As the summer of alternative press love approaches, there’s now a new website to help keep track of all the upcoming events. This includes the launch of the Alternative Press anthology, Collaborama and, of course, the next Alterrnative Press Fair planned for August.

Of course, as soon as the phrase “Sex and the City in the Marvel Universe” is used, a new low point has been reached, but Joe Quesada (editor in chief at Marvel) must know how idiotic his line of defence is, surely?
(via When Fangirls Attack)

Following on from the London and Brighton zine festivals, the author of Brainscan zine and Stolen Sharpie Revolution will be doing zine readings at Pogo Cafe, Freedom Books and 56a Info Shop this week.

Double X, a spinoff of Slate’s XX Factor blog, has now launched and to celebrate, Slate has the editors answering reader’s questions. For the most part, the question are of the type that say more than they ask, but check out the interview if you want to find out if that name is really a work-friendly choice and what the the quintessential Double X story might be. The layout of Double X seems slightly less frightening than that of Slate. The jury, however, is still out on the rest of it. More

Well, ok, it’s not quite summer yet, but there are still more amazing zine and small press events coming up. After yet another awesome London Zine Symposium on the weekend, the Small Press Expo is on Saturday, 9th of May in Bristol. This is in conjunction with the Bristol International Comic Expo, also happening this weekend.

There is also another Alternative Press Festival planned for London although they are still being mysterious about exactly when, in late July and early August.

A new zine about mail art projects is now available as a PDF download (via We Make Zines. You can also find out about how to submit your own mail art or similar projects to the next issue.

There seems to be quite a bit planned for International Zine Month . You still have about 2 weeks to submit to Entry Point , a zine compilation about how people first came to be involved in zines. There is also a 24 hour zine making challenge. And there will be many more events announced in the lead up to June.

You can RSVP for International Zine Month on We Make Zines. It’s the polite thing to do.

Update: maybe not anti-gay, but certainly anti-smart.

A new edition of the Doris zine anthology , complete with a new cover, is available. While it’s the same content as previous versions, it seems like an excuse to buy it if it’s not already yours.

Stolen Sharpie Revolution – A DIY Guide to zines and zine cultures, the new edition of that quintessential zine guidebook, will also be out in late April, and they are accepting preorders now.

Two things I picked up at last week’s Alternative Press Fair were Depressed Cat’s guide to Alternative Press and DIY Zines and Isabel Greenberg’s If I Could Only See Around Corners. The first is a tiny, tiny history of zines as told by Depressed Cat and was created by Lizz Lunney especially for the day and for the upcoming Brighton Zine Fair. A great way of explaining zines to people who don’t know and it fits in your pocket. If I Could Only See Around Corners is a ‘visual diary’, day to day stories of life captured as comics. I’m just kicking myself that I didn’t get the second part of the journal on the day too, because it really made me laugh (Isabel is funny and Isabel’s friends are funny) and i really hate just reading part one of something. You can find the journals and other self-published graphic novels at www.isabelnecessary.com .

I’d always hoped for a lezzie version of the revered and fashionable Butt magazine and was more than a little disappointed when its counterpart, Kutt, didn’t last more than a couple of issues. So it was great to hear about GLU magazine , a Danish-produced, US-published title that adds some long-overdue edginess to the queer girl magazine rack. It was also great to see that, alongside Kathrin Hero, Jessica Gysel (who who was responsible for Kutt) edits GLU. Consider it GLU in beta mode. As it’s a quarterly magazine and I’m looking at issue 7, this means I’m more than fashionably late coming to the GLU party. GLU stands for Girls Like Us, but I prefer the alternative version that appears on the editorial page; Gueer Lipster Utopia.

I didn’t actually think I could be any more enthusiastic about make/shift magazine (subtitle: feminisms in motion) than I already had been, but then the second issue arrives in the post with an (apparently unintentional) media theme and that theory promptly fell by the wayside.

The Itty Bitty Titty Committee is the latest film by Jamie Babbit and opened this year’s London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Babbit’s directorial style remains intact; the abrupt scene jumps, (dyke)pop culture references, humour and a glossy, music video finish. This approach has served her well most recently in episodes of The L Word and it works well here for a film that takes a light-hearted (and occasionally self-mocking) look at awkward adolescence. That is, the awkward adolescence experience by newly political disenfranchised young queers, an experience that has until now remained far removed from any kind of general cinema release.

Velvetpark has sought to be the tattooed dyke to Diva (or Curve, depending on geography) magazine’s pant-suited lesbian for a few years now. And its dyke badge is something that the magazine wears proudly, having challenged the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over their use of the word dyke, a word previously rejected as being “immoral and scandalous”. This seems to be the only appearance of anything resembling scandal, in this particular issue anyway. While the cover stars may feature the Chicago Rollergirls, the real star of the issue is Martina Navratilova.

Two new US TV shows, Dexter (Showtime) and Heroes (NBC), offer a startlingly fresh take on the themes of comic-book superheroism.

Richard Bluestein recently announced the somewhat controversial (at least in the insular world of podcasting) death of his performance persona, Madge Weinstein. Bluestein podcasts in the character of Weinstein for a number of popular shows, including Yeast Radio (and the experiemental format Yeast2 spinoff show).

Finley’s latest book is a satire of current American politics told as an illicit affair between Martha Stewert and George W. Bush and mimicking Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf. As in Finley’s earlier work, Living It Up, Adventures in Hyperdomesticity, Martha Stewert serves as the ultimate symbol of conservative femininity, acting out the mothering fantasies to Dubya’s damanaged little boy psyche.