These Things Happen volume 3

By Sam Carbaugh

www.samcarbaugh.com

This is a flip comic, with two different stories that are, in part, inspired by The Yellow Wallpaper. (Just reading that wikipedia article kind of depressed me.) One half of the comic (the one with the blue cover) features a story about an old man thinking about his dead wife. The other half features a cover that has nothing to do with the contents. Instead the story is about a woman who is confined to her bed by her husband for some unnamed malady. She attempts to hide the fact that she is writing, but according to him even that is too much strain upon her.

The story isn't that long and I wasn't sure if the woman actually was physically sick, if it was somehow psychological, or if it was being induced by her husband. It's not clearly spelled out, and I think that's part of Carbaugh's plan. It made me kind of uncomfortable as I wasn't sure what to think of the characters in here. So, um, I guess it succeeded on that front.

The art in both stories features people becoming totally overcome by their own negative thoughts. It's a cool way to show how isolated people can become inside of their own minds. It's also a visual effect that wouldn't be possible to do in prose, and so is a sign of how comics can do awesome things that other mediums can't!

Culture Slut #25

By Amber Forrester
fight-boredom.com

Recently I met Amber, the creator of this zine. I’d traded zines with her in the past, but we hadn’t really stayed in touch or anything. Just before Christmas she was visiting Halifax with a friend of mine and several of us got together and played Pirate Fluxx (as recommended by Alex Wrekk, super zinester gaming). We also went thrifting at a Salvation Army shop and found a book about feminist zines. We talked about reviewing zines (oh the hilarity!), which isn’t really a topic either of us get to talk about very much, and traded the newest issues of our zines.

Amber’s zine is a perzine, which, for those that don’t know, means it’s about her life. Sometimes when reading perzines I am impressed by the brutal honesty of the writer. They talk about incredibly personal things in their lives: their failures, their successes, their relationships, their problems. It’s kind of intimidating if you’re thinking about writing a perzine yourself, because you wonder what it is that you should be revealing in them.

In the last issue of Amber’s zine that I read she had just broken up with her boyfriend and moved to Montreal. This time (several years later), she’s just broken up with her Montreal boyfriend and is having a hard time. She’s dealing with her alcoholism (a pretty scary thing that definitely isn’t discussed amongst young people), her feelings of self confidence and self worth, and her times feeling suicidal.

It’s all pretty intense stuff. But the entire zine isn’t just about those things.

Amber also discusses her “job”, which is being a guinea pig for various medical experiments at McGill. These range from the banal (smelling things), to the downright bizarre (a test on genital pain, twice, during which she fell asleep), to the scary (all the pharmaceutical tests). She says that she’s not taking things that aren’t already on the market, but it’s still a bit scary nonetheless.

One of the things I learned while talking to Amber is that she writes and edits her text before she gets them ready for this zine. This may surprise some people who have read her zine, as the entire thing is either handwritten or done using a typewriter, but I think the extra effort really shows and makes Amber’s prose more readable.

If you're into perzines, or living in Montreal, Amber's zines are worth reading, even if there is a distinct lack of monsters and ray guns.