Author: Nyx

Confessions of a Small Town Pizza Delivery Girl
Hello Magnolia
One page folded mini-zine
https://www.hellomagnoliaprintshop.com
https://www.patreon.com/cw/HelloMagnolia

Confessions of a Small Town Pizza Delivery Girl is a full colour, one page folded mini-zine collection of personal experiences or witnessed experiences while working as a pizza delivery girl.

First and foremost, there is a trigger warning on the front of this zine: “Trigger warning: Zine mentions sexual assault of a minor and sexual harassment of a minor.” As someone sensitive to those topics, I appreciated the warning and found the content to be disturbing on a ‘what the f*** is wrong with people’ level but was fine to read and keep reading.

Confessions of a Small Town Pizza Delivery Girl gets right into things from the first page with an interesting regular who always ordered their soda in a particular way. From there, we get a variety of lessons about how sometimes people with bad reputations can actually be the kindest people, how some of the people reputed as being kind are actually the worst, and reminders to be kind to hospitality workers. They go through enough day to day and, well, should the opportunity for some payback present itself…

The design of this zine is very fun and colourful. It reminds me of a combination of colourful food ads and the kind of scrapbook and doodle type journals friends and I kept growing up. There are plenty of elements to please those who like plenty going on visually in their zines while still staying readable. There is also a QR cods on the back to make it easy to find out more about HM without taking up much visual real estate in the zine.

Confessions of a Small Town Pizza Delivery Girl is a zine that’s just like life: sweet moments, confusing moments, and some moments that will leave you shaking your head. However, if you’ve worked in hospitality (or retail, etc) and you’re okay with the aforementioned trigger warnings, then this is a zine to pick up for the solidarity. I can absolutely see other zinemakers reading this and making their own zines with their stories as well.

Lucid Dreaming and How I Accidentally Joined a Cult
Robby
6 pages
https://www.instagram.com/keet.creates.zines
https://www.instagram.com/keet.creates

Lucid Dreaming and How I Accidentally Joined a Cult is an A7, black print on orange paper zine about lucid dreaming – with an added part about getting out of a cult in a hurry. (They’re related, I promise.)

I’ve always been fascinated with dreaming overall, with lucid dreaming being a particularly interesting subtopic. So a zine about lucid dreaming? Yes, please.

Lucid Dreaming and How I Accidentally Joined a Cult (I’ll shorten it to ‘Lucid Dreaming’ from here on out) opens with Robby writing about finding a lucid dreaming course advertised and deciding to go for it.

From there, she goes into things she learned in the course. This leads into how the cover image works with the zine: Robby mentions how her lucid dreaming ‘tell’ for lucid dreaming was pulling her finger. Her finger stretching (cover image) or falling off would tell her she was dreaming. This whole thing made me smile because I have heard of so many things but nothing so, well, easy.

I appreciated that Robby mentioned trying not to get too excited. Nobody ever gave me that advice, and I got so excited the first time that I promptly woke up. Oops. Haha. But it’s definitely a good piece of advice that is too often overlooked.

You’re probably wondering about the cult part (which, kudos to Robby for that fun hook), and I’ll just say that I’m so Robby got out before she got too far in. Be careful out there, people, when helpful groups start trying to get you to obey strange rules.

Lucid Dreaming is a great mini-zine with a lot of good advice while also showing a bit of Robby’s personality and life experiences. If you’re curious about lucid dreaming and want to get to know a cool person through her zines, then definitely pick this one up.

Pouch: Issue One
VRK
50 pages
https://www.instagram.com/pouch.studio
https://pouch.studio/links/

Pouch: Issue One is a full-colour A5 zine chock full of all sorts of things stationery and stationery related – journaling, supplies, planners, DIYs, and more.

While Pouch identifies itself as a magazine rather than a zine on the cover, VRK does call it a zine inside. So I’m going with zine for the purpose of this review and, frankly, because I love it and wanted to write about it. (There’s your TL;DR if you’d prefer one. Haha.)

Pouch opens with a lovely table of contents on the inside cover and a letter of introduction and welcome. If I hadn’t already been convinced I would love this zine before even reading it, then this first spread would have convinced me. The table of contents page pulls a few things out of the list and places them, with pictures, around the page to add plenty of visual fun. There is a QR code to find links to all the stationery and creators featured in the issue, and the welcome letter? Has cute little stickers on it. Absolutely adorable.

From there we go into ‘Pouch Picks’ with fun stationery goodies to buy and/or try. (MU Inky Pens, welcome to my wish list.) In pages following, we have a thorough review of a label maker (thank you!), ideas for using up your notebooks, being kind to your hands while writing, an in-depth interview with Nikki Chan about journals, goals, and more… At fifty pages, I could write paragraphs about everything included in this zine. Needless to say, there’s so much to enjoy!

Yes, there is also some sticker talk, which I thought was fun in and of itself but also to follow the Sticker Culture Zine review yesterday. I also mentioned in that review how much I love an interactive zine, and Pouch is interactive! There’s a page included of drawn images to cut and paste if you like as well as a fun kuchipatchi coaster pattern to make! (And a crossword puzzle. Can’t forget the crossword.)

The aesthetic of Pouch is lovely and cute. There are plenty of little details to delight your eyes, journal and planner layout examples (and my bias is that I absolutely adore looking at what people create in their planners and journals).

All in all, Pouch is such a lovely zine that is jam-packed with goodness. Even better? There’s Pouch Issue Two already out in the universe for you to enjoy as well. I think you’ll know by this review if you’ll love the zine. If you have even an inkling you’ll enjoy it, pick it up! I’ve been pouring over it again and again. (And it will be staying on my desk for future inspiration.)