It’s a difficult time to be a caregiver for a young child. Finding ways for children to safely socialize and play and to understand why the pandemic has driven the world into quarantine is a huge task. As a librarian, I wish I had more books to give caregivers to help. Writer Mikey Woz and…
REVIEW: Black Hole Heart Explores Friendship through Horror
I am the kind of person who wants everything to make sense, and for everything to have a reason. Perhaps paradoxically, I also LOVE horror, a genre where questions often go unanswered, or the source of the horror is never fully explained. Horror stories examine relationships in ways that don’t follow normal logic, and I…
REVIEW: Séance Tea Party is a Beautiful Story about Growth, Change and Magic
Lora Xi’s twelfth birthday is a bit quieter than she hoped. Her friends are becoming more interested in things Lora doesn’t care about, like dating, fashion, and going to parties. Lora loves all things witchy and spooky, and still wants to play and be a kid. When her best friend Bobby is completely absent on…
REVIEW: The Dreams of Queer Utopia Will Inspire You to Dream
In a pandemic, in a time of unrest, in a world that constantly keeps marginalized people in crisis, how do we imagine an ideal future? How do we look past the obstacles immediately in front of us and consider a happy, queer world? How do we dream? Editor and cartoonist H-P Lehkonen decided to create…
Quaranzines Will Keep Us Connected: An Interview with Jenna Freedman
When I first started working on this project in those wild, precious, before-the-Pandemic times, I visited several zine libraries in person and online, and talked to the librarians, barefoot and degree-d alike, who run them. During this process, I quickly began hearing familiar names come up in conversation. Zine communities can often be niche and…
New Colors for Bug Boys and Witchlight Enrich their Stories
I’m a big fan of Czap Books, especially two of their earlier publications – Laura Knetzger’s sweet, slice-of-life series Bug Boys, and Jessi Zabarsky’s emotional, warm fantasy Witchlight. I’ve written about both comics before, but since those initial pieces both books were picked up by Random House Graphic and released to a wider audience. I…
Jane Mai’s Soft is a Brilliant Retelling of Carmilla
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains discussion of abusive relationships. When a friend recommended I watch a low budget webseries about a lesbian vampire who falls in love with her plucky college roommate, I didn’t realize it was based on Carmilla, a vampire novella by Sheridan Le Fanu older than Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I was fascinated…
Charmed, Sexual Assault, & the Medusa Myth
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains discussion of sexual assault. SPOILER WARNING: This article contains spoilers for season one of the new Charmed television series. I recently wrote an article encouraging people to return to the TV series Charmed as a silly, stress-free social distancing activity. Charmed is wildly campy and difficult to take seriously –…
Social Distance and Watch Charmed
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the necessary practice of social distancing, Netflix has introduced a new feature: Netflix Party. Netflix Party allows viewers on multiple accounts to synchronously watch a TV show or movie, simplifying a difficult task teen-me used to attempt with my internet friends so we could watch anime together….
Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Feminist Fight Choreography
Seeing myself in a piece of media never gets old. There’s a basic kind of representation that feels all right — oh, another queer person, a bisexual person, cool! — but every so often I find something special that really, truly resonates. I usually expect to find that feeling more in books or indie comics…
PEOW is Publishing Wildly Creative Comics for Everyone
When I look for new comics or zines in a shop, at a festival, or online, I tend to browse wildly and pick up anything that catches my eye. We are blessed to live in a comics era filled with small presses and distros that are putting a variety of wild, creative work out into…
From University Archive to Prison: An Interview with the DePaul University Zine Archive
Editor’s Note: This is the second interview in the Zine Interview Comics Librarium series by Alenka Figa. Read the first interview, “Our Queer Older Siblings Will Save Us: An Interview with the Queer Zine Archive Project.”