Morgenmuffel no. 17

Morgenmuffel no. 17
By Isy
www.morgenmuffel.co.uk
PO Box 74
Brighton
BN1 4ZQ
UK
Half sized.

I guess I’ve spent so long living in places that nobody would ever want to visit that actually reading about other people going to the same places I’ve been kind of blows me away.

That was the way I felt reading the comic that makes up the largest part of this zine, as Isy travels to the west coast of America, and goes to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and some other places I’ve been to. I was in that restaurant! On that train! I might have met that person! It was interesting to see how people who have gone to the same places as you can experience them differently, or will do completely different things in those places that you never even contemplated doing.

(I think this most struck home with me when I was in Japan a few years ago, and my guidebook said that in Kyoto I would encounter the Japan of my imagination, namely geisha girls and temples. As I’d just come to Kyoto after hitchhiking several hundred kilometres to go to a robot museum (that had closed down forever the previous week) and was in Kyoto primarily to see the manga museum there, I realized that the writer of the guide book and myself had very different views on Japan, and that next time I should actually look at guide books before I buy them.)

So yeah, Isy goes to America (and a little bit of Canada). She goes to punk shows, she is amazed by vegan Oreos, she sees some bears (I have never done this), she drives a car for the first time in twelve years, she encounters bureaucracy; it’s UK punks in America.

There’s also a comic about the Climate Camp 2008 protest, where she again spent a lot of time cooking food for huge numbers of people, and one on charting your girly cycle thing, which was actually informative and not as ick as I feared it would be (yes I am afraid of girls’ bleeding bits).

There’re also more of the hate lists, which I’m still not interested in (though at least this time they’re illustrated with drawings of the people who created the lists), and Isy’s panel to panel storytelling is still whack, but I enjoy Morgenmuffel anyway. Time to start reading the book!