A huge variety of zines was made during the Covid-19 pandemic, as people used this immediate and accessible form to record their experiences of lockdown. Researcher and zine-maker Lea Cooper finds that they were often made by people already familiar with “staying at home”, working with disability or chronic illness.
New normal : a perzine about almost moving house during the 2020 pandemic., Annie Pocalypse. Source: Wellcome Collection. © Zine maker: Annie Pocalypse, Tarot card illustrator: Kim Krans.
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The bright, collaged cover of Annie Pocalpyse’s perzine tells a story before you even open it. She documents her experience of housing instability against the backdrop of the start of the pandemic in 2020. ‘The Tower’ tarot card, with meanings including transformation and upheaval, on the front cover and the cut-and-paste text on the back cover about the stress of society restarting gives a different spin on her title ’new normal’. Many Covid-19 zines, like Annie Pocalpyse’s, don’t focus exclusively on Covid-19 but instead consider how it intersects with other things, like housing insecurity. They undo assumptions that everyone’s experience of the pandemic was the same.
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In the UK media the pandemic was often described as ‘unprecedented’, ignoring other histories of pandemics and epidemics. In ‘This is Not Our First Pandemic’, Sarah Mirk records queer Portlanders reflecting on the parallels and differences between Covid-19 and the early years of the HIV epidemic in the US. They see both as part of a long history of queer communities practising mutual aid. The connection is emphasised by the juxtaposition of Zeph Fishlyn’s socially distanced dance party, a response to the Covid quarantine, with the reflections of 89-year-old Eric Marcoux on queer dance clubs in San Francisco in the late 80s, which also engaged with sexual health support.
Facetime love, Kentaro Okawara. Source: Wellcome Collection. © Published by Hato Press, London. IG @hatopress. Artwork by Kentaro Okawara, IG @kentarookawara.
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Zines have often been concerned with new technologies – whether it’s the mimeograph or the Xerox machine – and many zines during Covid-19 documented changing relationships to digital technology. ‘Facetime Love’ is a bright risoprinted zine by Kentaro Okawara that offers a window into the intersections between digital technology, sexuality and relationships. A whole visual culture developed around Covid-19, from representations of the virus itself to the ubiquitous Zoom screen. These pages particularly capture the ways that our own faces appear in a small rectangle in the corner of a video call, emphasising the way the technology mediates our relationship to the person we are talking to.
Imprisoned with COVID-19, Tim Spock. Source: Wellcome Collection. © Published by Microcosm Publishing, written by Tim Spock.
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Zines have been an important way of sharing information within prisons and with the outside world. In ‘Imprisoned WITH COVID-19’ Tim Spock documents the experience of the pandemic from a prison in the USA. Spock describes the ways that prisoners were abandoned by the government, and the real-world impacts of specific policies on himself, his friends, cellmates and other members of the prison community. The zine’s title gives a sense of the anxiety, worry and fear that pervades the zine – once Covid-19 reached the incarcerated population, it was like being locked in with the virus.
Sore loser : a chronic pain and illness zine on queer disabled grief, Etzali Hernández and Sandra Alland. Source: Wellcome Collection. © Etzali Hernández and Sandra Alland.
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Sandra Alland and Etzali Hernández co-created the zine ‘Sore Loser: a chronic pain and illness zine on queer disabled grief’ through a variety of methods. This page includes a poem, composed by sending single lines back and forth via the messaging app Signal. They then cut and pasted the printed lines of the poem and scanned the page for the zine. The technique speaks not just to the changes in practices necessitated by Covid-19, but the alternative ways of working that sick and disabled people were already using. The page also presents a photo by Hernández of a basket of clothes labelled “dirty laundry” and a quote about the importance of grief from Disability Justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. As well as reckoning with the grief for those people being killed or disabled by Covid-19 (and a public health policy that prioritises profit), they explore the grief of inaccessibility, of being treated as disposable, of the loss of places and practices. The zine itself is an act of mourning, resistance and joy.
