Zines by Octagon are produced by Aggie Toppins, an artist and graphic designer living in Chattanooga. Aggie uses visual narrative to explore themes related to memory, mortality, myth, and hyperreality. Zines by Octagon are culturally critical publications that seek to engage readers in a kind of semiological playground in which meaning is a shared experience between writer and reader.

The name Octagon comes from Thomas Jefferson who was fascinated by this shape and used it often in his architecture and furniture design. Jefferson was famously a man of contradictions. Perhaps the least of these was that the pine doors of his home at Monticello were painted to appear as if they were made from a more luxurious mahogany. As such, the octagon signs to the longstanding American penchant for simulacra, a central theme in these zines.