OM

By Piotr Nowacki
www.magazynkarton.pl

Shit, this has an ISBN? Should I even be reviewing this? Well whatever, let's get to it.

OM is a comic from Poland, but it's told entirely without dialogue, so not understanding Polish isn't actually a problem. (Well, the back page is in Polish, but it's unrelated to the story inside.)

Nowacki has created a story about a weird dinosaur/lizard type creature and his best bud who is a giant egg. The dinosaur guy eats pretty much everything except the egg, which is pretty amazing. Alarm clock? Eaten. Toothbrush? Eaten. Chess set? Eaten. A pirate's hand? Eaten! In fact, the "eat everything" aspect of the story continues throughout the story with the main character actually getting eaten in the second half of the comic.

One day the lizard guy wakes up and his egg buddy is missing! He quickly puts on his detective outfit and sets out on a mission to find the egg. His quest takes him through many lands (and under the sea!), and he encounters many other creatures like ninja and fishmen. The story isn't anything super original, but the way it's told is pretty cute and there's some nice humour. The ending is kind of sad and bittersweet, and I wish that it wasn't.

The art is pretty simple, but Nowacki manages to get a surprising amount of emotion out of his wide-eyed lizard guy. Most of the pages are laid out in a simple six-panel grid, but some of them break from this, and when they do you know it's for a reason, something big is happening!

Overall I liked this, and could definitely see myself reading more adventures of this silent lizard guy. Though hopefully they'd end happier than this one does.

animal facts volume one

By Katy Curwin

It's not often (or ever) that I call out zines for false advertisement, but I have to put my foot down somewhere, and animal facts volume one is that place. I'm kind of sad to be doing this, but this really has to be said. This is important and I don't want anyone getting this zine under false pretenses.

There are no facts about tigers in this zine.

In fact there are no facts about any type of cat at all. None, nada, zilch, zip. And don't try to tell me about tiger shark facts. That picture up there is clearly a land tiger. Tiger sharks not only live in the sea, they aren't even mammals!

Sure there are cool facts and pictures about koalas and giraffes and pigs and other animals, but I was promised tigers and there are no tigers here. Terrible!

Cat Circus

By Sarah E

Cats! The internet loves cats! Zinesters love cats! Thus everyone (internet + zinesters = everyone) will love my review of this zine that features cats, right?

This short zine combines pictures of, and text about, cats and circuses from a children's encyclopedia. Giant cats ride on top of buses, children gather around posters advertising the cat circus, and we learn many amazing facts. Did you know that the "common domestic cat is one of the many strange animals obtained by circuses from far-off lands"? Clearly you can believe everything in print! It is all entirely factual.

To be honest, I kind of wish this zine was longer. I need more pictures of cats. The internet is not supplying me with enough.

Toasty Cats #6

By Magda Boreysza
www.magdaboreysza.com

Despite the title being what it is, this comic contains no cats, toasty or not. It does contain a number of short comics about other animals, some amazingly awesome drawings of monsters, and even a letters page!

Both of the comics in here are entirely silent, and sort of remind me of Masashi Tanaka's Gon series, if the animals in that acted slightly more like humans, and they were drawn in a less realistic way. Wait, I guess these have nothing in common with Gon, except they're both about animals not interacting with humans in any way. (And they're both good.) My comparison skills appear to be rusty.

I went into the first comic somewhat biased against the small, weird looking mammals with huge mouths and entirely too many teeth that star. Why? Because I have clearly been watching too many sci-fi horror films that feature horrible monsters eating people. Wait, what am I saying? That's clearly not possible, you can't have too many of those.

The dog-like creatures in this are, when they have their mouths closed, pretty cute. They live in some sort of forest society, playing with bugs, sleeping down holes, and mourning their dead. The story itself is pretty much just "nature happens", but it's drawn in a really lovely style that somehow manages to combine lots of small details, with a general cartoony style.

The second story is about a fox's life as it waits for a comet to pass by through the sky again. It is a tale of loss and longing, and kind of makes me sad. But, um, it has really nice art?

Both tales in this issue are good, though I hesitate to look for more, as while I enjoyed reading this comic there's definitely a morose feeling throughout, and I'm not sure I want to read more stories like that.

