Founded in 2024 by writer and editor JAKE MIKE BOY, GUTS Magazine is a new independent print publication exploring offal, food culture and the people who work in hospitality. The first issue brings together 33 contributors from around the world, creating a wide-ranging look at how interior organs appear in culinary traditions, kitchens and personal stories.
The magazine moves from essays about eating whole crab in Baltimore by Millicent Souris to Raymond Aquino Macapagal’s discussion of bile in Ilocano cuisine. The subject may be unusual, but the intention is simple: to examine something that exists everywhere yet is often ignored.
“Why GUTS? Because you have them too,” says BOY. “Why slaughter animals, put their muscle fibres on display, and hide their interior? Animals are made of organs. Restaurants are built by people. I’m trying to make something pretty out of something that people think is ugly.”
The aesthetic of GUTS draws heavily from the underground comics that shaped BOY’s teenage years. Influences such as R. Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Los Bros Hernandez, Charles Burns and Tony Millionaire echo through the magazine’s graphic style, giving the publication a raw and expressive visual identity.
The first issue was built through an open call for submissions. After selecting and editing the material, BOY designed and laid out the entire publication himself. The result is a dense mix of writing, illustration and visual storytelling that treats offal not as a novelty but as a cultural thread running through kitchens around the world.
The inaugural print run of 150 copies was produced by ABOGRAFIKA in Ljubljana, Slovenia in January 2026. Pre-orders opened in December, and with around 100 copies already sold, a second printing is now underway.
At its core, GUTS Magazine sits somewhere between food writing, cultural journalism and independent comics. It celebrates the overlooked parts of the animal, the unseen labour of restaurant work and the strange beauty of things people usually prefer not to think about
JAKE MIKE BOY is a writer and former waiter originally from Oakland, California. He studied criminology at the University of Toronto and later spent years working in the restaurant industry in Malmö, Sweden before studying gastronomy communication in Italy. He now lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he runs GUTS Magazine as editor-in-chief.
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