Teeth

By Elliot Baggott
surrealistetiquette.blogspot.com

So this is by far the most delayed review ever. I've had the images uploaded for months. Sigh.

This comic opens with two awesome pages that combine words written by Charlotte Bronte about the Crystal Palace, with drawings of Westfield shopping centre in London. It's a pretty neat juxtaposition of ideas, and I like how it compares things that were incredibly amazing with things that we now consider just common place. One hundred years ago people couldn't imagine wearing clothes made in another continent.

After this, we move into the main story, which is a short piece about the daydreams of a guy who works in a teeth whitening place in a mall. The whole piece has expository narration boxes that mirror the style that Bronte uses at the beginning of the piece. These help to make the idea of teeth whitening seem amazing and terrifying at the same time.

In addition to traditional panel based art work, we're also exposed to diagrams, anecdotes presented as asides, maps, and some pretty rad lettering. The story itself isn't that amazing or anything (dude works in a job he doesn't like, thinks about what he'd rather do), but the way it's put together is pretty fun and uses some innovative techniques.

A Conversational History: Roberts Street Social Centre

By Caleb, Nicole, Jyelle, and a whole bunch of other people
www.robertsstreet.org

The major reason as to why this site hasn't been that updated over the summer is that I moved to Halifax and developed a social life. I've also spent a lot of time volunteering at the Roberts Street Social Centre and the Anchor Archive Zine Library contained within it.

This isn't to say I haven't been writing things. I continued writing my column for The Beat until this month, I've made a couple of zines (mostly at a 24 hour zine challenge, more info soon!), and have also spent a lot of time updating the website, facebook page, and email announcements list for Roberts Street.

So it is with a fair amount of bias that I approach this zine.

The Roberts Street Social Centre is a space in a former house that houses a zine library, the People's Photocopier, a screen printing co-operative, a meeting space, and more! It's been around for about six years, and this zine (which was about a year in the making it seems) is mostly a transcript of a dinner conversation (from 2009?) between eleven (I think) people involved in the space, and their memories of how the space began, and how it's grown and evolved since then.

There's also an interview with the people that set up the website and online zine catalogue (really interesting to me, but possibly boring to everyone else), an interview with the owner of the house who we rent from (more interesting than it might seem), and flyers and posters advertising events from the beginning of the space.

As someone (heavily?) involved in the space, I find this all really interesting, but I'm not sure how interesting it would be to someone who has never visited. There are some problems (all of the pieces just seem to stop, with no real ending or conclusion), and there's some information that I would have liked to have seen included (why start a zine library at all?), but overall I think it's a really awesome zine, and the style of it (while a nightmare to transcribe I'm sure), is one that allows a lot of different people to tell their memories and opinions in an organic way.

Child of the Atom

By David Blandy and Inko

Just before I left the UK I happened upon an art gallery showing a kind of neat exhibition. It featured action figures, comic books, a video game, and several video pieces all about the creator, David Blandy. Not that Blandy created all the stuff himself, rather he had hired other people to draw the comics (and maybe make the other stuff?) based upon his ideas.

It was a kind of neat idea, and the reverse of the art pieces I've seen that try to take a fictional character and make them real.

This comic is about Hiroshima, and if you'll allow me a brief moment I will tell you about my time there, as at this point I don't think I'm ever going to make a zine about that trip. I visited Japan in 2007 after living and traveling around Asia for most of the previous two years. I did the normal geeky stuff in Japan: went to Harajuku, went to the science museum, went to the Ghibli museum, looked at the homeless people's cardboard dwellings, hitchhiked on buses of old people (okay, so maybe my trip wasn't always normal).

And then I got to Hiroshima, which in many ways was my favourite city in Japan. There was a rad tram system, the food was good, there were art galleries, the people were friendly, and it just seemed nice. Except that you never knew when you would turn the corner and uncover a memorial to the people that died because of the nuclear explosion.

I cried looking at the monuments and museums. I cried reading Barefoot Gen (a really good, if brutal, comic you should read) in a library. I cried because to so many people this was just another tourist attraction to be bussed to. I cried because I don't know how the war could have ended with less loss of life. I cried because I remembered how the Japanese had kept their prisoners of war in Sandakan a few months before. I cried when I saw the paper cranes.