The Meanest Greenest Frog

By Eric Baker

While I've categorized this as a comic (and it is one), I think it can be better described as an illustrated "children's book". Baker has taken certain aspects of comics (speech balloons) and added them to a single large picture on each page.

The story concerns a young boy's quest to find the titular frog somewhere in a forest. Baker has chosen to present the narrative text and the characters' speech in rhyme. Combined with the somewhat repetitive nature of the text this means that the story seems as though it should be read out to someone else (while of course showing them the pictures at the same time).

The art is all pretty good, and I enjoyed Baker's depiction of various frogs and other animals. He's also put a lot of work into the general appearance of this book, with end papers, page numbers, and a "This book belongs to" page. It's all very professional and nice to look at, though I did think that the colouring could have been a bit brighter.

It's pretty clear that I'm not the target audience for this, but I can see kids enjoying either reading it or having it read to them. Let's hope that this is what's happened with other copies of this story.

025.431

By Ella Dawson, Zoe Forster, Caitlin Verney, and Ruth Collingwood

This is a group zine featuring a pretty wide variety of content. The first piece is half photos and half text and is about interesting/important graveyards that Dawson has been to. It's pretty cool, but the photos suffer from being reproduced by photocopier and having text pasted over them. Graveyards are rad!

The next piece is on big cats, and features a number of drawings of roaring cats, as well as a review/plot summary of a movie about one of those weird celebrity big cat performance people from the USA. Animal performances always make me kind of sad.

The longest text piece was a story about the trials and tribulations a woman went through in order to get a pet cat. It made me miss the cat I had back when my family lived in Canada. Biscuit, you were awesome.

There's also some found objects, collages, and other stuff. The whole thing seems sort of like a collection of found objects, and the library numbering of its subjects makes it seem like you're just wandering around a library reference section reading things at almost-random.

Lusty Tales Number One

By B. Elston

From the cover of this I really had no idea what to expect. A sort of Black Pete looking character spitting up...something under the title "Lusty Tales"? Was this going to be furry porn?

Thankfully no! (Though I have caught the Wikipedia disease, and just had to drag myself away from reading about Goof Troop and other Disney cartoons after I went looking for the name of Black Pete.) Instead, this is a comic featuring anthropomorphic animals living in an "old west" style world. There are miners, people wearing cowboy hats, claim jumpers, and other stuff that would fit fine into a Mickey Mouse comic. Well, apart from some of the characters getting shot, the nudity, and so forth.

The characters and style are very reminescent of old funny animals comics and cartoons: hearts appear above the head to indicate a character is in love, the steam from a kettle acts as a thought bubble for a character, and there's a fair amount of slapstick style violence. This just causes the deaths that occur to seem more out of place. When you've seen talking skeletons, and characters being hit on the head with rocks and pouring scalding hot coffee on themselves to no apparent harm, it's hard to take the guns they're firing seriously. Especially when they're firing them from handstands.

Yet, this could all work, the art is nice to look at, and I have no problem with creating a dissonence between the expected and the actual. However the story itself is a bit of a disappointment. It starts strongly (down on their luck guys wondering what to do with their lives), but ends up meandering after the apparent climax, only to end on a cliffhanger of a sort. It could pull itself together when (if?) there are further chapters, but I did go in expecting this to be a complete story (I only discovered this was issue one of the comic when I looked at the back page), and so can't help to be a bit disappointed by the lack of conclusion.

Rounding out the issue is a short comic by Bernie Kosar about Hiawatha, which I guess retells part of that poem. It's alright, but didn't impress me too much.

Respect

By Tim Stout

The concept of this minicomic is really great. It takes the fable of the tortoise and the hare, and then asks "what happens next?".

Well the hare begins his spiral into depression. He's embarassed, he wonders how he could possibly have failed, and he begins acting in a self destructive manner, lashing out at his friends (both physically and mentally). The story is a little predictable, and ends up where you'd expect it to, but it is a fable, so you can't really blame the comic for that.

The cartooning is pretty good. There's some good use of cross hatching and shading to create depth and shadow in the images, and I enjoy the way the animal characters are all portrayed as university students, even if they're not people...animals...that I would ever want to hang out with in real life.

