What a Whopper

By Dan Archer

www.archcomix.com

It's interesting to think about your own biases and how the decisions you make don't really make sense. I don't remember the last time I ate at, or was even in, a major fast food chain location. Except Subway, which I've grudgingly eaten at while cycling somewhere or just when I forgot to bring lunch to work. Why? Because it's "healthy"? I have no excuse really, as it's the largest chain restaurant in the world, and while their wikipedia page is mostly controversy free I'm pretty sure that as a huge multi-million (billion?) dollar company, they're probably as bad as any other large capitalist corporation. (Though maybe that's my biases showing...)

This comic deals with some of those controversies that large companies frequently deal with (and which most people never hear of or care about). In this case it's slave-labour (or close to it) that's used to pick the vegetables that are served in these "restaurants". The comic communicates this information effectively, beginning with a (true) story about migrant workers trying to escape from the terrible conditions they're dealing with, and then tackling the way the corporations have dealt with these issues.

The issue at hand is how terrible the (frequently illegal) workers who pick these vegetables are paid. They work in appalling conditions, for money that hasn't increased in 25 years. In the case covered here they fought for a 1 cent increase per bucket of tomatoes they harvested. Bringing the total they earned to 51 cents per 32 pound bucket. How much do you think you could earn hauling those around all day? I'm guessing I could make pretty much fuck all.

While the comic eventually concentrates on the actions of the Burger King company to avoid paying any increase to workers (including fining companies who they worked with who agreed to pay their workers extra), other information is also conveyed to the reader. While the conditions the tomato pickers in this comic deal with are deplorable, I already knew that migrant workers dealt with those issues (and more!). But one small throw away piece of information completely blew my mind. 

While discussing a boycott of certain companies who refused to increase the amount workers earned the comic states that "Taco Bell was blocked from 22 college and high school campuses". Maybe nothing in that sentence seems weird to you, but to me? Oh my fuck! High schools have Taco Bells? What the fuck is wrong with society if high schools have fucking fast food restaurants (presumably with high school students working in them)? Underfunding education while lining corporate pockets. Great job everyone, pat yourself on the back.

So yeah, corporations are horrible, capitalism is awful, humans are frequently terrible, but this comic by Dan Archer was pretty good. Even if it made me upset and angry at least it talked about the good that many people and organizations are doing and provided places for people to find more information about the issues.

So in the spirit of that here's some information about Burger King labour controversies, and the Student/Farmworker Alliance who hope to "eliminate sweatshop conditions and modern-day slavery in the fields". I wish them my best.

Alternative Press Spring Fair, North London, June 1st

 
I  was asked to post about this event on my blog. So here are the details!

Alternative Press Spring Fair
Saturday, June 1st, 11am-5pm
The Albert, 1 Albert Road, London
www.alternativepress.org.uk

There's still time to apply for a table, but the deadline for applications is Friday 17th May at 9am (tomorrow!).

Dear Dear

By Eroyn Franklin

eroynfranklin.com

My first time through this comic I wasn't really sure what was going on. The story cuts back and forth between multiple people disjointedly talking into a video camera and telling about an event that happened one night. Like many eye witnesses to events they misremember things, get real events completely wrong, combine real memories with dreams, and come at things from incredibly bizarre points of view.

After I finished reading through the comic I thought about it for a while and tried to figure out what had happened. When it hit me, I went back and checked some stuff and suddenly everything clicked. The seeming nonsense that one person said actually made sense once you were able to filter it back to reality.

I thought this was a really interesting way of telling a story, one that I've seen before (usually in film), but which can be used really effectively by some creators. My only wish is that this comic was much longer. I feel like we get, at most, half of what was going on here, and that if there were more interviews with more characters we could get a fuller sense of the events.

Of course it could be that the creator didn't want to create a more defined account of what happened, and that their goal was to make the reader think and wonder about all the elements of the story that we can never find out about.

One Thousand Lies

By Laura Terry

www.bravesailor.com

This was a cute little story about a travelling itinerant who returns to LA to visit his former guardian, a bit shot lawyer. There's an immediate disconnect between the lives of these two people. One who is constantly dealing with huge piles of money, and the other who has all of their belongings strapped to their back.

