A local zine store recently reignited my passion for this DIY art form. The zines I enjoy are often more personal than books or traditional magazines. Less concerned with tidiness and marketability. Zines themselves, regardless of their subject matter, remind me of poems. Sometimes they’re more about a tone, a sense of something, a snapshot in time and emotion, than they are about a structured message. Maybe not everything makes sense, but it doesn’t have to. Maybe it just makes the reader feel something.
From years of private art and hand-scribbled personal and magical journaling, I pulled together my first zine in a long while: Hail Hel. Named for a beloved goddess of death and the daughter of Loki, this zine centers her and her gifts through journal entries about death, collages and scribbles, found objects, confessions, years of dreams and nightmares about the dying and dead, recurrent themes of parents and children, astral travel debriefings, and more.
Black and white physical copies will soon debut in Chicago, IL. But if you’re looking for a full-color PDF (20 pages) to read right away, check out my sliding scale Gumroad here or below: