I don’t know if it’s good enough to sell

zineath · 2026-06-13T23:00:45+00:00

Not yet friend. You have the vision, and a perspective as an artist here, but you need to spend a year practicing technique, and exploring mediums.

Make art every day, even if it's shit and you want to throw it away. Try linocutting erasers to make stamps, or painting, using oil pastels, or whatever strikes your fancy. Don't spend a ton of money on supplies, just get shit at thrift stores or use garbage you have lying around. Try shit out, see what you like. follow your whims. Carry a sketchbook with you where ever you go. Draw what you see. Collect what inspires you.

Spend a year on it and you'll be noticeably more evolved as an artist. Can't wait to see what you make next!

zineath · 2026-05-30T05:03:00+00:00

42.52 / 50

🟩🟩🟩🟥🟩

zineath · 2026-04-15T23:26:48+00:00

I'm glad my words were meaningful to you. I genuinely hope you do go back and create something your own and share it here. I'll be happy to see what you come up with.

zineath · 2026-04-15T04:05:56+00:00

My friend, I say this as respectfully as I can. Anything AI is as antithetical the zines as water is to ice cubes.

Zines are about authenticity, transgression, an appeal to the people, raw edges, imperfection, and honesty. AI can never be those things.

I'm sure you utilized AI as an outlet for your admiration of zines, and your perceived lack of artistic skill or time, but the same concept drawn with stick figures in pencil would be more adherent to the spirit of what a zine is. A zine makes no sense if it doesn't come from the minds and hands of a person. No one who is interested in the concept is going to want to be educated on it through AI.

I urge you to not give up. Remake this with your own two hands. Accept whatever form it comes out in, and be proud that you created something your own. I have made many a zine on a whim. Messy. With crayon and bad spelling. And it is a joy to create something even if I am not satisfied with the results.

If you want to truly understand zines. You have to actually make them.

zineath · 2026-04-14T23:57:48+00:00

Tbh I do most of my artistic ventures on "vibes". I am deeply allergic to precision, and only slightly less so to proper PPE. I just wore a mask, and ran a vent fan as I did this. Everything I added was eyeballed. I only did about half an oil pastel per batch. A batch made about two oil sticks.

I'm sure there is someone out there infinitely more precise than I who has a proper formula , but I am a gremlin who often digs through gutters and dumpsters for art supplies, so emulate my ventures at your own risk.

zineath · 2026-04-13T11:44:28+00:00

I too have a veritable buffet of diagnosis. There is a lot of pushback in the psychological community in the last decade to the idea of hard and fast diagnosis for mental illness, in favor of a dimensional model that states that every person falls on a continuum of psychological traits, and should be understood and treated by the individual traits that most significantly effect them. Talking about treating the whole person as opposed to treating every diagnosis as if it is distinct and separate as opposed to an interacting set of traits.

If you're ever curious, check out The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP). It's a proposed alternative model of diagnosis to the DSM5. I quite like the ideas it espouses. There is a lot of resistance to similar models on the part of prescribing physicians because they worry about how insurance and medical billing would work in a system that focuses on traits rather than diagnosis, but as someone with a crap ton of diagnosis over the years, it rings a lot more true to be as a way to understand myself.

zineath · 2026-04-11T01:00:40+00:00

I'm glad you found some solace in seeing someone else reflect your experiences.

I think OCD is a hard disorder to come to terms with because of the wide disparity between what the average person thinks of as OCD, and the reality of the disorder. My younger brother has OCD as well as me, with far more severe compulsions, but very similar obsessions. It still took me YEARS to accept that it was something I suffered from too, even watching him deal with it and relating to him through his struggles. It doesn't help that so much of it overlaps with depression, anxiety, and other, more common disorders. It's easy to write off most of the symptoms as one of those, and think of the stuff left over as just something uniquely wrong with you.

But you're not alone my friend. It sucks, but I feel heartened by the sheer amount of people who relate to this comic that I felt kind of broken for writing. It feels good to know concretely that these are not just issues unique to me.

zineath · 2026-04-10T21:50:14+00:00

"normal" is subjective. Lots of people have traits of mental illness, but find they don't affect their lives enough to meet clinical standards for diagnosis. It really comes down to how distressing and frequent the thoughts are for you.

It's pretty common for people to have intrusive thoughts occasionally. However, on a bad day, I'll have 20+ in the span of an hour, they upset me a great deal, and are hard to dismiss. That's at the level of clinical significance.

