Greek illustrator Vaso Michailidou documents a 48-hour January trip to Paris in her third hand-drawn travel journal zine, made with markers, coloured pencils and scrap paper collage, combining humour, sarcasm and a preference for getting lost over sightseeing.
Vaso Michailidou does not do landmarks without a comic approach. She is not particularly interested in presenting everything as magically ideal. What she prefers is getting lost in the alleys, discovering a nice bar by accident, observing people and noticing silly graffiti. “No stories, no messages, you’ll see it all when it’s drawn,” she says of how she travels now. The zine is the trip.
GLAGLA is the third in a series of travel journal zines that began with Tokyo in 2022 and Amsterdam in 2024. This one documents a three-night, two-day visit to Paris in January 2026, capturing what was seen, eaten and experienced in a cold city over a handful of hours. Made entirely with markers, coloured pencils and scrap paper collage, each illustration was drawn from photos taken during the trip, from memory, or from looking up places and combining those pieces into a kind of puzzle. Working on the zine from her return in January until the beginning of April, the drawing process extended the experience well beyond the trip itself. “Documenting it all and turning it into hand-drawn illustrations prolongs the joy of this tiny adventure,” she says. “It makes it a vivid memory to hold for life.”
The zine format suits Michailidou’s sensibility precisely. Rather than sharing in real time through social media, the whole experience is held back, reconstructed and shaped into something with a beginning and an end. The reader follows along at the zine’s pace, with humour and sarcasm woven in to keep it honest. The adventure does not need to be perfect to be worth sharing. It just needs to be drawn.
Vaso Michailidou is a Greek illustrator, comic artist and graphic designer, currently freelance. She studied illustration in the UK and works across digital and traditional mediums.
Website: vasomillo.com Instagram: @squidstew
GLAGLA, 2026. Hand-drawn travel journal zine. Markers, coloured pencils, scrap paper collage. Trip: Paris, 23–26 January 2026.
