Lök Zine celebrates the best of contemporary illustration and comics. The bilingual Italian / English title draws from an international pool of contributors and hopes to “inspire, scare, reassure and give peace” through its strange storytelling.

Issue eight’s theme is plants, but don’t expect a comfortable study of the greenery that brightens up your home. Instead the tone is playful and challenging, inviting the reader to think again about a world they think they know.

In this issue:

• Fatomale’s playful illustrations depict ‘guerrilla gardening’ as a political act, in which man gives back what he has taken from the earth
• Fausto Montanari and Salvatore Giomarresi present a dystopian vision of man’s interference with nature
• Humanoid plants and birds living in houses ask the reader to question their own identity
• Davor Gromilović’s still and desolate landscapes are dominated by darkness and surreal loneliness
• Investigating vegetation in antiquity, myth, and the era when everything was at the beginning
• And pleasant landscapes by Carol Rollo and classic realism by Martina Gentile depict the mind and relationships