Review of Zine Issue #2, "Grim Season"

NewPages Zine Rack

By Sean Stewart

I never used to read political cartoons until I started coming across Ted Rall’s strips in various places, and then Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World after that.  While I still don’t actively seek them out, I can appreciate their place, and I wish that they appeared in more mainstream publications.  Sure, you see them in alternative newsweeklies (although sometimes these even end up dropping them), but they don’t appear in the places where I think they’d be most effective.  This issue of Minimum Security deals mostly with topics related to the war on terrorism.  Stephanie’s one-page strips condense racial scapegoating, xenophobia, loss of civil liberties, and other issues into panels of bitingly cynical dialogue and illustrations.  The views represented within this volume are shared by quite a number of Americans, although you wouldn’t know it from observing the mainstream media, and so why shouldn’t this zine appear on your library’s periodicals shelves?

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