All of this is to say that I don't really know how to review a comic like this. The wordless comic and images of Hiroshima conjure up a lot of memories for me, but I have no idea what someone who hasn't been to these places will take from it.

One thing that is interesting, and the reason Blandy created this comic, is that he and his family sort of feel they owe their lives to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Blandy's grandfather was in a Japanese POW camp and believed that if the war hadn't ended the way it did, he wouldn't have survived. Which is something to think about at any rate.

Carnet D'un Sauvage

By Nye Wright

I love traveling, I love writing about my own trips, and I love reading about other people's trips too. If it's somewhere I've never been to, I get to live vicariously through them; if it's somewhere I have been to, I get to compare what they did to what I did, wonder why they didn't go to that awesome place I found, and feel dumb for not doing that awesome thing I didn't even know about.

This zine takes the form of a sketchbook that Wright made during a trip to Europe. He tries to draw something every day, and in the margins writes about what he's been up to. It's a format that allows him to show the people he met, the different types of architecture that he saw, the food he ate, and other random things.

Wright's art certainly manages to capture snippets of what he experienced, and I enjoyed the drawing of him exhausted from traveling (after only a few weeks, the amateur!). However, the text is considerably weaker. Some of his lettering is really nice, and I enjoyed the titles that he did, but the longer pieces of text are harder to read.

The text also suffers from it not being a complete account of what happened, so the reader isn't sure of everything that's going on in the trip or why certain things occur. There's also some unfortunate xenophobia and general weirdness stemming from Wright being an American. However, he does at least point out these faults in himself, so it's not that distasteful.

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.

The History of Irish Comics Part 1: Before the 20th Century

By Patrick Brown
paddybrown.co.uk

You know what? I love learning about things that happened in the past. Seriously, I have a history degree, read stuff (wikipedia...) all the time, and enjoy discovering about people and events from the past. I also love comics (and wrote my final history paper on the evolution of Canadian comics), so I was excited to pick up this volume that claims to cover 19th century Irish comics.

Of course, my first disappointment was finding out that there really weren't any Irish comics in the 18th and 19th centuries. This shouldn't have surprised me as there weren't really any comics anywhere until the early 20th century. Instead what's we're presented with is a fairly well researched (there's a reference section with actual books listed!) piece on Irish political cartooning.

While what's here is interesting, I think it definitely benefits from already having some knowledge of Irish (and British) politics during the time covered (which I guess everyone in those countries got in school?). Without context as to why the cartoons were created and who they were about it can be a challenge to figure out why some of them are funny.

Despite this, the several pages of reprinted political cartoons are pretty rad. It's interesting to see the different styles that were used to create these pieces, and I would have enjoyed more discussion of the actual art styles used by the artists. I'm guessing that information might be a bit hard to come by unless you're willing to read piles of old political magazines and figure out who inspired who.

Overallit's a pretty neat little zine, and my only real complaint is that the work coverd isn't what I would define as "comics". Brown does delve into defining the concept in his introduction, but while he has decided that political cartoons count, I'm pretty much of the opinion that there have to be at least two images in a sequence in order to constitute as a comic. However, as an intro to 19th century Irish political cartoons? It does its job fine, and I'll have to check out part 2 for when Brown (presumably) gets around to some actual comics.

Moments of Struggle

An Illustrated Introduction to Some Anarchist History
By Isy Morgenmuffel
www.morgenmuffel.co.uk

I usually really dig Isy’s zines, but this one felt kind of lacking. It’s broken up so that each page talks about one specific event/time period in history and how it ties into anarchism. Except that I felt one page wasn’t enough to even define the terms Isy wanted to use, let alone talk about time periods that sometimes went on for hundreds of years.

So while there is some interesting information here, I also feel there’s some misrepresentation (can a society really be anarchist if it survives solely by preying on other groups?). I guess I really want Isy to just pick one particular era (like the Spanish civil war) and do a zine just about that. I’d definitely want to read it if she did.

(I just finished making another recipe from Isy’s cookbook Another Dinner is Possible. It was a peanut chilli, and turned out really well! Go buy that instead.)

Odd Ends #2

By Rio

This is a collection of comics originally published in a number of different places, plus a new comic that acts as a table of contents (comics can be anything!).

