Panel: "Sweet" 16

Published by Ferret Press
600 Markview Road
Columbus, Ohio
43214, USA
www.ferretpress.com

I reviewed one of these anthology comics last year, and while I found the stories of varying quality, there were a couple that I enjoyed.

While that issue was about superstition and bad luck, this one is about a substantially different subject: romance and relationships. This is an area that I am less interested in. Or rather, the ways in which it is presented here didn't appeal to me.

Several of the pieces were about marriage and children, concepts I generally find boring and dull, while another shows a relationship that seems to be based mostly on material wealth (it's supposed to be comedic, but instead succeeds in making me sad). I also took issue with one of the comics that said that the alternatives to "monogamy over a 70-year lifespan" are "really awful". This person might want to look into monogamish relationships.

The best story in here was by KT Swartz and Brent Bowman (who illustrated the comic I liked in the other issue I reviewed). It's more about the titular sweet sixteen (a concept that both mystifies and terrifies me) than relationships, and is kind of Hunger Games-y. I don't think it really works as a complete story by itself, and functions more as a Future Shock type story, but I found it more interesting than the other content in here.

Halifax Comix Jam #11/12

It's the end of the month, and so it is once again time for me to "review" an old issue of the Halifax Comix Jam comic in order to promote the comic jam happening tonight at Roberts Street!

Honestly, I think jam comics like this are probably more valuable to the people that made them than to random outsiders. This is because these comics rarely make any sense at all.

(If you're not aware of what a jam comic is, they're comics where one person draws a panel, and then someone else draws the next panel, and so on. They usually don't have any real narrative flow, and the art styles can change drastically between panels.)

Still, I think they're neat because the jam sessions themselves encourage people to draw and be creative, which is something I think more people should be doing.

But yeah, go to the Comics Jam at Roberts Street Tuesday, February 28th (tonight!), 7-10pm. It will be fun! I promise. There will be cookies.

Robots and Electronic Brains number 14

Edited by jimmy possession
www.robotsandelectronicbrains.co.uk

This music zine is packed full of reviews, interviews, and articles about music and bands. Unlike most zines of this type it doesn't focus on one particular genre and the content can go from discussing Welsh language hip hop to the bands influenced by '60s French pop music.

Writing about music can be a pretty difficult thing to do, and I think even the best writers are writing it for people that read music writing. Thus, as someone who doesn't know that much about music I often felt a bit lost when reading some of the content here, which perhaps can be said to be aimed at the sort of people who spend their weekends searching through crates of records at garage sales in the hopes of finding that one amazing seven-inch.

However, some of the interviews were pretty good, and it came with a compilation CD with loads of different music on it (everything from hip hop to indie to weird cut up spoken word bits featuring Vincent Price), and it's worth it just to get hold of that.

Treasure Hunt issue two

treasurehuntfuns@gmail.com

I think the strange collaged cover featuring multiple drawings, photos, text and other elements is possibly the best part of this group zine.

The contents are as random as the cover, and include pieces of art, poetry, a few bars of musical notation, photographs, an incredibly long and dull (to me) interview with a musician (that I just couldn't get into because it was about someone I'd never heard of, and didn't seem to discuss why I should care about him), a recipe, found art, and a prose piece about a breakup that was pretty good and written in an interesting style.

The zine was supposed to be a showcase of ephemera, and to that extent it succeeded. However there really wasn't anything in here that stuck in my mind. I looked at the cover of this zine before writing this, and couldn't remember a single thing featured inside. I'm not in the best of mental states right now, and I do like zines that collect random things and found objects, but this issue didn't do much for me.

Pathologize This! A Mental Health Zine

mentalhealthzine@gmail.com

Mental health is an important issue, and one that is frequently ignored by many people and most media. Zines are one area where there are people telling their stories about mental health issues. This allows people to learn that they are not alone, discover how other people live with their mental health issues, and heal through writing about their own lives.

However, it can be hard to read this sort of thing, and even write about it. This zine is filled with brief, anonymous accounts of different mental health issues. Anxiety, depression, eating disorders, physical problems, dealing with rape and sexual assault, and other things are written about in stories, poems, interviews, and essays. They are not all easy reading, and some of them kind of upset me.

It also made writing this review kind of hard, as I didn't know what to mention and what not to mention. However, if you are interested in this area, you might enjoy this zine.

