Ink Cartridge Funeral #1

Ink Cartridge Funeral #1
PO Box 573
Casper, WY
82602
Half legal sized.

The Ouija board inspired cover to this group zine promises “Olfashioned Necromancy,” which sounds like a pretty good place to start a zine, so it’s unfortunate that the content doesn’t really live up to the promise.

There is no consistent theme to this group zine; we go from a brief photographic tour of “homoerotic Casper” (which I think would have been more interesting as a tour of public art/statuary in the town), correspondence with an internet scammer, a show poster (yay), and some fairly random art including a pretty nice collage featuring skeletons and tarot cards (ooh, there’s the necromancy) which was one of my favourite parts of the zine.

The other two parts I enjoyed were a recipe for easy chai tea, which combined the instructions with art from Little Nemo in Slumberland (which is a pretty awesome comic), and a short comic by Ben Bates about skeletons in Grim Reaper outfits working in an office trying to inconvenience people in a variety of ways. It’s only part one and I hope Bates does more somewhere, though committing yourself to drawing page after page of skeletons seems like hard work. Maybe the number of teeth you have to draw is cancelled out by the black robes.

There’s also a fairly decent prose piece in here by Tom Loepp, with a title I cannot read because it is fake Cyrillic (I keep trying to read it as real Cyrillic and it doesn't make any sense). My first time through I thought it was a fairly surreal first person narrative, the second time it seemed more like a fever dream, which I guess is basically the same thing.

This is a first zine for the person in charge, and I feel it kind of shows. It was printed on a printer/copier they bought from someone on the internet, and the travails of that were more interesting than any of the poetry included here.

They also haven’t really used the format to the full extent that they could. Zines in 8.5 x 7.5 should use the full space, while here the margins often seem too large. I mean, just look at that cover!

I did however get a pair of incredible X-ray vision glasses from these guys. Okay, so they’re actually 3-D glasses of some kind, but they’re pretty rad. I had to take them off before I finished writing this review though, they were hurting my eyes.