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Mad Covid was created in 2020 as a shared space for grassroots work by mental health survivors and service users that started during the pandemic. It includes a diaries project, a hardship fund and a series of broad recommendations for mental health services. This zine asks: what advice can people who have already had experiences of isolation and restriction of movement offer? The tagline on the back page, “We were mad before the whole world went Covid 19 crazy” highlights how numerous experiences that were new to so many during lockdown were already the everyday experiences of other people.
Staying home : (prompts for zine and other art making), Vicky Stevenson.. Source: Wellcome Collection. © Vicky Stevenson.
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With many of us staying home, our usual routines and work disrupted, there was an increase in zine-making. This ‘prompt zine’, created by Vicky Stevenson of Penfight Distro, is an example of the ways that zine makers encourage zine-making by others. Through a series of prompts, ranging from the bigger questions like “How has your sense of time been affected?” to the more immediate “What do you wish you could have delivered to you right now?”, Stevenson encourages us to use zines to record and reflect on our experiences. Although the zine was made with the pandemic in mind, broader prompts around staying inside address experiences of disability, chronic illness, isolation or incarceration.
Quarantine zine, Compiled by Katie Ravenscraig. Source: Wellcome Collection. © Zine maker Katie Ravenscraig, comic artist Ellen Forbes.
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In ‘Quarantine Zine’, editor Katie Ravenscraig collects together the work of 45 artists, writers, photographers and poets who responded to an open call at the beginning of Covid-19 lockdowns in March/April 2020. The zine is an example of how the immediacy of zine-making meant she was able to record experiences of Covid-19 in the moment. In this humorous comic, artist Ellen Forbes captures some of her experiences of quarantine as a series of physical poses. Some, like ’the dumpling’ and ‘existential dread’ give a sense of an emotional state. Other poses suggest familiar quarantine activities such as sitting watching the world out of the window and napping. The wider world intrudes in the form of ‘FAKE NEWS’ as she and her cat arch their backs and hiss at a ringing phone.
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This zine explores the importance of mutual aid. The widely circulated meme suggests that rather than all being “in this together”, the pandemic is a class conflict. The zine’s creators, Power Makes Us Sick, go on to discuss the meaning of mutual aid and its co-option by politicians, referencing an alternative response to an economic crisis in Greece in 2008. Zine-making is often thought of as an ‘analogue’ process, using typewriters and photocopiers, but this page demonstrates how contemporary zines incorporate memes and other online content and culture.
Long Covid symptom tracker : a self-care tracker, ASC for Healthy Communities. Source: Wellcome Collection. © ASC for Healthy Communities.
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A significant part of the pandemic has been the post-infection effects of the virus, given the name Long Covid. Like many post-viral conditions, Long Covid is not well understood, well researched or recognised by some medical professionals. This zine is interactive, designed to be filled in by the person reading it, and used to track some of the symptoms of Long Covid. It contains enough pages for a month and uses different techniques to track different things – like a battery outline that you can fill in to record your energy level, and thumbs pointing in different directions for your balance and GI (gastrointestinal) symptoms.
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‘All we have is each other: a guide to creating fabric masks’ is a zine, created by Yessi and N, which extends the tradition zines sharing health information and resources. In the early days of the pandemic, there was less understanding about how COVID-19 was transmitted and limited access to medical-standard masks like the N95. Yessi and N’s step-by-step guide is simple, informative and visually communicates the importance of masks and how to construct a fabric mask that can take a filter insert. The zine is available to view or download from the authors' Google Drive. Like many health-related zines they offer practical support for taking care of ourselves and each other.
About the author
Lilith (Lea) Cooper
(they/them)
Lea Cooper is a zine-maker and zine librarian at Edinburgh Zine Library. They recently completed a practice-based PhD working with the zines at Wellcome Collection. They live on the Fife coast in Scotland.