"While not the most polished writer, Somers writes with great enthusiasm. Since the majority of the articles revolve around Somers himself, he seems to his subject well enough that he has crafted some zany and hilarious stories about himself. The only place where the book loses its momentum is in the section where reviews of The Inner Swine from other zines are posted. This section is pure filler but then again, it makes me wonder if my review will appear in a future issue?"

During the '90s, while New Age guru John Bradshaw was exhorting us to "champion" our traumatized inner child, Gen X writer Jeff Somers was busy cultivating The Inner Swine, a very odd, sometimes funny, sometimes idiotic and always vitriolic zine that he launched from his North Jersey home in 1995. The Freaks Are Winning is a collection of personal essays, editorials, "Wedding Confidentials" (accounts of numerous weddings at which a drunk Somers made a fool of himself), reviews, and angry rants culled from 24 issues of the rag. Somers, who was 23 when he started the zine, is an uneven writer with a penchant for overstatement, and his opinions can be loony and irrelevant. But he writes with gusto and there's an undeniable - though slightly perverse - charm to his work, most of which is about his favorite topic, "exploring the wonder of: Me." It's a pretty entertaining self-exploration, which takes us from musings on the social benefits of pornography (it provides "a much needed safety valve" for the male population) to a hilarious riff on The Pork Avenger, a "paunchy man with poor hand-eye coordination" who dons a pig's nose and a suit made of aluminum foil to transform himself into a crime-fighting superhero: "defender of justice, eater of bacon." (Man, this guy's got a serious pig fetish.)"