Joshua Plague

Joshua Plague is a prolific zine editor from the Northwest U.S.

Joshua's real name is Joshua Ploeg. He began to call himself "Plague" as a play on the mispronunciations of his real last name "Ploeg" and it stuck throughout his career.

Joshua is the creator of over thirty different zines. He is perhaps best known as the author of the Now I... series of zines. These include the titles Now I Write A Dictionary, Now I Don the Mask of Melancholy and Now I Devour You. He is also the creator of other zines such as More Garbage On Paper.

Joshua is also well known as the lead singer for the hardcore punk bands Mukilteo Fairies, Behead The Prophet No Lord Shall Live, Lords of Lightspeed, and The Special Friend. All of his bands were known for their Do-It Yourself ethics, setting up their own shows and recording for independent record labels such as Outpunk, K Records, Noise Pollution and Kill Rock Stars. In 2004, the hardcore band Limp Wrist released the song "Ode" on their Complete Discography CD, which is a tribute to Plague, as well as Gary Floyd of the band The Dicks and Randy Turner of Big Boys, for being pioneering queer hardcore musicians who paved the way for bands such as Limp Wrist. More recently Joshua has performed solo, or with Joshua Plague's Sanctuary Of Sound, at events such as Bands Against Bush and released several cassette tapes of his various solo musical projects. He is also the author of a number of Vegan cookbooks.

In 2006, Joshua released the comp zine Archvision #1/Now Let's Put On a Show #6, subtitled A Torrid Tale of Collected Art, Tales and Recitations and which is described on the cover as "A torrid tome of collected flyer art, flyers, amusing tales and dull recitations from various and sundry shows, mostly from the 90's."