Broken Pencil

It is with profound sadness that I announce the closure of Broken Pencil Magazine, an independent publication I co-founded 30 years ago to celebrate and support zine culture and independent media. This is a decision I have not made lightly. Broken Pencil was more than a magazine: it was like a light in the cultural darkness, a beacon for alternative voices and aspiring creators.

Dear friends, Broken Pencil’s fabulous thirty year run has concluded. But we are going to keep our website and archives up for as long as we can! To help us with that and get yourself lifetime access to the website, flipbooks of all 103 previous issues and pretty much everything we’ve ever done, please subscribe here. Note, this is a one time subscription that will never expire.

OVERSTOCK SALE!!! EVERYTHING MUST GO! WHILE SUPPLIES LAST! For Only $17.99¬† Limited time! While supplies last! You or your gift recipient receives in the mail: ¬†*4 issues of Broken Pencil Magazine¬† — our three most recent issues plus a surprise issue from our archives. Yes you can customize if you already have a recent issue. *The 25 years of Broken Pencil special issue compendium. *Broken Pencil t-shirt.

Since 2017, Broken Pencil has celebrated zine excellence with an award like no other: The Broken Pencil Zine Awards. We are happy to announce that submissions for the 2024 awards are now… OPEN! Between now and the end of September 30th, 2024, enter your zines, comix, leaflets and self-published wonders into the mix.

Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There Jade Wallace, 104 pgs, Guernica Editions, guernicaeditions.com, $20 How do we define where love lives? Is it a place you can travel to? Is it somewhere you could escape from? Jade Wallace doesn’t give us the answers, so don’t go looking for them. Every poem in this collection has mastered the art of depicting love as something tethered to a place but not belonging to it.

Feminism for a Genderqueer Generation: Gender Dysphoria Under Capitalism Comic, Sabrina Melendez, 14 pgs, $15 This short but potent zine engages with my often unanswered questions around where genderqueer and nonbinary people exist within feminist movements. How the body and mind relate (or don’t). The big question around transness: would we want to change our bodies to “pass” if we didn’t live in a world that subjugates women and female bodies? Melendez identifies as agender.

On New Years Eve, 2022, radical indie comics publisher Silver Sprocket rang things in on a damp note. Their HQ, San Francisco, was slammed by rain, the second highest amount in the city’s recorded history. A torrent of that water made its way into the Silver Sprocket’s basement and inventory, endangering the art, zines and comics that make life worth living.

“Urban Legends” is a compilation zine about urban legends, local myths, and folklore. Share your writing or art that’s entertaining, mysterious, spooky, cautionary, weird, or funny. Submissions are open to anyone in the world. This is a quarter-page zine (5.5 inches high x 4.25 inches wide), printed in black and white. You do not have to have any experience making zines to submit content! All experience levels are welcome. Submissions will be accepted through Sunday August 18, 2024.

Gorgias, a Grecian philosopher of some controversy, is one of the arch-annoyances of Socrates and his boy wonder Plato.

People Collide Isle McElroy, 256 pgs, HarperVia, harpercollins.com, $28.99 USD Can you ever really know your partner? You might live with them and even share a bed, but what are they really like? One might have to literally walk in their shoes to find out. And in Isle McElroy’s new novel, this is exactly what happens. People Collide follows Eli and Elizabeth, a young married couple living in Bulgaria.