Khyber Komix Jam #2

Edited by Kyle

A comics jam is an event where a bunch of people get together and draw collaborative comics. Usually each person draws a panel, and then passes it on to the next person (who in turn passes on the comic they'd been working on). You spend an evening hanging out with other comics artists, and at the end you have a pile of usually bizarre, generally nonsensical comics.

While these are great drawing exercises for the artists, both to get them to actually draw something and to draw within a certain period of time, they results are generally incredibly uneven. You have some participants who try to continue the story started by the previous artists, but others who go for random jokes and non sequiturs.

You also have an incredible variety of art styles, and while a few of the artists here are quite good at drawing something within the allotted time, others are not. My favourite comic had to do with a horrible jelly fish attack, both because jelly fish (or at least the idea of flying ones) terrify me, and because on average I think it has the best art. I guess jelly fish aren't that hard to draw.

Ultimately though, I think the biggest problem is the lettering. I can't even read a bunch of the dialogue! I'd be really interested to hear of any comic jams have used a writer/letterer who would write the dialogue/captions in advance and have the artists draw things to try and match up with that. I don't know if it would work better, but at the least the produced comics would (probably) be more coherent.

Loserdom #21

loserdomzine@gmail.com
www.loserdomzine.com

One of my favourite things about reviewing things for this blog is that I read so many random things, and sometimes I am completely and utterly blown away by content I did not expect.

That is the case with Loserdom #21. I'd read some issues before, but nothing prepared me for the massive (over twenty pages!) history of the Dalkey punks that appeared in this issue.

Dalkey is a village suburb of Dublin in Ireland, and it doesn't seem like that exciting a place to live. Anto grew up there, and remembers being a little kid in the early '80s and being both scared and fascinated by the punks he saw hanging around town. Almost thirty years later he's tracked five of them down and interviewed them about what being a punk in that time was like, how they got involved with the scene, what music they listened to, how they dressed, where they hung out, how the group came to an end, and what they're up to now.

It is an incredibly epic piece of journalism, and feels more like the basis of someone's thesis in folklore, anthropology, sociology, or history than an article in a zine. It's a fascinating piece made all the more interesting because of the real emotions that the interviews conjure up in people. You can feel the joy and fun that these people had back when they were kids, and then, in the most brutal and unexpected part, there is a tragedy. I don't really want to spoil what happened, but it was a big enough thing that it was mentioned in newspapers at the time (which have been dug up, photocopied, and included here).

Even if that was the only thing in Loserdom #21 it would be worth picking up, but this is a massive zine and there's loads of other stuff too! Comics about riding bicycles, an interview with a woman who's been busking in Dublin since 1985, and more. Not all of it appealed to me, but that's always the case with anthologies, and I think this is definitely worth checking out.

Bear with a Chainsaw Issue 1

Edited by Devin Renshaw
supercrazymonsters.blogspot.com

In his introduction Renshaw says that there's no "rhyme or reason to this zine", and that is entirely true, as the content switches between his drawings of monsters and completely random written content from others.

The monster drawings are pretty rad. Monsters! Yeah! That's like ingredient number one to make me like your zine. Renshaw draws tentacled monsters, hairy monsters, insect monsters, and more. None of them is incredibly horrifying or anything, but if you spend too much time looking at them and thinking about what they'd look like in real life they can create a certain sense of squeamishness in you.

The other content is considerably less good. A piece about why hobos are terrible which misrepresents homeless people (even if the author claims not to hate them), a poem I don't remember (surprise, surprise!), a nonsensical story about someone trying to find matches so they can smoke up, and some pretty gross "self help" style pieces (ie. "How To Revive Dead Mac n'Chz", and no, I've never put a half eaten pot of macaroni and cheese "in the frig".)

I liked that Renshaw saw fit to put little hand written editor's notes at the end of all the pieces other people wrote for him, but the pieces in general were not really my thing.

I did like the monster pictures though. Monsters! Raaarrrrrr!

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.

Piston Quaker

This is a pretty hapazard group zine which contains poetry, collage, drawings, photographs, and several somewhat hard to read pages of anarchist propaganda.

Now maybe that's just not what I was expecting when I picked up this zine to read, but the small font size and huge blocks of text about solidarity was a bit intimidating to read. However I was amused by a certain segment that seemed to be fairly apt considering what is going on in Egypt and other countries right now:

"But time and again, having rid themselves of tyranny, people have allowed another to replace it. Afraid to use their new found freedom, they hold up their wrists up to some new jailer."

