Dan's Zines
Interestingly enough it was a library book that first introduced me to zines. As a middle schooler, I found the book “Zine Scene” by Francesca Lia Block and Hillary Carlip at the Albany Park Branch of the Chicago Public Library. My takeaway from “Zine Scene” was that a core ethos of zine-making is that anyone can make a zine - there are no gatekeepers - as a repressed, home school kid, that spoke to me.
Tabling at Portland Zine Symposium 2023
In the two and a half decades since picking up “Zine Scene,” I’ve made and shared zines about my life. Most to least recent, here is a sample of the work I’ve made.
Zine-a-Month #51 “Arrive Slowly: An Autobikeography” (June 2025)
I had the honor of producing a zine for Anna Jo Beck’s Zine-a-Month series in June 2025. Producing and sharing dozens of copies of this zine really would have been an impossible task alone, but it was important for me to experience the impossible becoming possible through asking for help and using community resources.
In this zine, I use the bikes I’ve ridden throughout my life to explore what it means to make progress.
"Motion & Rest 2024" (December 2024)
I spent a lot of 2024 working on the Smokies family anthology below, but didn’t want to end the year without a solo work of some kind. As sort of an “annual greeting,” I made this short, four-page zine summarizing the books I enjoyed reading in 2024 and included one of my favorite drawings from the year. If you’d like to read it, here’s a link to a pdf version.
"The Smokies Peaceful Side Log" (December 2024)
I edited an anthology of work created by the Kittaka family following a trip we took to the Great Smoky Mountains. We grew up hearing stories from when my dad spent a summer in the Mountains as a high school student, but had never been able to visit together. We documented this trip in a style similar to the student conservation log my dad kept for over fifty years.
"Motion & Rest Fall 2023" (October 2023)
This zine outlines what it was like for me as a lifelong runner to experience a life-altering injury. Both motion - PT, walking, and finally slowly reintroducing running - as well as rest were required to find my way back to running after injury.
"Tough Guy, Man Dude" (July 2023)
My final project for the Comics Portfolio Program at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, OR. I retell the opening scenes of Final Fantasy VII and explore the way that game influenced my understanding of masculinity as a tween.
Sawa, Sawa Okay, Okay (February 2020)
Printed at a small copy shop in Iten, Kenya, "Sawa, Sawa" is a brief summary of my experience of running culture in Kenya.
kaki (2019)
"kaki" is a celebration of a moment of connection as an American of Japanese descent. It explores how food and language can connect us to shared histories and others including our ancestors. You can read this comic on my Instagram: part 1 and part 2.
Duluth (2018)
"Duluth" explores a painful experience of racial descrimination juxaposed with my ability to push through the physical pain of training for and racing marathons. Even as I write this, I find new layers of trauma from existing in a racialized place.
Born and Rolled in the USA (June 2016)
While I continued to draw and make one-off booklets, comics, and illustrations throughout high school, college, and my early twenties, making art took a back seat to other things which felt important at the time. The things that occupied my time in these years were getting a degree, commuting, work, training for marathons, and unraveling religous trauma. "Born and Rolled in the USA" was the product of a class I took at the Spudnik Press in Chicago with teaching artist, Leila Abdelrazaq. For me this represented the first time as an adult that I invested more than the cost of a sketchbook into my artwork. It was around this time that I began to see myself as a life-long maker of comics and zines.
"Born and Rolled" was my first attempt to process and share my experiences in comics as an American of Japanese descent. One of my traumas and fears is being pigeonholed into my racialized exeperiences, but at the same time, with limited community in which to process these experiences, I turned to the labor-intense medium of comics to make time and space for myself to process the pain and confusion of being me.
Blank Pages no. 2 (June 2003)
Just before the end of my first year of high school, I completed the second (of two) issues of my comics anthology, "Blank Pages." I wanted to give copies of them to my friends who were seniors before they graduated. This second issue features a quickly drawn cover with a request for connection (via email). This is something that feels like an ongoing theme of my work and life. It also features a "grown up" version of a hero I created as a child which I called "Helper Man." Helper Man wore an Iron Man-like suit of armor which featured a Mega Man-like arm mounted "non-violent" vaccum and was orginally drawn a bit like Bomber Man.
Blank Pages no. 1 (March 2003)
I was homeschooled from third through eighth grade. Among the many things that changed when I started high school in the fall of 2002, two of them were regular access to a coin-operated copy machine in the school library and small bits of cash to pay for bus fare. Inspired by "Zine Scene" and an upper classman who was pursuing comics somewhat seriously, I made this small collection of 1-2 page comics during my second semester of high school. I called the collection "Blank Pages no. 1" because I stapled together single sided copies resulting in blank backsides between pages of content. I was scared to show my work and ask someone how to make double sided copies and too cheap to experiment with the library copy machine to get double sided copies to work.