Hondle Special Edition

By Matthew Craig
www.thematthewcraig.com

Growing up I had a cat named Biscuit. She was white and orange, not that big, and once left a live pigeon under my bed. I mostly remember her as a middle aged cat who slept a lot, and who, after I moved out, would seem really happy when I came back to visit my parents.

I was sad when I moved to Korea, but figured I’d see her again at some point. But my parents moved back to the UK, and my cat was given to friends of the family. Shortly after that she disappeared (and my parents didn’t tell me for a year). Since then I’ve (foolishly?) thought that she went to find me, and my imagination conjures up images of her shivering in the cold. I try to block these out with ideas of her happily sleeping in front of a fire in the house of whatever people she ended up living with, but sometimes it’s hard.

So what does this have to do with zines? Not very much to be honest. But after reading Craig’s comic about his childhood dog, which he loved despite it doing many incredibly disgusting things that are some of the reasons I’m not particularly fond of dogs, I missed my cat.

Craig grew up with his dog Hondle, and it was when he moved away for university that it died of old age. He still loves Hondle though, and he recounts a series of stories about some of the weird/funny/horrible things that it did. If you’ve ever had (and enjoyed) pets I’m sure this comic will remind you of the good times you had with them, and maybe the sadness you felt when you lost them.

(Speaking of comics about pets that create sadness and a sense of loss, you should all go and read We3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. It’s super good stuff, and that’s not a tear in my eye, it’s just raining on my face.)

The art’s not the best, and the lettering kind of annoys me (constantly changing font sizes, arrgh!), but the comic still does what it set out to do, so it’s a success on that point. I still miss you Biscuit, even if your fur did always show up on my black clothes.

Ich My Fish is Sick

By Dawn Wing
sassyspinstercomics.blogspot.com

Woaaaaah. Just look at that image above! An origami fish thing! I can’t imagine making one of those to hold your zines. Well, I guess I can. I’ve made origami things before, but making one for each copy of your zine? That is awesome dedication that I clearly do not have. I mean, I find doing more than two folds for a zine to be intensely annoying.

I’m a little afraid the tail might fall off, and it would be extra amazing if the zine was square and fit inside the fish completely, but really, who cares? Look at this thing!

Inside there’s a short comic about ich, which is some sort of horrible fish disease parasite thing. Ewwww, I hate reading about parasites, even ones that say “hey”. There follows Wing researching how to fight ich, and then doing so. *Bang!* *Pow!* There’s a bit of text that confused me a bit (a winner who’s going to lose?), but the fish seems to get better and everyone is happy. Hurray!

The Tortoise Enters Tough Races

By Bill Volk

I was worried I was going to run out of things to review on this blog, and then on a day trip to Malmo I discovered the awesome library there and all the zines (well, mostly minicomics) that they had. The site was saved! Hopefully

(Note, I actually have images for this and a bunch of the following ones, but have no way of getting them online yet. Hopefully soon!)

Anyway, you know what I totally love in zines? Fold outs! And this one totally delivers.

But first there's the comic, which is a retelling of the fable about the Tortoise and the Hare. You already know the story, and you can probably guess that there's going to be a twist of some sort, and there is. However I thought it was a good twist, and I enjoyed the mean spiritedness of it all, especially coming from the really cute animals that Volk has drawn here.

And then there's the fold out, which is really awesome if whoever has read the comic before you has refolded it correctly (less awesome if you have to refold it properly yourself first). Each unfolding (is that a word?) reveals a larger space for an image and dialogue to show up on. Hurray! The only problem with it is that it reminded me of those immortal jellyfish things, which in turn reminded me of one of my greatest fears: flying jellyfish. They (thankfully) don't exist, but eeeek they are horrifying, with their tendrils floating through the air and stinging things that get to close to them. I shudder just to think about them.

Now Then

By Steve Larder
www.stevelarder.co.uk

Considering how much I enjoy Steve’s Rum Lad comics, I’ve always been a bit disappointed by his other comics. They’re clearly very different beasts, and I wonder if I was reading them just as “comics” and not as “comics by that guy who does autobio comics I really like” if I’d like them more. Hmm...

Anyway, this one features a bird of some sort, a lawn gnome, and a clock and the adventures they have! Flying! Swimming! Smashing! Falling! It’s all there, though possibly not as exciting as I’ve just made it out to you. I think that ultimately my problem with this (and some of Steve’s other comics) is that they’re very light weight stories, there’s no (or at least not much) meaning to them other than what’s on the page and they’re not designed to make you think, just amuse you for a couple of minutes. I guess you could say the same thing about Rum Lad, but I still like it better.