Some of the art is pretty good, some of it is more like doodles, but the lack of a coherent theme damages the overall book.

Mild Peril #11

By Dean and Pete
mildperil@hotmail.co.uk
myspace.com/mildperilzine

As we head down the path to BIG CHANGE (not with a bang, but a whimper) I come across another old punk zine. Several years old, other issues already reviewed on this site, almost unreviewable because you either are interested in it or aren't. Let's go!

This thick zine is filled with what you would expect from a punk music zine. Rants (the politics! That is the part of punk I really enjoy), band interviews (I only read the parts on touring and life in other countries at this point), tour diaries (the short distances here still blow me away), show reviews (generally ignored!), vegetarian recipes (possibly good!), random jokes, pictures, and drawings (confusing!), and CD and record reviews (completely ignored!).

You probably already know whether or not you're into this sort of thing, and my review can be summed up as "generally positive". There're some spelling, grammar, and layout issues, but those have never really been a strong point of the punk scene, and really don't detract from the overall product. Am I burnt out? I think I might be despite only writing one review in the last week.

I guess the only reason I reviewed this at all is a misplaced sense that I should review _everything_ I've been given, and wondering where I should send the punk records a friend gave me before returning to Canada. I want them to be reviewed, who (in the UK) should I send them to?

Blank Stares & Cricket Claps Yearbook 2003 – 2006

cricketclaps@yahoo.co.uk

Sometimes I wonder if it's even worth reviewing some of the zines I have. I mean, this is a music zine from several years ago. Is it relevant? Is it still coming out? I mean, if it was ancient it'd have historical value, but I think it's from 2005 or something. But I've read (most of) it, so whatever.

Blank Stares & Cricket Claps (the title comes from audiences' reactions to bands they don't know) is about indie music, and is, as you might expect, filled with reviews, interviews, and other stuff. The problem is that the bands featured I've either never heard of, or don't really care about. I don't think I actually finished the interview with a guy from Mercury Rev, though I did read the one with one of the members of the Afghan Whigs. Despite this, I would be unable to pick out any of their songs if you played some to me. "White boys with guitars" is apparently not my type of music.

I feel like I'm being overly critical of this zine, as it's very nicely laid out. Someone put a lot of effort into the design of this zine, and it looks really good! It's just that the content, style, and humour don't really appeal to me, and there are lots of references to things I didn't understand. I did like the step by step ilustrated dance instructions though. Those were pretty great

Lights Go Out Issue 9

Edited by Mr. T
www.lightsgoout.co.uk
myspace.com/lightsgooutpunkzine
£1/$2/€1.50

I was all ready to write a review about how I wish there were music zines that weren’t about punk/hardcore, but then I actually sat down and read this issue of Lights Go Out. Yeah, there are the usual tour diaries and interviews with punk bands, but this zine also includes some non-punk content that’s quite interesting.

The first is an interview with Thousand Yard Stare, an indie rock band who seemed to be on the cusp of hitting the big time in the early ‘90s. Four of the band members were tracked down and interviewed independently, each giving accounts of their time in the band, and what they’ve ended up doing since then.

The other piece is a series of interviews with Girls@Play, a manufactured pop group from the early 2000s. This was not what I expected from a punk zine! Again the interviews ask about their time in the group, and what they’ve been up to since then.

I hadn’t heard of either of these bands before, but both of these pieces were interesting reading, especially as companion pieces. Neither group ever got really big, and they came into the music industry from very different directions, but it’s interesting to compare and contrast their experiences, some of which are quite similar.

The only real problem with the interviews is that they were clearly done over email, and the answers can get a bit repetitive. Still, overall they’re good pieces and must reads if you liked either group.

There are also a bunch of opinion columns (some good, some bad), a show review section done partially in haikus, and a music review section that covers everything from thrash/hardcore bands to Kylie Minogue to Tegan and Sara. Sadly neither of the latter two reviews featured lines like “It blasts right into your head and refuses to let go like a vicious little dog attaching itself to your nutsack and biting for all it’s might.”, though that would be pretty amazing to see printed on the front of a Kylie record.

Oh dang, apparently they reviewed one of my zines in issue 10. I'll have to give them bonus points for that, even if I have no idea if they even liked it or not.

With more than forty pages of content in tiny typefaces, it’ll take you quite a while to read everything in this zine, which definitely makes it value for money. I'd still love to read a zine about hiphop or electronic music though, any suggestions?

