Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2021 October 15 • Friday

On our last visit to Quimby’s Chicago, we picked up several zines by Nyxia Grey.

She was new to us but we liked her style. This is old-school zine practice, with text and photos apparently literally cut and pasted onto pages and then photocopied, with color, and then bound with staples.

This particular one is appropriate to the season and while which witch is which? might sound like the beginning of a joke, Grey is very much in earnest, beginning with the subtitle: “one witch’s take on Salem, Mass”.

Grey fell in love with Salem the first time she went there and as a practicing witch herself she thought it would be a great place to live and work. And so she moved there but was dismayed to discover “power hungry, capitalistic, misogynistic assholes” in the witch community and, well, most other places too.

Part of the problem is greed for tourist dollars, which leads to over the top and extremely distasteful exploitation of the town’s tragic history and revving up for Halloween in September.

The pandemic didn’t change much except for the autumn invasion to include people from places that don’t care about masks and quarantines and social distancing and things like that.

It’s a harrowing yet riveting read. This is something that zines and autobiographical comics do better than other media, a report from the front lines of real life as it’s being lived, transmitted by those whose feet are still on the ground.

Grey is also donating “100% of the proceeds of this zine” to organizations that will aid social justice.