Wildlife of Victoria Vol 1 – Semi-Domesticated Animals
Apples
Twitter: https://twitter.com/celuran@cerulan
celuran@gmail.com

It was bound to happen again sometime, and here we are…

Wildlife of Victoria Vol 1 – Semi-Domesticated Animals is a funny black and white zine featuring two stories: one about bees and one about a goat. There are also some bee facts and recipes to try out thrown into the mix.

With the title being what it is, I expected something like a listing of wildlife encountered or something along the more ‘dry factual’ lines. I was surprised in all the best ways when I realised that, while this does serve as a guidebook of sorts (I had no idea that if you move bees, it has to be more than 5 kilometres away because they know their way home), it’s primarily a funny memoir-style zine about animal encounters.

Before I get carried away, I want to start off with the beginning of this zine, which is very, very sweet. Apples talks about being afraid of meeting new people (I hear you!) and dealing with that fear by seeing them simply as people who haven’t heard the bee-moving story yet.

I thought the concept was a fun and funny (in a good way) way to do things, but I didn’t realise quite how funny until I got into reading about the bees.

And then reading about the goat. Oh, my goodness, that goat.

I struggle to talk about the stories because I enjoyed them so much and don’t want to spoil even the tiniest bit of goodness. The stories are funny on their own, but they are made even funnier for two reasons.

The first comes in having the wisdom of hindsight. I laughed, with empathy, when Apples wondered why they thought a certain move with beehives would be a good idea because it definitely wasn’t.

Right now, typing this, I cannot believe what a stupid idea this is.

Secondly, it’s funnier because Apples has taken tweets made while these things were actually happening and included them in the zine.

I now realise why goats are linked to Satan

Apples also includes recipes, both of which I’d like to try out. But I think what I love most about them is that they are put into the zine when they are mentioned. Even mid-story. Readers might not think one way or another about this, but I really feel like sticking them in like like (as opposed to putting them in their own recipe section or something like that) adds to the ‘chaotic flurry’ that is the feeling when reading about angry bees and even angrier goats. It feels almost like an aesthetic choice to simply put them in as they came up in conversation.

The funniest thing about this zine for me is this: I looked at the back cover before I started reading, and it reads “look forward to vol. 2 where I will talk about chooks”. Now having read the zine, that now takes a hilariously ominous tone.

If you want to have a(n empathic) laugh at tales of semi-domesticated animals, then you are missing out if you don’t check out this zine.

If You Hate Someone… You Hate Someone
http://jeepneyzines.tictail.com/
notyourleo@outlook.com

If You Hate Someone… You Hate Someone is a black and white handwritten zine about language, relationships, and the question: Are hurtful words turning romantic?

I’ve been sitting here for a while now trying to figure out how to get into this review, but my head is still filled with everything I’ve just read. I should learn to simply not have expectations with any zines because this zine certainly went in a different direction than I thought it would. What started out as a rant turned into a real ‘lightbulb’ sort of zine for me, making me think about things in a new light.

Inspired by people ‘shipping’ Resident Evil 7’s “protagonist and the game’s next door asshole”, the zinemaker asks:

“Are we normalising loathing in healthy relationships?”

They start off talking about tired of people deciding that two men who hate each other ‘obviously’ must really be in love with each other. The concern (amongst many) in this is that it’s taking nasty words and phrases thrown at each other as some sort of secret, disgusting love language and how that is playing out in society with hurtful words becoming normalised.

I like the clarification of the difference between liking the ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ trope and the ‘they hate each other so they must love each other’ thing that the zinemaker is talking about. Furthermore, there is the clarification that this isn’t about abusive relationships either – even though, when it comes to this topic, they are muddier waters to navigate.

They go on to point out the societal implications of indulging what some would argue is an ‘innocent fiction’ and how it’s not just simple or fun. How these sorts of things tend to leak into behaviour and normalise it.

Who hasn’t heard ‘if a boy hits a girl, then he really likes her’?

I do have to point out here that the handwriting is a bit hard to read at times. But I found the subject so interesting that it only slowed me down rather than prevented me from continuing.

If You Hate Someone is a zine that I expected to read casually, but it ended up really making me think a lot about things that I’d simply accepted as how things work. Things that I hadn’t taken the time to think critically about. If anything I’ve described here sounds interesting to you, then definitely check out this zine.