Stringray Issue 1

stingraymag.com

The introductory piece of this anthology of prose pieces says that the issue is filled with each creator's response to the idea of ‘community’, this made me think.

Recently I was talking to someone about zines and the zine scene, and they said they found it incredibly odd that there would be events, websites, and a sense of community surrounding zines. The idea that all zinesters had in common was that they photocopied their own stuff and wanted others to read it was foreign to them. The breadth of stuff I’ve read about in zines is pretty amazing, but perhaps this person was right and what's more amazing is the fact that there is a zine community at all, let alone one as awesome and supportive as the one that does exist.

Stingray is a pretty good literary styled zine. Nothing in here totally blew me away, but I enjoyed almost every piece and think several of them are worth reading. There is an article about how London is dealing with homelessness in the run up to the Olympics (which though well written and informative probably should have mentioned Vancouver in some way), a piece about cats and how their stare at each other, a bizarre piece of fiction that involves a guy having his nose cut off, a comic about living in Stoke-On-Trent and how the sense of community there used to be about working in the potteries but is now based around “mutual suspicion of others” (and is also at least the third time this year I've read a comic that featured a Jobcentre Plus), a history of the the Israeli music scene, and more.

The piece on the evolution of Israeli music is possibly the most interesting just because it was about something I knew absolutely nothing about. It was lacking in that I would have liked some more background information (if the residents of Israel were from such a diaspora why was their music so “dominated by Anglo-Saxon culture”?) and detail (what type of music did the musicians coming out of the army play?), but it was still a good read.

There has been some effort put into design and layout in this zine, which I always appreciate, and I enjoyed the giant letters used to present each piece’s title. At the same time parts of it are strangely formatted: the intro page is littered with the >> common of emails, while there are a number of blank pages that always kind of frustrate me in print publications.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this comic is the vague sense of despair that seems to fill all the pieces. No matter who the writer is, whether they’re writing prose or creating comics, using fiction or journalism or memoir, there always seems to be a sense of confusion and sadness in the pieces. You wouldn’t immediately see a connection between someone writing about their mother’s dementia and someone else silently freaking out because their new boyfriend just bought their old boyfriend’s sweater in a used clothing shop, but put them together in an anthology like this and they all seem to fit.

It might just show success on the part of the editor that the styles of the people who have contributed mesh so well thematically, but more anthologies could benefit from strength in that area.

The Other Wo/Man Zine

Edited by Sarah Noonan and Emily Ostapovitch
Half sized. $5 (postage included)

I wasn’t really sure what this zine was going to be about. I mean, I have a piece in it (admission: I’m friends with the editors) and I still had no idea what other people would contribute. Interestingly, it seems that many of the other contributors had similar feelings and the contents of this zine cross many spectrums from poetry to recipes (always the zine staple) to erotic (no frontal nudity) photos.
Yet they all manage to orbit around the idea of “the other wo/man”. Okay, maybe if you saw a piece independently of anything else that’s not what you would have immediately though about, but when presented together in a zine like this they manage to create the outline of a shape/idea.

The best pieces in here are by the two editors (perhaps because they knew what their contributions would be before the zine was put together?). Ostapovitch contributes an excerpt from a journal entry she wrote while in Russia. In between pictures of Russian soldiers (and after a kick ass title page/logo) Ostapovitch writes about coming to terms with the end of a relationship, dealing with being a foreigner in Russia, and other personal crises. Her word choice creates images in the mind of the reader, and though I have the benefit of having been to Russia I feel as though anyone will be able to read this piece and understand the experiences she was going through. Well, maybe not the parts written in Cyrillic, but those aren’t really important.

The final paragraph of her piece says

“Pelevin wrote that this country is drowning in its own melting iceberg. The thaw is glorious and dangerous. I take risks but so far I’ve always made it up for air. The day’s themes are of little importance, fire or water, shifting from moment to moment.”

Sure she’s paraphrasing someone else for the idea, but I wish my journal entries were ever that interesting.

Emily’s next piece is actually written by her grandfather, and is about how he met his wife in the Netherlands during the Second World War. It’s not what I expected to find in a zine, but it’s crazy to read about experiences like that, and a rather sweet story to boot.

Noonan’s final piece is also about an experience in Eastern Europe. This time she and some other people in Ukraine go on the most terrible hiking trip I have ever heard of. They head out without the proper gear, it pours down with rain, they get lost, they run out of food, and they end up sleeping in an old couple’s house somewhere up in the mountain. It sounds like one of the worst possible trips you could ever go on. I’m glad I didn’t go.