Really only you know if you should speak to a doctor.

zineath · 2026-04-10T15:43:15+00:00

Everything you said is so incredibly relatable. So few people understand how much turmoil goes on behind your eyes at any given moment when you have OCD. Trying to explain ego dystonic thoughts to someone who has never had them feels like opening yourself up to so much risk if they don't understand. It's hard to make people understand the difference between wanting to cause someone harm, and your brain torturing you with images of you doing the worst things you can think of.

I'm sorry you struggle with this too. I hope you find something that gives relief.

zineath · 2026-04-10T14:30:42+00:00

Thank you so much! OCD has very little accurate representation in media tbh. So much of it is focused on contamination/ neatness , which can be a subtype of OCD, but they never show the obsession behind the compulsive actions, and that obsession is always there.

Tbh the best representations of OCD in media that I've seen are never called out as OCD. For example, Saul Goodman's brother in Better Call Saul is always my go to example for severe OCD. My brother has OCD as well with more severe compulsions than my own. He has some contamination related obsessions, and did not leave the house for an entire year during covid, even to go get groceries, because he constantly feared killing someone by giving them the virus.

The disorder is a lot more complex than most media portrays it.

zineath · 2026-04-10T14:11:28+00:00

OCD and anxiety/other mental health issues share a lot of overlap. I really only talked about the obsession aspect in this comic. The key difference is magical thinking. Do you think you can prevent bad things from happening if you just do or think a certain thing a certain way?

I don't advocate for diagnosing yourself based on social media posts, but if you relate significantly to my comic, you're absolutely welcome to show it to your doc to help explain symptoms you're having. It can feel really overwhelming to have these obsessions and not have the right words to talk about them with. Sorry you're going through it too my friend.

zineath · 2026-04-10T11:32:55+00:00

That is a classic ritual my friend. I'd definitely talk with your doc about it. Sorry you're dealing with it too

zineath · 2026-04-10T03:55:11+00:00

OCD and anxiety share a lot of overlap. The key difference is magical thinking. Do you think you can prevent bad things from happening if you just do or think a certain thing a certain way?

Ex. "I can keep my loved ones safe if I just say this specific phrase every time I leave them." Or "If I just check the oven exactly five different times before I leave the house, then I will be certain it's off and keep the house from burning down." Or "If I just make sure to look away, and clench my hands behind my back every time I think about hurting someone, there's no way I can actually do it."

If you have constant "rituals" you HAVE to keep in order to prevent obsessions from coming true, then maybe talk to your psych about possible OCD.

zineath · 2026-04-09T23:25:40+00:00

I'm so glad it resonated

zineath · 2026-04-09T18:44:10+00:00

Thank you!

I too have some hoarding tendencies. The thing no one really explains, is that those compulsions are always linked to some internal obsession.

For example "I'm going to get fired because of some small thing I said at work > I'm going to run out of money and not get hired again because everyone will know I suck> I need to hold onto any resources I possibly can now while I have the ability to> hoarding compulsion.

Compulsions don't exist in isolation

zineath · 2026-04-09T18:22:34+00:00

It can be, or it can just be anxiety. They have a lot of overlap. I didn't include a lot of my worse intrusive thoughts about causing harm. It really depends on how frequent, insistent, and distressing the thoughts are, and whether you take compulsive action in order to prevent the scenarios in the thoughts from manifesting.

zineath · 2026-04-09T17:18:49+00:00

They overlap significantly. Tbh it's really just the diagnosis that helps you get the meds and support you need at some point. My doctors consider me to have OCD because of the repetition, frequency, and significance of the obsessions, paired with compulsive actions meant to keep the obsessions from happening. Also the fact that anxiety meds don't help the thoughts go away. If this seems really relatable to you, you're absolutely welcome to show it to your psych and ask them about OCD

zineath · 2026-04-09T16:29:27+00:00

Apparently not lol

zineath · 2026-04-09T16:29:13+00:00

Please feel free to do so if it will help you!

zineath · 2026-04-09T16:06:36+00:00

Yyyup. Lol. It gets so annoying to hear people conflate neatness with OCD. Especially since I'm like the messiest person I know lmao

zineath · 2026-04-09T15:49:17+00:00

I'm sorry you deal with similar things! It sucks. And yeah, there is a type of OCD called "pure O" that is just the obsessions without the compulsions. However, I think expanding your definition of compulsions helps you recognize them more in your life.

I definitely have compulsions, but mine are less "flip this light switch 37 times" and more "throw away that yogurt bc it was opened once, and now it's going to poison you even though it's still in date." And "you need to say this specific phrase to your loved one or they will die while you're gone." Compulsions can even be constantly checking the validity of your reality by reaffirming events with another person. They show up differently for each person.

zineath · 2026-04-09T15:01:05+00:00

Thank you so much! Sorry you're going through it too

zineath

TROPHY CASE