Category: Guest Posts

Oishii Expressions
Creepy Cheese

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Oishii Expressions is a A7 one-page folded and thrice stapled mini containing a fun selection of Japanese phrases for when things aren’t going your way.

I picked up this zine at Festival of the Photocopier in February. I love bilingual zines and have a particular soft spot for Japanese. More importantly, I couldn’t resist the cheeky smile of the soy sauce fish!

Each of the six pages has a phrase written in hiragana, Japanese script, with the romaji (or Roman characters) transliteration. I thought this was a really cool feature which makes the zine accessible and useful for people with different levels of Japanese. As someone who understands hiragana, I enjoyed being able to read the zine in the original language as well.

The English translation is beneath my favourite part: the full colour illustrations of highly expressive sushi. The faces these critters pull demonstrate the meaning of the phrase just as well as the text. These sushi pals aren’t just your standard California roll either – I was really happy to see an onigiri rice ball!

If you’re keen on languages or adorable sushi characters, nab yourself a copy of Oishii Expressions.

This has been a guest zine review by J.E.M. Hast!

Zines have entered a very sad period; the saddest in the history of zines. The zine world has been taken over by liberals who spout the same nonsense incessantly. There was a day when zines covered every walk of life and included incredibly diverse opinions. Alas, that day is gone.

But with Fishspit’s “Pussy Whipped Again” issue of his Wiseblood (started in 1984!), we finally get “notes from the underground.” This is something truly different.

This zine records Fishspit’s struggle to put a zine out that upsets the so called “modern liberal” with their incredible closed mindedness. Liberalism, by its nature, is supposed to be a system of values which is based in open-mindedness. But they’ve somehow warped liberalism into an actual intolerant fascism. It’s truly amazing!

It has delightful collage work that expresses just what it means to be pussy-whipped, and just what it means to not be. It has a sensationally funny story about Fishspit slapping a female cat on her ass and the unbelievably whacky consequences. It also has the truly entertaining story of a fellow taking a date to the zoo, and having a giraffe sneeze an amazing amount of snot in her face, and the farcical results of just such absurdity.

You won’t find anything like it in the countless zine drivel by the “Oh! We’re so oppressed” zesters. (To give an example I recently received a zine with an entire content arguing that white female feminists were not true feminists because of their privilege! Who wants to read that nonsense?!)

It is unbelievably refreshing to have a zine like this! I give a nod and a wink to Fishspit for his bravery to keep putting out zines that are going to be unpopular with the zine status quo. This sort of zine is the true “underground” in the modern zine scene.