Oh Comely over here
It’s been a while since we’ve had a new title to announce on Stack, but it gives me great pleasure to break that particular silence and announce that Oh Comely has become the latest addition to the Stack stable.
When its editor Liz first contacted me she told me that she started Oh Comely because she’d grown tired of finding nothing that she wanted to read in women’s magazines. I was interested to see what an alternative women’s magazine would look like, and when it arrived I was even more interested to see that it’s not really a women’s magazine at all.
It is, in so much that it’s made mainly by women, with mainly women in mind. But its mix of bands, artists and stories mark it out as addressing an aesthetic, or a lifestyle, rather than a gender. Its bands tend to be indie, its illustrations calm and whimsical. It feels careful – it’s very clean, and quite quiet in a way, but there’s never any danger of it feeling like it doesn’t have something to say.
It has the sense of getting its point across without shouting, and while most of the products it carries are for women and the majority of its writers are women, its femininity remains subtle and hard to pin down exactly.
Issue three is due out next month and has national distribution in WHSmith, so keep an eye out for it in the shops. If you do see a copy it’s well worth picking up. And of course watch out for it arriving via Stack before too long – hopefully some time early next year.