The comic I liked best was the Nasrudin comic. Hurray Nasrudin! I don’t know why but I really like these comics about an old dude and his donkey giving out folk wisdom. They’re cute.

The longest piece in here is an adaptation of Young Goodman Brown, a story I’m not really familiar with. Unfortunately I didn’t really dig this comic as I didn’t really understand what was going on in it. I suppose if I knew the story it would make more sense.

However, there are some pretty good comics about being gay and of Middle Eastern descent, and dinosaurs! I like dinosaurs.

Portland, Oregon Hip Hop: Four Essays on Style and Place

Portland, Oregon Hip Hop: Four Essays on Style and Place
By Martha Grover
PO Box 14871
Portland, OR
97293, USA

This fantastic zine takes a look at each of the four elements of hip hop (graffiti, break dancing, deejaying and emceeing) and how they’re represented in Portland.

Grover’s well written essays discuss how each of these elements exists in “one of the whitest major cities in the [USA]”, and how those involved in the scene there struggle with “keeping it real”. Through interviews, explorations, and memories Grover tracks how hip hop culture has grown, and in some cases thrived, in her city.

The first piece, on graffiti, originally appeared in “The Raven Chronicles” (whatever that is), and is presumably the inspiration for Grover to go out and find out about the other parts of hiphop. She talks with graffiti artists and discusses the idea of graffiti as a type of hidden conversation between multiple parties. She gains, and communicates, an understanding of tagging that I had never comprehended before (I love graffiti, but have never gotten the quick tags people put up). Plus she wanders around an abandoned building. Awesome.

The next piece focuses on break dancing, or b-boying, and continues in the same format. She goes on a trip with a long time break dancer, who has played an influential role in getting Portland on international break dancing maps, to tour the many practice locations his crew have gotten kicked out of, interspacing it with information gained from interviews and research.

She discusses the idea of break-dancing as an incredible technical thing where slight variations and difficult moves can only be appreciated by people who know what’s going on and breakdance themselves. (I experienced this last summer when I saw a battle in San Francisco. Some of the other people watching would ooooh and aaaah over things that didn’t look that impressive, but were presumably difficult to pull off.)

The other two pieces are similar: she interviews people who are involved in different parts of the scene and tries to understand why they have committed their lives to them. I won’t go into them too much here, as otherwise I will just go on forever.

Near the end Grover asks questions that I, a similar white hip hop fan, cannot answer: why do we (white people) listen to, and connect with, white rappers like Aesop Rock and Sage Francis while ignoring tracks by black musicians? By asking this question I feel she disregards the many, many white people who do embrace black music (look at the music charts to see), but she was probably thinking of the hipster/indie/alternative people who don’t listen to pop music.

My only complaints are fairly minor, there’s some typographical and punctuation errors that only stand out because the rest of the package looks so good, a few photos, especially in the graffiti section, would have been nice, and the piece on emceeing doesn’t go quite as in depth as I would have liked. But as Grover admits that in the piece I can’t really complain.

This zine is well worth checking out if you have any interest in hip hop or even subcultures in general. You might even discover some new artists to check out, I did.

(Look! An interview I did with a break dancer in Thailand. Seemingly one of the only of my print journalism pieces that's still online.)

Nasrudin

Nasrudin
By Tim Batiuk
www.movedancecreate.com

Nasrudin was a real historical figure (maybe) who lived in the thirteenth century (probably) in what is now Turkey (possibly). Since then he’s become legendary figure, famous around the world, with thousands of stories being attributed to his life.

So of course I’ve never heard of him before.

The stories about Nasrudin are usually told as a satirical form of folk wisdom style, comedic but with a moral. Not all of the stories are long, and many of them are quite short, more like anecdotes then full on fables. In them Nasrudin pokes fun at people, frequently giving a voice to rebellious feelings people held against the ruling class, but the stories also tell how you should live your life in a better way.

In this comic Batiuk combines a number of different tales about Nasrudin into one continuous narrative. Several of the pages could work entirely by themselves as one page strips, but the way in which Batiuk weaves the different stories together is quite effective.

Nasrudin walks around his village telling stories and making fun of the people that he meets. However, as he is an old, respected man, and his comments are usually both true and told in a light hearted matter, he generally gets away with it.

