Morgenmuffel no. 16

Morgenmuffel no. 16
By Isy
www.morgenmuffel.co.uk
PO Box 74
Brighton
BN1 4ZQ
UK
80p, half sized.

I really like vegetarian cooking, and I really like comic books, so reading Morganmuffel, which combines these two things, is pretty awesome.

Isy documents parts of her life through her comics, and the parts she documents are mostly about attending huge political protests and cooking insane amounts of food for hundreds or even thousands of people with the Anarchist Teapot Mobile Kitchen. I really love it! It is so inspiring to read about that sort of thing. I’ve been involved with Food Not Bombs for years, but even at its largest I’ve only fed a couple hundred people. Reading about the infrastructure that has to be done, and the amount of food that has to be bought is kind of insane. I can’t even comprehend the bit where someone says “We need to go buy 1000 kg of veg from the market.” And that was because they hadn’t ordered enough!

It’s also cool to read about the protests that Isy is serving at. In this one she goes to a G8 summit in Germany, and to Climate Camp protest at Heathrow Airport. They both seemed like pretty neat events, though apparently the Climate Camp one had “far too many hippies.” I’d like to go to at least one at some point, maybe later this year.

The comics aren’t just about cooking and protests though, there are bits about camp life, travelling, and baking competitions which are all good too.


However, not everything about this zine is super rad. Isy asked people to contribute lists of things they hated, and if she asked me in the future I might say that those lists were one of my things. I didn’t enjoy these, and didn’t even bother reading them all. Some of them are just giant blocks of text with no paragraph marks or anything! So hard to read. The content of the lists wasn’t too good either, with some of it just being really stupid. I did have to agree with the guy that complained about how English houses are crap and let all the heat out. It is so true, everyone here needs to learn about insulation and double glazing. Brrrrr.

The other problem is that sometimes the flow of the panels doesn’t work too well. The layout of some of the pages and the use of arrows makes me think that Isy doesn’t read that many comics. Maybe she does and just doesn’t care that much, she is packing massive amounts of information into the panels she uses, and the comics are still enjoyable.

In the end, neither of those things are deal breakers, but if you buy the collection that was just released by Last Hours I don't think it'll have the hate lists.