theoretical feminism, interesting, not sure I agree, but Nina is writing for the people not the ivory tower. I enjoyed reading this, and would recommend it for any feminist readers looking for solidarity…”

New zine – From Spice Girls to Riot Grrrls

During the recent 24 hour (fan)zine workshop at Le Space I made another 24 hour zine (although, as usual, it took me a bit longer than 24 hours to finish it).

It’s called From Spice Girls to Riot Grrrls!

Article about feminist perzines in Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies

In November last year the journal Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies published my article “Write it yourself? Feminist perzines as participatory playgrounds”.

Mail me to get the pdf and read my article about feminist perzines.

I’m still always interested in zinesters’ views on zine-making and feminisme/activism. If you make zines and would like to contribute to my (diy) research and be interviewed, fill out my surveys here, here or here.