The comic is about telling stories, and features the traveller telling increasingly ridiculous stories about some of the places they've visited on their travels. There's a city where the library is where you go for drug deals while intellectuals hang out in the playground providing answers for people, one where the railway tracks separate the mobile part of the city from the permanent part, and a city that was built to reflect the universe, but is now eerily empty.

The rapport between the two main characters is well represented, and you can tell a lot about the relationship between the characters just from their body language and the way they talk to each other. The dialogue and actions manage to reveal a lot about their interests and how they feel about both their own lives, and the lives of each other. That the friendship even exists despite the vast differences in lifestyles says a lot!

The stories are all fun, and even when they're being "creepy", it's still in a humourous way. The art works pretty well for the story it's telling, and Terry is good at making pages of "talking heads" look visually appealing as the characters banter back and forth. I also enjoyed the use of gray shading to give depth and shadow to the artwork.

Monsters & Girls: Amelia

By Denis St. John

denisstjohn.blogspot.ca

So sometimes the problem with having piles of unread comics and zines around is that I'll pick up one like this, discover it's chapter five, read it and have almost no idea what was going on. There's are some nosferatu guys, and a girl has a nightmare, and what?

Except this time I discovered that I actually owned chapter's 1-4 as well! They were just in a totally different comic that didn't have the name on the cover. I'm kind of surprised I found it at all!

So does it make more sense now that I've been able to read the story from the beginning? Yes! Definitely! Chapter five picks up immediately after the previous one, and now I have some idea of who the characters are and what they're doing.

There are three magical artifacts, and one of them belonged to Amelia's mom. It seems like it killed her (the mom) somehow, and now Amelia is trying to get the other objects to "make things right", and to discover the secrets behind them.

Neither the art or the story really appealed to me that much. The style of the art makes all of the characters look weirdly unattractive, though I'm not sure if that is the artist's intention or not. The story is just kind of...generic I guess? Plus there's a sex scene that's just kind of gross (this is at least partially on purpose). I did enjoy the fact that one of the characters was a nosferatu instead of just a vampire. I thought that was pretty funny.

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters

By Anna Anthropy

This isn't a zine, hell, this isn't even a book about zines. It's a book about the concept of video games as zines. And there are some interesting ideas in here concerning the video game industry in it's current form, how diversification of the type of people who make games would probably improve the industry, and how it's easier than most people think to make video games.

Anthropy brings forward the idea of DIY games that are distributed for free online as an equivalent of zines. They can be made by only one person, made with no commercial intent, and made just because you want to make something. In fact Anthropy says you don't even have to show people the games you make, but that by creating games (even terrible ones) you get a better idea of how games are constructed, and also become more creative yourself (something I definitely think is good!).

I think there's lots of really interesting stuff still to be said about video games, and while reading this book a quote from a video game creator came back to me: "a video game is the most effective way I can express myself." I thought that was really fascinating and shows a side of video games that most people don't realize exists.

Of course, there are also lots of problems with this book. It really stretches to hit two hundred pages, is fairly repetitive in places, and there are a lot of games (and ideas) it just completely ignores. I'm not sure I could really recommend this book, but at the same time I'm not sure of other books that cover similar areas. Are there any?

Mostly though I just wish that I encountered more zines about video games. If you've made one get in touch! I'd love to read it.

(I'd also kind of love to get a zine on a 3.5 inch floppy disk, but I would have no way of actually reading it...)

Poems WIthout Words

By Mark Bilokur

Okay, so poetry (the written kind) isn't really something I get. I mean, I understand why people write it, but it's never really been something I've enjoyed that much. My eyes tend to glaze over while reading it, and I remember one time I was over a hundred pages into an epic poem by Aleksandr Pushkin (which one exactly I can no longer remember) when I realized that I had actually read it before. Over a hundred pages before I realized that. I'm amazing.

That's not to say I dislike poetry. There's some I enjoy, and I'm a pretty big fan of hip hop (which can be spoken word poetry with backing music), but overall it's not something I seek out.

Visual poetry is probably about the same for me. I can go "oh this looks cool", but at the same time I don't "get it". A lot of the art in this zine (people with hands for heads, burning skeletons, etc.) is pretty awesome, but I'm left with the feeling that there's something that I'm missing. Still, sometimes just looking at nice art is fine, and I enjoyed looking through this zine, even if I didn't really understand what the creator meant by the art.