There are also interesting pieces on the decolonization of sex (“Every orgasm should be an act of decolonization”), a bizarre play about installing Ubuntu, a neat foldout, and more. Like I said above this zine encompasses a lot of different types of content.

Of course, not all the content is good. There are a number of pieces I didn’t really care for, and there’s also the piece I wrote. Which, as a bizarre piece of fiction, is completely out of place with the rest of the content of the zine, and isn’t that well written (I can’t write fiction!). Still there are a couple of moments in it I enjoyed upon rereading. And overall the zine is huge, and packed full of stuff well worth checking out.

Constipated Rhythms Issue Six

By a bunch of people
ultrahorse.blogspot.com

I dunno, I don’t really get zines that are just collections of doodles. I mean, the cover of this one is nice enough, there’s an awesome drawing of some monsters, and some of the contents took some effort, but at the same time there’s just loads of stuff in here that looks like it was done in 12 seconds.

A lot of the content also just seems like weird in-jokes that that the creators would get, but just leave me confused. Or maybe some of the jokes and comics in here are just incomprehensible to everyone. There’s a thing in the middle about a foot giving fashion advice that (when I can read the lettering) is just utterly beyond my understanding.

I’m not opposed to doodles and poorly drawn comics. They can be awesome! And indeed there’s stuff in here I like, but I’m always a little confused by things like this. Why not spend an extra hour on your picture if you’re going to publish it? Different priorities I suppose.

Still, this is a pretty awesome monster picture.

Atta Girl #4

By lots of people
www.attagrrl.co.uk

I owe ATTA girl a good review. You see, this zine is actually the companion piece to a monthly club night in Birmingham. The night is all about playing music with female vocalists, mostly indie rock and pop, but they’ll play pretty much anything as long as it’s got a girl singing (and yes, it existed before the one in Phonogram). They were the official after party of the Birmingham Zine Festival last month, and I had a good time dancing and drinking and listening to music and talking to other people.

And then came the song I requested be played. The song I asked about in advance. The song I had to bring my own copy of. The song that utterly cleared the dance floor and made me owe ATTA girl something. This song:



That’s Tatu, the Russian faux-lesbians, singing about how they are in love with a robot. None of you appreciate their musical genius.

But you didn't come to this blog to listen to Russian pop music, so how about the actual zine? What’s in it? Well it’s actually filled with lots of neat stuff, so I would have given it a good review anyway! There are pieces on feminism (and how it can be defined personally), the Guerrilla Girls art movement, roller derby, being mixed raced and non- heteronormative, abusing authority, a cake recipe, a DIY bit, a crossword, and lots of stuff about bands and shows, including a comic about the Indietracks festival (it is a zine promoting a music event after all!). That overly long sentence should tell you that there’s a lot of stuff in here, and it’s pretty much all worth reading!

The next ATTA girl is this Saturday night! How exciting! You should go! (If only because of the awesome poster.) It is Halloween/fancy dress themed too and that makes me kind of sad that I won’t be there as I’ve had fun both times I’ve gone. If you get the opportunity you should check it out. They’ll have zines and vegan cake, and if you request Tatu they probably won’t glare at you.

Loserdom #19

By lots of people!
loserdomzine.com

I always think it's fun to read travel stories about places you've been or lived. You get to critque what the author did: "Why didn't they go there? Of course that's awesome! Hah, you fool, you should have known better." and wonder if you ever walked passed them when you were in approximately the same place.

So it was with some joy that I opened up this issue of a (quite thick) Irish punk zine to discover an account of a trip to Vancouver that one of the authors went on a few years ago. I was a little disappointed that it didn't mention more places I had been to (or even exciting new places I hadn't heard of), but I was at least vindicated in my belief that the thrift stores there are a billion times better than the ones over here. If only the creators had a copy of my zine guide to Vancouver though!

Also included here is an article on urban foxes, a good interview with someone who works for the Irish Refugee Council (a group that helps refugees arriving in Ireland, as opposed to helping Irish people become refugees), a comic about how awesome cycling is, and the standard band interviews and zine reviews.

Still, there's a lot of good content here, and it's presented in an attractive package featuring a lino-printed cover!

Tales From The First 5 Years

By The London Zine Symposium
www.lasthours.org.uk

"This isn't a zine!" the voices in my head loudly proclaim. "It has a spine! And we all know how spineless zines are."

