![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeMori: yo yo, I too made out like a bandit at the Boston Anarchist Book Fair! My favorite zine so far (and I doubt it’ll get topped, it speaks to my monster dyke SOUL) is Snake Hair’s “Medusa: Myth, Memory, (Anti) Monument.” This is the religion zine I was gnawing on my arm for when I was making Madgic, and I bought it because I realized it was associated with the banner on the wall, which read “The Monster’s Tools Will Dismantle the Master’s House.” SOLD!
First of all, Snake Hair is also a Riso print collective, and this zine goes BANANAS with it. Most Riso zines/comics, you stick to 1-2 colors because more than that and you gotta refeed the paper through the machine with new drums, and since Riso is persnickety about colors lining up even on good days, the more colors you got, the more likely shit is to get unacceptably misaligned.
This zines has a spread that uses FOUR colors, and the line-up is damn near perfect. I don’t know what witchcraft they did to pull it off but I guarantee you they got a spell for it. This zine is gorgeous and no shit it costs $27 bucks for 50+ pages, just looking at that spread makes me vicariously DREAD.
Okay, okay, so what’s it about? Well, it’s a zine commemorating a public/performance art project involving painting a massive floor mural of trifold wings and spirals in a city park, Gateway to Infinity. Basically a few Italian-American queers created an art anti-monument to Medusa (intentionally referencing the nearby beheaded statue of Christopher Columbus, a fraught figure in Italian-American history) and did a religious ritual where the public brought family heirlooms and magically transformed them from the Master’s tools of oppression, force, and hegemony, into the Monster’s tools for freedom and power. The zine itself not only documents the art project and ritual, but also contains essays from three of the creators (and also a mythologist and art historian) on the Medusa legend, Monster Theory, patriarchy and monstrous women, astrology, what the deal is with Christopher Columbus, anti-Italian racism and Italian racism in turn, and the meaning of power. There’s a lot packed in here! It has citations for me to dig through and the art chosen for the book was well-placed and ALSO cited! Plus it talks straightforwardly about racial and ethnic cruelty, violence, and lynching among “white” people, which is of especial interest to us because it breaks a lot of American ideas about race and what whiteness is.
It was also especially well-timed because we’re reading Samuel R. Delany right now, specifically his Nebula-winning novel about myth that he wrote in his twenties but had this author's note to add to it, twenty years later:
This thing is gorgeous and it’s gonna hang out with Be Gay Do Crime as one of my foundational religious zines.
If you’re intrigued by this zine, but for whatever reason aren’t up to purchasing a chunky gorgeous Riso, Maria Molteni has uploaded a grayscale version for free here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51cf4263e4b0a6b9999e9019/t/6522f1d810d27f65287316e2/1696788966085/Final+Medusa_ZINE_bw_for+web.pdf This is a case though where I see the colors as a big boost to the piece itself.
First of all, Snake Hair is also a Riso print collective, and this zine goes BANANAS with it. Most Riso zines/comics, you stick to 1-2 colors because more than that and you gotta refeed the paper through the machine with new drums, and since Riso is persnickety about colors lining up even on good days, the more colors you got, the more likely shit is to get unacceptably misaligned.
This zines has a spread that uses FOUR colors, and the line-up is damn near perfect. I don’t know what witchcraft they did to pull it off but I guarantee you they got a spell for it. This zine is gorgeous and no shit it costs $27 bucks for 50+ pages, just looking at that spread makes me vicariously DREAD.
Okay, okay, so what’s it about? Well, it’s a zine commemorating a public/performance art project involving painting a massive floor mural of trifold wings and spirals in a city park, Gateway to Infinity. Basically a few Italian-American queers created an art anti-monument to Medusa (intentionally referencing the nearby beheaded statue of Christopher Columbus, a fraught figure in Italian-American history) and did a religious ritual where the public brought family heirlooms and magically transformed them from the Master’s tools of oppression, force, and hegemony, into the Monster’s tools for freedom and power. The zine itself not only documents the art project and ritual, but also contains essays from three of the creators (and also a mythologist and art historian) on the Medusa legend, Monster Theory, patriarchy and monstrous women, astrology, what the deal is with Christopher Columbus, anti-Italian racism and Italian racism in turn, and the meaning of power. There’s a lot packed in here! It has citations for me to dig through and the art chosen for the book was well-placed and ALSO cited! Plus it talks straightforwardly about racial and ethnic cruelty, violence, and lynching among “white” people, which is of especial interest to us because it breaks a lot of American ideas about race and what whiteness is.
It was also especially well-timed because we’re reading Samuel R. Delany right now, specifically his Nebula-winning novel about myth that he wrote in his twenties but had this author's note to add to it, twenty years later:
As for myths, the popular story about them was that they were deep wells of therapeutic wisdom. You had only to rub up against then to begin to be radically healed by their mystical glow of concealed richness...
[...]
Well, as Ernst Cassirer noted so many years back, the committee nature of their composition assured that myths will be conservative. Should we study them? Of course; but we must remember that myths are the stories a society can bear to tell about itself. Their significance only comes clear when we realize that around any myth there always hovers the unstated, the repressed, the socially unendurable truths, truths frequently in direct contradiction to what the myth declares, truths that the society is terrified and bewildered by. Rubbing up against them may reassure; but reassurance marks the extent of their healing power. There is nothing radical in their stated portions. And to learn truly and deeply from them requires an active, skeptical, and informed reading that takes into account not only the mythic narrative but the social conditions the narrative was responding to, both by its statements and by its silences.
This thing is gorgeous and it’s gonna hang out with Be Gay Do Crime as one of my foundational religious zines.
If you’re intrigued by this zine, but for whatever reason aren’t up to purchasing a chunky gorgeous Riso, Maria Molteni has uploaded a grayscale version for free here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51cf4263e4b0a6b9999e9019/t/6522f1d810d27f65287316e2/1696788966085/Final+Medusa_ZINE_bw_for+web.pdf This is a case though where I see the colors as a big boost to the piece itself.
no subject
Date: 2026-11-09 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-11-09 05:09 pm (UTC)As you were commenting, I was also adding a quote of Delany’s towards the end.
no subject
Date: 2026-11-10 07:30 am (UTC)