End of Times | Summer 2025

Light reading for a dark era

No. 2, Summer 2025

The ‘zine is printed with a Risograph printer, and the inks used are dark purple and red on a blue paper. The header reading ‘End of Times’ is in a newspaper-y font, nodding to the ‘zines satirical nature. There is a QR code next to the header with a red arrow indicating that it can be used to bring you to the transcripts of the zine.

Page One

In This Issue:

• Op-ed + cut-out fairies: Jenny Dickieson @jjickieson 

• Comics: Gabrielle Haynes @gift.of.gabrielle

• Poetry Corner: Em Lud @rrramchild 

A Note from the Editor:

Thanks so much for reading!!! If you have a pitch or want to be involved get @ me at itsjenny.ca -- XOXO jenny

A photograph courtesy of Leeds University of  16 year old girl Elsie Wright looking contemplatively at a glowing fairy figure standing on a branch in a forested area. Elsie has long wavy hair, and is wearing a simple cotton dress. The fairy is overexposed but appears to be wearing what looks like a bathing suit from the 1950’s, she has the wings of a butterfly and is offering Elsie something. The photograph has been digitally altered to have the fairy and its details cut out to make it stand out as if cut-and pasted into the photograph. 

Touch Grass

By: Jenny Dickieson

To use a Midg falling plate camera you’ll need to carefully load the small, leather-bound box with glass plates coated in photographic emulsion. The plates stand upright in a neat line, supported by a spring coil, patiently waiting their turn. Once the box’s small door is latched shut, peer through the rectangular viewfinder, compose your image, and finally, when you are satisfied, open the exposure—flooding the interior of the box momentarily with light burning the scene into the emulsion. Then, a lever is flipped, and the exposed plate falls into the bottom of the dark interior, where it waits to be developed.

Continued on page two

Page Two

Interspersed into the article there are images of photo collaged cut-out fairies. The first is a collage of an image of the character Data from Star Trek next generation, he is weathering an old fashioned detective’s hat and woolen coat and is looking through a magnifying glass, his lower half is a salmon’s tail. The second is actor Willem Dafoe with dragonfly wings, he is in a wide legged stance with the upper half of his body leaning as far forward as he can with his hands in his pockets. The third is professional tennis player Naomi Osaka in a sleeveless sports top and a skirt made of flower petals, instead of a tennis racket, she is brandishing a long sword and has beautiful doves wings flared out behind her. The final fairy is George Russell, an F1 racing driver, in his infamous T-pose. His legs have been replaced with a ballerina's legs at the height of a jump, and so he appears to be floating. His skirt is made of grass and begonias, his wings are made from the tails of goldfish. His shirt, which would normally say “Petronas” reads “Begonias”

The article from page one continues…

Elsie Wright of Cottingley, UK knew how to use the Midg by the time she was sixteen. Charged with her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, the girls spent their days playing outside in the beck—a small, mossy creek behind the house—often getting in trouble for coming home with wet shoes and dresses. The beck was lush, peaceful, its rippling water and soft moss a soothing contrast to the chaos of the rest of the country. In the Spring of 1917 World War I raged across Europe. Rationing had been put into place across the country and new German planes began dropping bombs more quickly and heavily than ever on urban centres. Frances' own father was fighting abroad - the very reason they came to Cottingly to live with her cousin.

But here in the beck, amid the trees and hush, fairies were said to live. Or so the girls claimed - One day, after being scolded for returning home late, Elsie and Frances claimed that there had been fairies in the beck, and begged Elsie’s father for his Midg camera, for their chance to prove the excuse. This began the famous series of hoaxed photographs, known as The Cottingley Fairies. The photographs hung around the Wright home, odd pieces of family lore, until they were shared with the public by the girls mothers. The hoax picked up traction in spiritualist communities when the photographs were published in the December 1920 issue of The Strand alongside an article by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (yes, the Sherlock Holmes author) titled “Fairies Photographed”.

It may seem quaint today that anyone could have believed the Cottingley fairy photographs were real. Our eyes, trained by the constant stream of digital images and videos, can quickly spot the flatness of the paper cutouts. In a tell-all published in a 1983 issue of The Unexplained the girls, now women in middle age, explained they made the fairies out of paper, using illustrator Claude Sheppard’s drawings as references, adding wings, and then carefully cutting them out. The fairies were then arranged in different formations in the beck using hatpins.