But the introduction says that it's a zine, and I'm guessing they just ended up with more content than they anticipated and so got it bound into a nice little book, instead of something with staples. Oh no! I shall review it anyway.

This is a collection of writings, reminiscences, and ephemera from the first five London Zine Symposiums, created to be sold at the 6th symposium earlier this year.

There's some pretty neat stuff in here, and it's probably worth reading even if you've never been to the London Symposium, as the information about how the event was started could be incredibly useful to anyone who is interested in creating their own event (hint: just say you're going to do it, and rope other people in to helping you).

Edd Baldry (who does Hey Monkey Riot), writes a text introduction, then does a much longer (22 pages!) comic about how the event was started, and how it's grown over the years. The comic's setting is kind of bizarre, in that it's an alternative reality talk show. What I find weirdest about this is that Baldry has choosen to draw his characters just sitting and talking about previous events instead of showing them to us. I'll admit that the comic is probably more interesting to read than a just straight up account of what happened, but I really do feel that comics should try to stick to the "show don't tell" rule. Mentioning that the first several symposiums happened in squats, then just drawing people sitting around in a TV studio seems kind of strange. There is one actual event shown as it happened, and it's much more interesting in that you can actually see what was going on.

After that we have reprints of the posters from the first five years, and lists of who showed up to table, and what workshops and other events happened. It's neat to see how the event grew and changed over several years, and could be a useful resource for someone looking for people to invite or things to do at their own event.

Then there's a number of pieces from other people about their own memories of the previous symposiums. Some of these are informal emails, others are comics, and Isy Morgenmuffel's includes a falafel recipe! Yum!

Overall it's interesting to see what people remember from past years, and to try and figure out how the event will grow and change in the future. Hopefully it'll continue for another five years!

Adventures in Menstruating #5

By Chella Quint
www.chartyourcycle.co.uk

For whatever reason I'm having a hard time starting this review. Adventures in Menstruating is a well put together zine about, well, it says what it's about on the cover. You can probably guess from the cover if you're interested in this thing or not.

There's a page where Alison Bechdel shows off her reversable shirt (good for hot flashes!), a page on wanting to go back in time and tell '50s advertising execs to create ads that are less demeaning, some fake ads, an interview with the cover model Kitten von Mew, a piece on the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, criticisms of modern adverts, a comic drawn by Sparky Taylor that had pretty cute art, some poetry I didn't really care much for, a fairly interesting piece on "friendly bacteria" yogurt and the way it's advertised (so much content about advertising!), and a couple of other things that are worth discussing a bit more.

The first is an excerpt from the novel Rose of No Man's Land by Michelle Tea. It features a couple of hitchhiking girls throwing a bloody tampon at a creepy boy who's offering them a ride. I showed this to two different girls, one of whom thought it was funny, the other thought it was really gross. I'm somewhere in the middle. I mean, yeah it's kind of funny, but at the same time it seems to create a double standard. I can't really imagine a piece of fiction about boys throwing any sort of bodily fluid at a girl presented in the same positive light. I mean, I can only imagine it turning out as "boys are immature jackasses/incredibly sexist". Do you think otherwise? Let's discuss!

Then there's a piece by Dr. Brooke Magnanti/Belle de Jour about oral sex when you're on your period. This piece make assumptions about guys I find kind of frustrating ("They even eat supermarket value sausages [...] they're not squeamish."), and then discusses proposes the idea of sex as a reward. Now, I know some people are into relationships were one person has power over the other, but I'm really more about equality and respect in relationships. I mean, some of the stuff here is fine and good, but other bits makes me wonder what the response would be if it was about guy's trying to get anal sex or something. ie. I'll go down on you if you let me fuck in you in the ass. Hmm...

Surely having an understanding partner is better than trying to trick them into doing something they don't want to do. Yes, we should discuss sex, menstruation, and so forth, but I guess I'm not really down with the whole style of this zine. Still, to each their own, and lots of people do seem to like this sort of thing.

There's just two things I'd really wish the creator(s?) of this zine would do. The first is learn to use paragraphs, they are awesome. There are entire pages here that are just blocks of text. This is hard to read!

The second is also to do with the text, as some of the fonts used are hideous. Belle de Jour's piece is difficult to read because it uses a font that is terrible for articles. Headlines? Other short pieces of text? Yeah, fine, but urgh, it looks awful here.