I’m reminded a little bit of The Rabbi’s Cat by Joann Sfaar (though probably just by being a humourous comic set in desert with a cat), and perhaps more so by Groo the Wanderer by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier. This second comparison may seem a little weird, but Nasrudin is about a man who wanders around saying things that other people don’t want to hear (though in his case for educational purposes instead of Groo’s stupidity), and is usually accompanied by an animal who can think (a donkey for Nasrudin, a dog for Groo). If Nasrudin got into a fight and killed everyone by the end of the issue they’d be more or less the same character. (Or maybe I just have read any Groo comics recently.)


Batiuk says that he had intended on painting this comic, but because of time constraints wasn’t able to. He asks people if they’d like to see a painted version in the future and I’m not sure. I have no idea what a painted version would look like, but I think the art here does its job in presenting the story. It’s not super flashy, but Batiuk’s grasp of facial expressions and body language helps to get the various characters personalities across to the reader. However, I’m not as keen on his hand drawn panel borders.

Anyway, it’s good stuff, and well worth picking up.

Out of Control #4.3

Out of Control #4.3 - A Journal of Abiotic Vampirism
By David Drexler
www.azothdesign.com
Quarter sized.

The three short pieces in this zine all focus on old technology, retro-futurism, and the idea of the future, all topics I’m interested in.

The second essay raises the idea that our vision of the future is firmly based on what exists in the present, just more so. Drexler says that when we look at images of the future from the past we are “seeing what things would have looked like if 1962 had gone on for 100 years without changing, just getting MORE 1962.”

Drexler mentions that he’s travelled to several capitols of former British colonies, like Cairo and Calcutta, and that the aesthetics seen on signs and packaging there seem to be echoing that which existed fifty years ago, ignoring later developments. I can’t say for sure whether that is true or not, and wish there were some photographic examples to illustrate this point.

The other two pieces go into other ideas about the future, what it means to us, and why we care. All three are written using a style and word choice that seems somewhat unusual. Drexler seems far happier using less common words if at all possible. He doesn’t “go up” stairs, he “ascends” them, he was “puerile” not “childish”, things were “desiccated” not “dried”, and on and on. But rather than taking you out of the writings, they seem to fit in with writing about technology and ideas from the past, creating an almost spooky feel to some of the descriptions.

When Drexler writes:

“The protracted gloamings of aesthetic senility, deep-layered coatings of dust, forlorn, forgotten, forbidden, covered up in dead leaves, coruscated encrustations, slyly hinting dim visions of futures that never were, the last legions of the lost are my real loves, the truest and darkest lusts of my being.”

It’s like he’s about to summon up some horrible Cthuloid-inspired, technological monster. (And that's something else I'd like to see him write about!)

Interspaced with the text pieces are loads of awesome “futuristic” images from the past: Crazy cities, rocket ships, space girls, mummies using lasers, pulp science fiction covers, and more. I love all that stuff, and really want to know where that mummy drawing is from. Now I need to go find my retro-futurism art book, and maybe write some pulp science fiction stories.

Russia, Georgia and South Ossetia

Russia, Georgia, and South Ossetia: A Geopolitical Picture Book for the Perplexed
By Maria
maria-sputnik.livejournal.com
One dollar, half sized.

This was a pretty awesome zine, as I have a total hard-on for Russia and all those former soviet places (damn useless degree). It attempts to give background information on Georgia, and why on earth Russia went to war with it (a hint, it involves something from underground that is crucial to the world’s economy).

It starts with historical information on the country, the various groups of people that live there, their cultures, and conflicts that exist between them. Then it gets into information on Gazprom, the massive Russian natural gas company that sells gas to large parts of both eastern and western Europe.

There’s politics, dirty dealing, and black mail. Thrilling stuff! And it’s all illustrated by photos, maps, and diagrams. There’s also a section on further reading! Exciting, maybe I will check some out.

I’m always up for reading more about what a horrible and corrupt place Russia is, and this zine totally scratched that itch for me. It’s worth checking out if you have similar interests.

Anarchy and Alcohol

Anarchy and Alcohol
By CrimethInc
www.crimethinc.com
Half sized.