The Corvidologist

Words by Jack Gobsmob
Designed by Shaven Raven Designs
www.shavenravendesigns.co.uk

Corvidae is the scientific term for a group of birds that includes ravens, crows, magpies, and a few others, but this zine is mostly bout ravens. Everybody loves ravens! Hurray!

There’s information about ravens from a broad range of areas. We find out where they live, what they eat, how (we think) their brains work, the results of scientific experiments, and other interesting facts.

There’s also a diagram of a raven, some nicer artwork featuring ravens (I wish my zines had covers as nice as this one, click to see it bigger!), and a story about ravens from the mythology of the Chukchi people of north-east Russia. This was totally my favourite part because despite believing that a raven created the world, they hate ravens! They constantly complain that the world is terrible, that there are too many mountains, that the rivers run to fast and other things. That’s amazing!

I’ve also, thanks to the magic of the internet, discovered that the Chukchi people are the butt of many Russian jokes. What a weird world we live in.

Holes

sammagee.com

Holes reminds me more of a children’s book than anything else. The full colour artwork inside is accompanied by limited text, to tell a fairly simple story. However, the artwork is very accomplished, and the plain cut and paste cover probably works against the book.

The story is about a young child believing that fairies lived at the bottom of her garden. It’s not very long, and the story is more of an anecdote than anything else, but the artwork is really nice. It combines collage work with painted art and cut and paste lettering, and I think it looks really good. Above all else I love the badgers with wings, but overall this is a really nice looking book.

Cat Week: Unicorns + Werewolves/Tubetastic

By Lizz Lunney
www.lizzlizz.com

Catweek! It continues despite the fact that this comic features absolutely no cats whatsoever. It’s even a flip zine (which I love) and so I have failed twicely in order to find a comic with a cat in it (I mean, I just went to a comic event and failed to get any, I am clearly incompetent). Why not stop cat week? Because I still have more non-comic zines featuring cats to talk about. It will never end.

Unicorns + Werewolves is the reason I picked this up, and it deals with what happens when a unicorn and a werewolf fall in love. Oh no! Opposites attract, rival families, babies of some new and unexplained species.

Though really, a cat is sort of a cross between a unicorn and a werewolf when you think about it (which is really all I have done this week). They’re both furry and like running around outside, unicorns care about their appearance, like indie music, and are adored by girls, while werewolves have claws, bite and pee on things, and are adored by girls. That pretty much spells out “cat” doesn’t it? I bet werewolves even sleep all the time. I guess the only major problems are that cats don’t transform into humans or have giant horns growing out of their foreheads. Theory ruined!

Um, anyway, on to how amazing tubes are. They have great fashion sense, they are very agreeable to other shapes (even if the shapes are a bit jealous of the tubes’ dancing abilities), and they sleep all the time. Hold on a second, I think that’s the missing element from earlier...

Horses!

By Ray
myspace.com/granandpop

Recently I helped organize a Midlands zine meetup on the wemakezines ning http://wemakezines.ning.com/. A few of us got together in Nottingham, and despite fewer people coming than expected, a good time seemed to be had by all. We talked about and traded zines, went to an art gallery that was having an exhibition about/inspired by the Soviet space program ( like oh em gee totally awesome <3 <3 <3), had dinner, and made vague plans to meet again.

One of the zines I got was this one about Ray’s “irrational fear of horses”. Now to be honest, he may claim his fear is irrational, but it is far, far more rational than my greatest fear (or at least one of them), which is flying jellyfish. Eurgh. Even thinking of it gives me shivers. Floating around in the sky with their electric tentacles going every which way, preventing me from ever leaving the house again. I am eternally gratefully these monstrosities do not exist in real life.

But horses do exist! And Ray is afraid of them. In his zine he goes through the reasons why people usually have a fear of horses, explains his previous exposures to horses, and tells about instances when his fears have caused him inconvenience. Plus he explains the, far more sensible, reason why he’s afraid of birds. I could tell you about my hate/fear relationship with swans, but I’ll leave that for my own zines.