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.
![Front and back covers of the zine 'New Normal: a perzine about almost moving house during the 2020 pandemic'. The front cover is a collage of text, images, a tarot card of The Tower and a circular sticker of a rainbow and the words "I'm gay. Stay safe." The back cover is a botanical illustration of an orchid, so floral wrapping paper and some cut-and-paste text, including: "what's wrong?" "I know it sucks to say but I'm starting to get stressed about society starting up again".](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/cf7a91b8-f7ac-4b81-be07-de6cedae00ee_EP002384_0039.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
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.
![A double page spread from the zine 'This is not our first pandemic' by Sarah Mirk. The left page shows four young figures socially distanced from each other and dancing, each within the confines of a yellow circle on the floor. The text above the dances says "when the government and civic institutions fail queer communities in the midst of a crisis, people step in to support each each other". The right side shows an elderly man with white hair seated at a table, with a parrot on his shoulder. A speech bubble from the man says "I've lived long enought to know what it's like to identifiy as a criminal and to have to be silent about it to be safe". The text above the illustration says "In a network of friends, neighbours, lovers and strangers no one is disposable."](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/e1e3fce8-679d-494a-adb7-61a1230ef5eb_EP002384_0036.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
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.
![A double page spread from the zine 'Facetime love' by Kento Okawara. The left side is a crudely painted figure of the head and shoulders of a woman with long hair and a red mouth framed by a heavy black rectangle. In the top right of the rectangle is a much smaller red rectangle containing a painted figure of a naked man doing a full-frontal pose. The main rectangle is surrounded by a red background with white stars. On the right side is another black-framed rectangle on a yellow background with blue stars. Inside this rectangel is a topless male figure with a mustache and goatee and wearing his underpants on his head. He has a small yellow duck perched on his left shoulder. In the top right of this rectangle is a small yellow square containing the head of a woman iwth long hair.](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/e281d8e8-e4ac-4c93-aef7-816d03264f9d_EP002384_0003.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
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.
![The front cover of a zine called "Imprisoned wiwth COVID-19' by Tim Spok. Teh cover shows the silohuette of a figure sat iwth his head in his hands behind prison bars. On the other side of the bars is the giant silohuette of the COVID-19 virus.](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/f46a1923-f323-456d-8672-268c6351db62_EP002384_0040.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
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.
![Double page spread from the zine 'Sore loser: a chronic pain and illness zine on queer disabled grief" by Etzali Hernandez and Sandra Alland. On the left side is text containing content and access notes and author biographies for the two zine-makers. The top of the right side of the page is a cut and pasted poem entitled 'Your Exquisite Corpse #1*', with the authors' names Sandra Alland and Etzali Hernandez in italic underneath. The text of the poem is formatted in three verses. Verse one: "I'm good at maths; I'm a counter. / I'm good at nothing: I'm a chaos.
Verse two: "I count squirts of shampoo, / unmasked white men, my dead. / Infinite counting on the longest day of the year."
Verse three: "Is that a blackbird or seven text messages? / A light sky at 10:44; ten fingers and toes less than before."
Below the poem is an asterisk linking back to the title and the text: "composed via Signal messages, summer solstice 2021. Glasgow".
Below the poem is a cut out from a black and white photo of a bundle of clothes. The words "dirty laundry" are written in handwriting, with an arrow pointing to the picture.
The bottom third of the page contains a pasted, printed quote from the book 'Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice' by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. The text says: "Although containing and denying grief is a time-honored activist practice that works for some people, I would argue that feelings of grief and trauma are not a distraction from the struggle. For example, transformative justice work—strategies that create justice, healing, and safety for survivors of abuse without predominantly relying on the state—is hard as hell! What would it be like if we built healing justice practices into it from the beginning?"](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/779c9668-778e-4f70-a3d1-a02becbf327f_EP002384_0029.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
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.
![Front and back covers of the zine 'Quaranzine: a zine about isolation, connectedness & survival in dark times" edited by Mad Covid. The front cover has the word "QUARANZINE!" in capitals going diagnonally downwards from left to right. Above the diagonal is the faint outline of a human face in profile made of tiny pale blue dots on a black background looking down at a mobile phone screen. Below the diagnonal is a mobile phone with an illumnated screen held by a feint hand outlined in pale dots.](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/7d9cf954-c36d-467e-96fa-1cceecc58474_EP002384_0044.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
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.
![The front cover of the zine "Staying home (prompts for zine and other art making). by Vicky Stevenson. The words "Saying home are written in large outline in the middle third of the cover and roughly filled in with a white chalky efet against a black background. The words are roughly circled in the same chalk like marker. Imediately below this is the subtitle in brackets in white typeset in a narrow black strip. The background of the whole page is an abstract pattern of pale white shapes tinged with bluish green against a black background.](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/f83b30dc-9b55-410c-9671-07fc1def4a80_EP002384_0041.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
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.
![A page from the zine 'Quarantine zine' compiled by Katie Ravenscraig. The page, title 'quarantine poses' depicts a young woman with long curly hair and her cat doing 9 comic poses that capture the quarantine experience. The titles of the 9 poses are: a dumpling (the woman sits wrapped in a duvet), the pancake (the woman and cat lie, arms and legs stretched under a duvet), existential dread (the woman and cat are curled up in a ball), plank of wood (the woman leans back rigid like a plank against a swivel chair), yoga guru (the woman stands on leg raised on top of a filing cabinet), life's TV (the woman sits gazing out of a window), the warrior (the woman and cat are on all fours, backs arched, hissing at a mobile phone with the speech bubble coming out of it that says "fake news"), power up (thw woman lies on the floor, arms and legs apart with a cat lying under each arm) and the small things (the woman sits cross-legged on the floor, reaching for a mug with a steaming drink in it).](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/a644047f-672d-48d8-a42a-a11a892293a1_EP002384_0035.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
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.
![Page from the zine 'Physically distant, connected by care : towards collective resilience and strength during the COVID-19 pandemic' by Power Makes Us Sick. The top two thirds of the page are a collage of screen shots of an online meme from a TV gameshow in which a bald black man holding a microphone stands infront of a row of black contestants. The text below two or the panels says "Name one way in which we are all in this together" "We aren't this is a class conflict". The bottom third of the page is a typed text about mutual aid.](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/70acf755-1235-4749-91e2-1c699914c4c8_EP002384_0033.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
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.
![A two page spread from the zine 'Long Covid symptom tracker: a self-care tracker' by ASC for Healthy Communities. The two pages are identical and contain graphics, spaces and check boxes designed to be completed by the user. These recored information including: energy level, mood, insomnia, balance, GI symptoms and a variety of physical sypmptoms such as fever, pain, headache etc.](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/21e6e7e1-9a6a-445a-b1df-bf27c943aae5_EP002384_0026.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
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.
![Two page spread from the zine 'All we have is each other : a guide to creating fabric masks', pieced together by Yessi and N. The pages show step by step diagrams of a cloth mask in different stages of construction. Each diagram is accompanied by a circle containing text of a step number and instructions.](https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/9f709e00-41e7-410b-a926-fbaa4e2ad332_WeAreAllInItTogether.jpg?w=1338&auto=compress%2Cformat&rect=&q=100)
‘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
Lea Cooper is a zine-maker and zine librarian at Edinburgh Zine Library and they are currently working on a PhD looking at the zines at Wellcome Collection. Their research interests are liminality and the third space between practice and research. They live on the Fife coast in Scotland.