Radio CKDU 88.1 FM Colouring Book

ckdu.ca

CKDU is a campus radio station based out of Dalhousie here in Halifax.

(Aside: A friend and I used to have a radio show on the campus radio station when I was at university. It was called Meanwhile, Back at the Comic Book Shop and we talked about comics for an hour every week! That was over seven years ago, and I still miss it. I really need to start podcasting. If you're really bored you can go look at the archives in the blog I created for it, and read reviews to see what I thought of comics back in 2005. Oh, and apparently I wrote a bunch of stuff for it in 2009 after the show ended, I don't even remember that!)

Every year (I think) CKDU has a fundraising drive asking people to help support the station. A few years ago they put out this colouring book as part of the drive. It's not really a colouring book, but instead just some old show posters photocopied and bound into a book. I mean, I guess you can colour them in if you want.

Some of the posters in here are pretty awesome (there's a pretty neat one by Kyle Bridgett, who has a weird furry animal fetish erotica comic, you've been warned), and some are kind of boring. But it's also cool to look at them as a snapshot of shows that happened in Halifax in the past (one of them is for a show my friend's band played at!). The reproduction on some of the posters is weirdly terrible though, and it looks as though they might have been scanned and blown up from handbill size, which is too bad. I also wish there were more!

Probably the best part of this book is that it includes bios of the artists that did the show posters. That's awesome! Though at the same time I'm not entirely sure who drew what, so I can't really say who drew the poster below. I really like it though.

And The Evens are a pretty awesome band.

The Triumph of Our Tired Eyes #1

By Amber Dearest
 www.fight-boredom.com

(I'm in Montreal right now, so clearly it's a good time to review a zine by  Montreal resident. Though, admittedly, she did make this zine in Halifax.)

The Triumph of Our Tired Eyes is the new zine by Amber Dearest, who was the creator of the long running Culture Slut zine. Amber came to the Roberts Street Social Centre earlier this year and stayed in our shed for two weeks working on this zine and other projects.

A lot of perzines deal with depression and other mental health issues. These can be tough things to read about, and tougher still when you know the person who wrote them (should I have noticed? Was there anything I could have done?). In this zine Amber says that she never knows if she should tell people who ask how she really feels, and I think it's interesting how she won't tell her friends about her feelings, but she will write them down so that strangers can read them. Many other people (including me) have done the same thing, and it's kind of strange to think about why this happens.

Amber also writes about dealing with sobriety, writing letters, gentrification, punk femme aesthetics, and more.

This isn't my favourite zine by Amber; I feel that it's too slight to be a satisfying read after some of the other issues I've read. This is despite the fact that I know that this issue is shorter because it was made under a tight deadline as part of the residency program, and that reading more about her depression would have made me feel worse. Still, I look forward to reading the next issue when it's finished!

Harbour Water Fest 3

By Shannon

Every year the Roberts Street Social Centre runs a residency program. Artists and writers come to stay in our shed for a couple of weeks and make zines, art, or whatever they want really. It's a pretty awesome program and you should definitely apply next year!

Shannon was the first resident this year, and this is the zine they made during their stay. It's mostly about Harbour Water Fest, a local punk music festival put on in people's basements and living rooms. Shannon writes about her experiences in Halifax in general, and the shows she went to specifically, and she also got other people to write about their own memories of the event. Apparently there was a shadow puppet play!

Shannon also interviewed the lead organizer of the event, members of bands that played, and other people who went to shows. The interviews are pretty interesting to read,  and cover everything from small town living, to transphobia, to  trying to create more positive, inclusive, and safe spaces for others.

The final part of this zine are the many photographs that various people took at the shows in Harbour Water Fest, and most (or all?) of the posters people made to advertise the various events. I really like DIY posters, so seeing them all collected here was pretty neat.

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.

Halifax Comix Jam

I have to admit that I have an ulterior motive to reviewing these minicomics on this day. And that motive is that the next Halifax Comic Jam is happening tomorrow (January 31st), at 7pm, at the Roberts Street Social Centre (there’s more info on the facebook event page). You should come by and draw some comics! No talent is required.

Jam comics are comics that are made when each artist draws a panel, continuing the story (or not). They're kind of like exquisite corpses, except you can see what’s come before. The stories generally involved bizarre humour, often don’t make a lot of sense, and frequently just stop without any type of ending. They can still be funny though.

It’s strange reading several of these in a row, because I see that the same characters show up again and again as artists draw their own creations into the comics. I’m not sure who invented Hitler-Cat, Maraca-Squid (see above), or that weird little robot, but when they show up they tend to take over the comics.

One thing to remember about these things is that they are 18+, and I’m pretty glad that nobody saw me reading them at work.