Last year I made a whole bunch of zines. I had made a handful in previous years, but I truly went ham on the zine making front in 2018, Year of the Zine. Here’s a little something about some that are my faves of the lot.
When I first looked into getting a dog, greyhounds were so far away from my radar. But I did a bunch of googling, joined a bunch of Facebook groups, and ended up deciding to get a greyhound and haven’t looked back since. Macy has been amazing! We get asked a lot of the same questions everywhere we go. I hadn’t made a zine for probably about a year or so when I made this one. We love a good FAQ!
All the mini Macy zines are sold, but I’ve got a handful of A5 ones left that come with Macy stickers.
Sad Cooking: Vol 1
Sad Cooking is supposed to be a series of zines that’s sold out at the moment (I’m thinking of reprinting for this year’s set of zine fairs). The first one (currently the only one I’ve put together – no. 2 is in the making) is a bunch of recipes I gravitate towards when I’m depressed and living alone. There’s also a page on how to make rice on the stove, and my other favourite basic the Humble Vermicelli.
I really like cooking but it’s hard to find that balance of cooking for the right amount of time and also the right amount of energy when you’re depressed. I don’t want to read through fourteen paragraphs about someone’s glorious day out at the park which inspired the mac and cheese I’m about to attempt. I just want the recipe and then variations on what I can do with it. I just want to know how long it’ll take to make. I’m depressed. I don’t have time for this.
So I went through a bunch of recipes I had saved and had written for myself for when I couldn’t get around to making proper meals. I’ve structured it according to how long each recipe takes (sometimes when things are too much, I just want to make food for 2 hours and not think about anything. Sometimes I’m sad and mad and hangry and want food in under 20 min), followed by what equipment you need (washing dishes could be very low on my priority list at times), the instructions, and variations on the recipe (eg. what you could add to the dish, how I normally eat it etc).
Volume 2 will be vegetarian/vegan meals.
One time some people told me I should sell that drawing on the left but I wasn’t confident enough to sell a drawing of my own selfie as a print. So I made a compromise with myself and also a zine instead. This is probably one of the first zines I made, and still some of the highest quality selfies I’ve ever drawn, for class and otherwise.
This is probably my favourite thing I’ve made in the past few years. I’ve talked about it a lot on various media, so I’ll keep this one nice and short. Articulation was written in the middle of an intense self reflective time, and after I had been to therapy continuously for about 4 months. I had started to share my thoughts on mental health and my own journey online a year prior and was overwhelmed by how positive everyone’s responses were to what I had considered to be things that I had worked out about myself that weren’t either positive or negative.
It carries a content warning for various intense emotions, and it is important to me that people don’t read it until they’re ready to confront themselves on thoughts about mental health (either good or bad). I’ve often described it as entirely representative of myself as an artist, but truthfully, it’s like looking at a report card about myself and my journey. All the things in this zine are about the past, and about how I could and would like to move forward, but they aren’t representative of myself in the future and there is a sense of letting go because of that.
I’ll be making a sequel to this, soon.
Talk soon, Annie
