Truth: If your zine is about The Smiths or The Cure, I will buy it. If it is about both, I will buy it and sing gently to it in the quiet light of early evening.

Okay, that got weird, but for real. I love these bands (cliches be damned), and I was super excited to see the Goth Gang zines up on the Pioneers Press site. Part 1: Teen Witches and Morrissey Punks and Part 2: Cure Hair and Halloween Forever both explore the unnamed author’s adolescent discovery of the mentioned bands and the goth aesthetic. Inspired by older sisters, she and her friends began trading in their basketball shoes and beach shorts for black clothing and Joy Division records at the beginning of ninth grade.

These first two issues are small and short (1/8 size, 10ish pages each), and are snapshots, more than anything else, of this formative time in the author’s life.

“I didn’t know it at the time but I was experiencing what I would come to know as my first and sweetest adolescent depression”

I didn’t discover these bands till a little later in high school, when a dear older friend began sending me mix tapes with The Smiths, Depeche Mode, The Cure, Tori Amos, Suzanne Vega, and so many others I still owe her for. Reading about this zinester’s similar discoveries was nostalgic. I’ll look forward to reading more as they come out.