This is some pretty heavy stuff. The two essays* within are, more or less, on the dangers of alcohol, and how it is destroying both the punk scene and society.

Punk and alcohol have a history. The stereotypical punk is probably blitzed out of his (or her) mind on the cheapest alcohol around, and throwing bottles at people. And while some of them are, you could say the same about any sub group of people. Plus there’s the straight edgers (no drugs, no drink), who is a significant part of the punk scene in some cities.**

I think it’s important for zines on topics like this to exist. For many people alcohol is a problem, and creating dialogues within communities where it is frequently abused is important. When the major programs that exist for dealing with addiction are based around religion, the need for alternatives is incredibly important.

Despite all this, the first essay seems kind of crazy until the postscript where it says that it was written from an extreme “no alcohol ever” position to hopefully create acceptance of a “moderate” position somewhere between "no alcohol" and "alcohol alwa"ys. Viewed as such it’s a far more reasonable piece of writing; the writer doesn't expect people to do what they say in the piece, in fact they come right out and say that it’s okay to drink (and be drunk).

Without that disclaimer it’s somewhat hard for anyone who drinks alcohol in moderation (though I suppose even alcoholics generally don’t think they drink too much) to take it seriously. The idea that all anarchists are drunken louts who never get anything done is hard to take serious because, well, I know some who aren’t. And no, they’re not drunken louts who get things done, or sober people who get nothing done either.

The second essay is written from an anarcho-primitivist viewpoint, and while I found the history of brewing and alcohol it contained interesting and worth reading, even if you have absolutely no intention of changing your alcohol consumption (they drank how much beer in the olden days? Woah), I really have to take issue with one point.

The piece claims to be a case for straight edge, yet my understanding of that philosophy is that it is against all forms of recreational drugs, not just those created by capitalism. Claiming that hunter gatherers didn’t drink alcohol, and thus were free from outside affections, is just, um, lies. There are many drugs that occur naturally and require no preparation to be consumed, and can cause an alteration of the mind. To ignore these, and the idea that our ancestors didn’t do them, seems to be ignoring a fairly major fact.

Still, over all this is worth reading, as it contains thought provoking material, interesting history, and it looks pretty nice.

*And essays they are, the only thing really differentiating them from university papers are a lack of footnotes. Though I sort of wish they had footnotes, or at least some references for further reading.

**I think there’s a really interesting documentary to be made about the global straight edge movement. I’ve had straight edge friends who have come from different cultures and it’s interesting to see how in some places it's really tied to religion (in Malaysia some of my friends didn't like straight edgers because they were being "good Muslims"), while in other places it's not.

Another example is how in South Korea there are no illegal drugs available (or at least they are incredibly hard to acquire), so straight edge is just about the alcohol. However that can be a really big deal in a culture were drinking is so important.

Here’s links to an article about and an interview with a Korean straight edge band I wrote for a magazine.

The Burning of the Albion Mills

The Burning of the Albion Mills
www.past-tense.org.uk
Quarter sized.

The cover of this book is totally rad. I’m assuming the (wrap around) image is of the Alibion Mills burning, but even if it isn’t, it's still a good cover and I like the contrast with the title printed in red.

Alibion Mills was a massive flour mill started in the late 18th century that was equipped with the latest in steam engine grinding technology. Awesome! Except it didn’t go over so well with the people that worked in the mills. As in past tense, no longer had a job worked. Bread riots over prices, rumours of wheat flour being mixed with other things, general poverty. Not the most fun time to live.

The mills caught on fire somehow, and people rushed out to watch the fire burn. A common enough occurrence nowadays when we know the fire department will show up*, but when people lived in cramped houses and one fire could burn down a whole neighbourhood they generally tried to put fires out. Not so this time.

I enjoyed the many sources that were used to put this zine together. As well as historical information, there is information on songs and poems about the mills and the fire, and a variety of images showing the event. Unfortunately it could have used another read through/edit and a few layout nudges. Also it lacked some background information that would have made it more useful to people with less knowledge of 18th century (ie. what is a Luddite?).

Still, I’ll keep my eye out for other publications created by Past Tense.

*This is not as fun when you get home to discover the building everyone is crowded around is your own and fire fighters are kicking doors in.