I’m not so quick to judge those who believed, or the girls themselves. Our generation has its own changelings to deal with. The Midg camera of the future is arguably our cell phones, the capacity to make and share images instantly offered among the rest of it’s powerful gonzo-carnival-of-everything capacity. Many of us are often immersed in our phones, and travelling through digital space we all encounter AI-generated images and figures stealthing among us —uncanny humanoids with bouquets of impossible fingers, customer service chatbots passing the Turing test, and reality augmenting filters are increasingly convincing bizarre, useful, and devastating to the environment and creatives who make their living making stories, pictures, and films.

There’s a quiet power in making something by hand—in stepping outside, spending time in nature, and grounding yourself in material practice. To write, to collage, to make pictures, or poems, or films, or music, or whatever it is you make with intention is to reclaim your imagination from the algorithmic churn of content. It’s rebellion. The images Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths created over a century ago—whether you see them as innocent mischief or deliberate deception—were rooted in play. They emerged from wonder, from storytelling, from the hush of the beck and the dreams of two children passing the time as they endured a world at war.

So, as is often prescribed to the chronically online, go touch grass. Literally. Gather scraps and textures. Journal, draw. Wander with curious eyes. Make something strange, beautiful, and non-monetizable. Let your stories resist flattening. Imagination is a part of revolution. It is an act of resistance to sit by a stream, shoes drying on a rock, hem slightly wet, and imagine worlds without suffering or pain.

Page Three

Page three has illustrations by Em Lud Interspersed. Seeds, lightning bolts, daisies, and four point stars are drawn in an inky loose style. A butterfly with an unblinking human eye floats among them creating a transition between the photo-collaged fairies and the illustrations which frame Em’s poem.

Poetry Corner
By: Em Lud

gemini stellium

magpie nest

changeling rest

a collection without measure

fairy den

sister hen

in every glance, toil and treasure 

here, butterfly mirror

oh, a crystalline tear

rainbows dance, close and far

drawer of candles

mis-matched handles

travelled beads in a milk glass jar

bottle of seed pods

bundle of lightning rods

a shell, mint tins, a thorny knot

baskets of thread

stars on the bed

ladles, tongs, tools full of thought

closets glow with spring

kettles tremble and sing

the witch tends her simmering pot

checkered yarn pillows

vase of pussy willows

the cat’s paws pad in from the rain

dried blooms, bone petals

hidden rooms, old metals

bamboo curls from the sink drain

a billion roses unfurl

for june’s favourite girl

she is bird song meets thundering train

Page Four

Crocman in “Summer Setback”
By Gabrielle Haynes

The back page of the ‘zine is a 12 panel comic by Gabrielle Haynes. The offset printing of the Risograph has been enhanced and so the two-color printing gives off a trippy, almost drug induced effect when you look at it. Haynes style is line-based with strong outlines and thick chunky textures.

Panel 1
Two trees with cartoon faces vibe out, one is screaming and one is smiling. Their oval leaves are falling to the ground. They frame the title of the comic “Crocman in “Summer Setback”.

Panel 2

Narrative text begins, nested into the image,”Deep in the Jungle, I ventured.” Crocman is pictured. He is a tall lizard humanoid, is pictured from the waist up, walking by the faced trees, the trees look at croc man with curiosity and even anticipation, Crocman’s expression is nervous.

Panel 3

The narrative text continues “Twisting and Turning” A close up of crocman looking behind him as he nervously presses on through the jungle.

The narrative text continues “What secrets prevail?” Crocman is seen from the knees up, framed between two large palm leaves as he navigates the jungle. He continues to look nervous and the readers finally see his outfit: a red speedo.

Panel 4
The narrative text continues: “Huh?”. Two large leaves conceal a mysterious hole.

Panel 5 

The narrative text continues: “Immune!”
The hole is revealed to be a can of tea bags, labelled “Immune herbal tea”.

Panel 6
Three cave demons, masked, horned figures in dark cloaks, their faces look stressed and highly caffeinated. They appear to shake in the image. The narrative text continues: “Adored by the Cave Goblins”

Panel 7
a close up of a single cave goblin looking remarkably more unstable claiming “I drink nine cups per day”

Panel 8
*pour* a tea kettle pours water into a teacup with a teabag in it.

Panel 9
*sip* Croc man lifts the teacup to his lips and takes a tip, his nervousness has somewhat quelled.

Panel 10
*spit* Croc man expels the tea he drank, as his eyes widen.

Panel 12

The final panel exclaims “IT TASTES LIKE PEE!!” in a large bright red starburst.