Sans Bras

By Rachel Edidin

For months this zine had been taunting me. I had a scan of the cover, but I couldn't find the zine to actually review. Every time I went to scan another zine the image file would sit there taunting me. "Imagine if you could find me," it said. "Then you wouldn't have to do this work and could be more lazy."

However, within a couple of days of returning to England from my prolonged European trip I finally found this zine. Of course while I was gone the computer with the cover image saved crashed and I may have lost everything I had saved on it (including all of my zines).

But here we go! At least/last I can review it, though I didn't bother getting a new copy of the cover for this review, since it's just a white background with the title and author name.

The comic itself is about a "minimalist line drawing" walking along a blank 'landscape' before stopping and having a conversation with their omnipotent creator. The single panel per page, and the style of the whole thing (minimalist), actually reminds me quite a lot of animation and I can really imagine the weird, armless, character in motion in a cartoon.

The one thing that couldn't really be done in animation is the lettering. Sure you could have actors speak the dialogue in here, but I quite liked the various font styles that Edidin used. It all seems to be hand drawn and there's some quite good stuff here, even if it suffers a little because of the reproduction. Of course maybe I'm just jealous since my handwriting is completely terrible.

(Oh, and the title means "without arms" in case you were wondering.)