Discover my queerest zines! (for Queer Zest Zine Fest)

Hi there! This weekend it’s Queer Zest Zine Fest: a virtual zine fest with queer zinesters showing their creations, workshops, and online meet-ups. Find all info here and also check my little participation announcement poster.

I love to read AND make queer zines. There probably exist queerious vibes in all of my zines but they are most clear and obvious in the zines I’ve listed below. In those zines I write and draw about non-conforming gender expression (and feeling pressure to conform), trying to understand (my) gender, lesbophobia in feminist spaces, queer subculture/events, LGBTQIA+ musicians, hating TERFs and fighting transphobia, exploring and relating to queerness in 80s rock stars… Often these writings are a mix of personal reflections and fandom while trying to find some political meaning in between.

Scroll down to the end of this post to find my ideas for future queer zines… 🙂

Zines I’ve read in 2021 (July) – International Zine Month edition

I intended to read at least one zine every day in July for International Zine Month (IZM) and succeeded! I ended up reading 46 in total. My selection for this reading challenge included a comic about travel adventures, a comic about overcoming tiredness, metazines encouraging readers to make their own zines, several riot grrrl zines from different parts of the world including Brazil and Denmark, a few quaranzines with personal reflections and experiences, a Jewish queer zine with personal-political stories and artwork, a zine about dealing with abuse and community accountability, a fanzine about horror films directed by women, personal-political zines about manarchists and anarchist organising, perzines with a glimpse into the life of the authors, mini-zines about mental health, a play your own adventure about zines, a music/perzine about reclaiming an interest in playing guitar, a study about black face masked as a children’s holiday and how art can offer criticism or alternatives, a zine with ideas for dabbling in witchcraft, an artzine about winter plants, and more! I love that these publications use a mix of text and images to express what they want to say, with fictional stories and passionate revelations as well as black & white collages and splashes of colour in the paper choice, binding, or ink. One zinester even made a curiously folded zine, one of the tiniest zines I’ve ever seen, and a mini-zine with a pocket filled with seeds! Clearly, every zine maker has their own unique style and voice and each zine is so personal and reveals a lot about the creator or author. I recommend checking them all out!

PS. I actually read the two feminist mini-zines by Girls Go BOOM that you can see in the photos below in June but forgot to add them to my previous post. I got both of them during a recent visit to the Girls Go BOOM zine library and look forward to upcoming issues.

More photos and links to where you can find the zines:

International Zine Month 2021 – overview

International Zine Month (IZM) is over! 😦 But it’s been fun and of course zine-making goes on during the rest of the year! How has July been for you? Did you engage in some zine fun too? I’m curious to know all about it!

Here is an overview of all the zine-related things I did this month and some tips for things to do from August on:

20 years of Echo Zines: the Flapper Gathering series

I’m not only celebrating International Zine Month this summer but also my zine anniversary (aka zineversary)! So for today’s prompt “HallowZine! Remember zines and zinesters that are no longer with us” I’m going to focus on some of my own ancient out-of-print zines. Let’s dive into my personal zine herstory again and take another look at my oldest zine series…

International Zine Month 2021 – work in progress

How’s zine month going for you? I’ve been enjoying myself so far, reading and making zines, and posting about zine stuff on this blog…

I’m skipping today’s official International Zine Month prompt, “write a letter or online post about your IZM2021 experience” (see Stolen Sharpie Revolution), because I will summarise my #IZM2021 experience in a later blogpost.

So instead, I’ll give you some glimpses of the zine projects I’m currently working on:

• Do it Yourself Care #4
• Confined #3 and 4
• New buttons

International Zine Month 2021 – zinester selfie

After I shared a “shelfie” or photo of zine shelves a few days ago, it’s time for a zinester selfie!

Today’s prompt by Stolen Sharpie Revolution for International Zine Month says:

‘Take a photo of you with your zine or zine collection and post it online.”

I don’t really like to share photos of myself online and when I do, I usually hide behind the zines! 🙂 (Face masks and sun glasses are also very useful 🙂 ). I even thought about showing a drawn self-portrait instead… But in the end I did the entire prompt: photo of me + my zines + my zine collection + posting online.

By the way, I’m having quite some fun experimenting with Gimp (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) this month. I mostly use and like Photoshop for my illustration work but I recently installed Gimp on my laptop and I find it’s easy to quickly make or edit some images for this blog and social media. It’s a lot better than it used to be and totally free and open source. I can recommend it! Here are more recommendations for graphic software, fonts, and clip-art (the font I’ve been using for my July images is “Mom’s Typewriter”).

Chainsaw Bunny is less cameraphobic and wanted her photo taken too:

International Zine Month 2021 – read a zine every day

Today’s prompt for International Zine Month is: “Post online about your favorite zines!” (see Stolen Sharpie Revolution for the entire list of prompts) and I’m going to combine it with the bonus prompt “read a zine a day”.

International Zine Month 2021 – L7 zines

A few days ago, I decided to invent a new International Zine Month prompt to encourage myself and others to delve into the relationship between zines and music. The idea of this prompt is that you can do or make (and/or share online) anything relating to music and zines. This can include making a playlist about zine-related songs, researching the herstory of zines in music subcultures, marveling over your favourite music fanzines, or making a zine about your favourite band. I invite you to participate and post about it online before the end of July (and let me know about it)!

Read on to find out what I did for this prompt…

International Zine Month 2021 – my zine collection

I love today’s International Zine Day prompt because I’m such a zine geek!

“Organize your zine collection. Post a shelfie online.”

So thank you, Stolen Sharpie Revolution for inventing that prompt and the word “shelfie”! 🙂

I have a pretty large personal zine collection, from having acquired zines for more than 20 years (buying them, trading them, getting some for free…). Most of the zines I’ve read are stored and organised in magazine boxes on book shelves, and smaller sized zines in smaller boxes. The big boxes are arranged according to subject (meta zines, queer zines, self-care, witchy… and so on) and the smaller ones according to country (it’s just easier for me to find things that way). Some parts of my zine shelves look a bit messy I think. Time to tidy and reorganise those parts and also read more unread zines so I can put them in the pretty boxes (and so I can enjoy exploring those unread zines of course). 🙂

Here are some photos of my zine collection:

Virtual Portland Zine Symposium 2021 – my virtual zine table

It’s Portland Zine Symposium this weekend and because of the ongoing pandemic it’s taking place online. But that has the advantage that more people can attend and participate! Like me!

So tomorrow I’m going to take a few of Portland Zine Symposium’s virtual workshops and during the entire weekend I will be “tableing”. Are you curious to see my virtual zine table? You can find all my zines in my zine catalogue and I have a few zine bundles in my webshop too.

Contact me by email if you’re interested or if you have questions. 🙂

By the way, at the moment I have these special surprise bags available (More info):

Here are a few more photos of my virtual zine table: (Scroll down to know how YOU can table too!)