Monstress Ten: The Thing From Another World II

By Una Crow
www.etsy.com/shop/MonstrousIndustry

Okay, so I totally failed in getting more scary or monstrous zines up for Halloween. I guess I am either an awful person or don't have enough zines with monsters in them.

Wait! Not having enough monster zines makes me a terrible person! I am horrible! I love monsters and I love dressing up and I love Halloween and I've just gotten home from a pretty epic weekend and I'm exhausted and I still have eyemakeup on. Look, this is your reviewer. Is this a face you can trust?



Well, when it comes to zines about monsters you totally should.

I first picked up an issue of Monstress years ago, and I fell in love with the format. One monster per issue, with articles, artwork, excerpts from fake pieces of fiction, movie reviews, and more all revolving around that monster.

This issue's all about Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian monsters. Of course Lovecraft himself was pretty racist, but as the works that he's inspired are probably better then the originals you can just ignore them.

This issue's got more references to brains in jars, deep ones, crab people, and unspeakable horrors than you will know what to do with. There are also activity pages that are sure to drive you insane if you complete them all (doing the maze is probably okay though), reviews of loads of Lovecrat inspired movies (Crow does ignore the terrible ones), a comic, accounts of going to Buffalo and the Toronto Film Festival (which aren't about Cthulhu, but are still worth reading), and other stuff I've already listed.

Also my copy came with a rad linocut of everyone's (least?) favourite tentacled-faced being, and at the bottom of the envelope I discovered an awesome minizines that actually was supposed to go with the last issue of Monstress I reviewed: Robot haikus written in binary!

It's not my favourite issue of Monstress (I really don't get why the crab people all talk like spam bots), but it's still pretty fun. Oooh, and apparently I've missed an issue. I'll have to try to track that down.