SlowQuest – A Choose Your Own Adventure Zine – Quest I: The Goblin Guard
BodieH
@bodieh
www.slowquest.com

Sometimes you see a zine, and you instantly know that you want to get a copy. This is one of those zines.

SlowQuest is a choose your own adventure zine taking you on an adventure for glory and riches! Standing in your way? A goblin guard…

I love this zine so much. On the aesthetic side, it’s superb. It’s well made, the art is incredibly detailed and invites you to inspect it closely, the cream-coloured interior paper suits very well, everything is so nicely put together, and even the corners are rounded. The whole thing is not only fun but speaks to a dedication to making even the tactile experience of the zine a good one.

I have talked a little bit about zine re-readability in reviews, but this is re-readability of a different sort. After I found out that my ‘natural instinct’ adventurer days would be about as monetarily rewarding as my actual life (hahaha), I immediately went back to trying all the different possibilities. The size of the zine is deceptive in that there were even more options than I expected there to be.

I felt like a kid again, and it was awesome.

Also, two thumbs way up for clear contact details:

This is one of those zines that I’m probably going to have to get another copy to loan out because I don’t want anyone messing with my copy.

PS. Shout out to Zine-O-Matic for having such good taste in zines and for granting a wish on my zine wishlist. 🙂

Anecdata 2
Olivia M June
Oliviaszines.tumblr.com
www.ParadoxNowCreations.etsy.com

24 Hour Zine Thing!

Starting with a side note: I really like it when people mention when their zine is a 24 hour zine thing because it’s a quick and simple way to spread the word about it, but it also usually means I’m in for some fun, ‘not even the zine author expected this’ pieces.

Misspelling Anecdata while typing this review inspired me to actually look up the definition of ‘anecdata’, and I must say that I absolutely adore when there’s a ‘not quite secret’ extra layer of meaning to the title of a zine. (See: A Visitor in Myself https://seagreenzines.com/2016/05/06/mini-zine-review-a-visitor-in-myself-2/ ) I was going to share the definition, but I’m starting to feel like that might be a spoiler-ish move, so I’ll leave it to you to Google ‘define anecdata’ if you’re so inclined.

As I mentioned in my review of Anecdata 1, Olivia’s writing style is open to glimpsing her life but also has these strong ‘pay attention and remember’ moments. For instance, she shares some thoughts about her personal experiences with depression before launching into the reminder that depression can be about more than feeling sad. Then she gives a list of other symptoms before easily sliding back into her own experience of some of those symptoms.

Olivia also writes about all sorts of things including pills, poetry, penpalling, and not liking chocolate. There’s also a self-sketch (sketchie?), poetry, a list, and more recommendations – this time of the science fiction and fantasy book variety.

Though this zine is bigger than the first, it keeps the same cut and paste aesthetic that I enjoyed from the first zine.

I must say that I’m really enjoying this zine series, and it’s one of those ones that has set me on a ‘I need to have them all in my zine collection’ path.

Brainscan 21: irreconcilable differences
Alex Wrekk
http://www.portlandbuttonworks.com/

This zine is complicated.

I don’t mean that comment to be flippant or dismissive. Quite the opposite. I’ve never read a zine that had me examining my own behaviour and the behaviour of my partner to the extent that I felt the need to sit down and have an intense talk with my partner about our relationship. It’s that level of personal involvement with the content and its implications that earns it this comment from me.

As Alex Wrekk puts it, Brainscan 21: irreconcilable differences “started out as a letter to explain my perspective to someone, to give context to my behaviors and concerns.” Inside, Alex documents thoughts, feelings, and the unanswered questions that surrounded her through her six-year relationship that eventually came to an end due to many things including emotional abuse.

What makes this zine a complex one is that it addresses the issues of emotional abuse and power dynamics within relationships. In school, I was taught about sexual abuse, physical abuse, and even mental abuse in a rather cut and dried, black and white manner. But emotional abuse can be a more complicated issue and thus brushed over. And yet I feel like it’s so important because it’s the subtlety of this kind of abuse that can make it so dangerous.

At one point, Alex talked about having picked up a few of the bad behaviours from her ex-partner and how she’d caught herself using them. It was one of those examples that prompted me to have a sit down with Wanderer about the dynamics in our relationship.

Though Alex does talk about specific events, this zine is not a tit-for-tat list of every argument or event. Alex keeps it very much to her perspective, thoughts, and feelings during this time. If I had to guess, I’d say it was written very close to everything or at least during a time when everything was still quite raw. There’s an almost ‘foggy’ nature to some of Alex’s writing, especially at the end when musing the bigger picture: abuse in a society that seems to support the psychopath, the sociopath, the abuser, the manipulator. A ‘fogginess’ that I recognise in myself.

As someone who grew up with abuse, however, it’s hard not to inject my own thoughts and feelings regarding working through things into Alex’s experience of working through things. This is also something that makes this zine complicated – at least, for me to review it.

All in all, this is a zine I would recommend because there’s so much here to think about but also because it’s important for these experiences to be shared.