Guts Power #3

By Paul Jon Milne

http://cargocollective.com/pauljonmilne

http://gristtothemilne.blogspot.com/

So yeah, who would have thought that grad school would get in the way of writing more or less anything? Plus I'm dead lazy. Anyway yesterday I scanned a whole bunch of zine covers. I would promise that more reviews or coming, but if you read zines you know that promises of more timely content are a dime a dozen. And I mean, it's only been three months since the last time I posted a review...

This is the third issue of a pretty strange science fiction comic set in Scotland in the "future" of 2003 about unemployed people in a world where time is a mental construct, and even horrible monsters have to deal with bureaucracy. 

In this issue the bizarre possessed sentient Segway thing that exists has become a giant mutant thing, and the thee main characters have to take a train to Deadinburgh in order to get replacement parts. Of course, as most of them are broke this is harder than it first seems. Plus they have to deal with monsters, government agents who follow them, and horrible tourist shop owners with Australian accents who keep trying to sell them novelty swords and kilts. I told you it was weird.

I read the other two issues ages ago, but this one seems more coherent in it's narrative, though perhaps that's just because I now have a better grounding in what type of world this comic is set in. I do wonder what people with no understanding of Scottish slang/accents would make of this, as I'm pretty sure some of the dialogue ("This guy's a richt heid-the-baw...") would be completely impenetrable to them.

Docs: The Journal of Microbiography Issue #2

PO Box 26183
Baltimore, MD
21210
USA

The purpose of Docs is kind of strange. It has a very strict format in that each contribution is four pages long: a title/index page that lists who/what is being written about, and three different "documents" that somehow relate to that entity. When I read the first issue of this zine I had absolutely no idea what was going on, as the "documents" can be anything (photos, screenshots, excerpts), don't have to be what was listed on the index, and the people described don't actually have to exist.

And so you get three pages of seemingly random stuff, that is considerably more interesting because you assume there must be some connection to it, that it must mean something, that it somehow describes someone who may or may not exist. You struggle through multiple pages of text with no paragraph breaks, you stare at pictures of leaves, you try to decipher a bad photocopy of a crumpled piece of paper, and all the time you wonder how these three things possibly describe the entirety of a person, or if that's even possible.

Huh, so apparently I am somewhat enamored with the idea behind this zine, even if the content for the most part doesn't totally grab me (even bizarre, mysterious poetry/lyrics don't interest me that much). My favourite section from this issue was about the world squirrel, who's lived from infinity to infinity, and whose documents consisted for an excerpt from a "truly evil" Swedish black metal band's biography, an interview with a restaurateur, and a screenshot of a .WAV audio file. Fantastic! Somehow this does describe a mythical squirrel.

Docs Issue 1

PO Box 26183
Baltimore, MD
21210
USA

I'll admit, I wasn't really sure what I was reading until I got to the final page of this zine and read the guidelines for people who want to submit to future issues. So what is Docs? Well, it's brief three topic/page biographies of people: living, dead, or entirely fictional.

And by "biography" I'm speaking pretty loosely, there are pictures, and sheet music, and weird stories, and to be honest I really didn't have any idea what I was reading the first time through. Where these true? They didn't really seem to be...

But then I hit the final "biography" in here (Hrtumt Slitte by F. L. Smith), and even if it still confused me to some extent, it read like the sort of collection of ephemera that I love and I didn't really care that I didn't really "get" the rest of the zine". Each page of Hrtumt Slitte is clearly part of a larger piece that does not exist. The table of contents (with footnote) seems to have no relation to the other pages. The first page is a description of Kid Kinney ("a loathsome creature") from someone who hates him. The second page is a series of TV show proposals that all finish with everything unraveling. But the final page was what clinched it for me. A description of someone exploring an abandoned building that features a hidden message amongst the text _and_ stops midway through a sentence with no resolution? That sounds like something that I'd write! (No wonder nobody reviews my zines...)

I'm not sure what the next issue of Docs will contain, but I hope it has more content like that final biography.

Oak Linden Issue #1

By Pat Barrett

patbarrett.com

You know, I don't usually talk about the cost of the things I review on this site, in large part because I either get them through trade or people send them to me for free. (They also pretty much all get given away, either to friends, to zine libraries, or to the #UBCnoox, in case you're thinking I'm sitting on a dragon-sized horde of zines.)

But this is a regular sized comic, with 24 pages (plus cover), and only 11 of those are in colour, for $6. I know that small print runs can be expensive, and I kind of doubt Barrett was making any/much money off of this, but at the same time I think creators should maybe think a bit more about the formats they're using.

Okay! But that's enough about prices (and holy shit, I've been writing a lot about stuff that isn't the actual content of zines recently), what's inside the comic? Well, as you might have surmised, the contents of this comic is made up of a number of different stories. There's a bizarre sort of pulp sci-fi Abraham Lincoln time travelling space hero comic that was kind of fun. It's retro in style and even uses the old weird dot style colouring that used to exist because of the way things were printed. My favourite part of this one was when Lincoln turned off his "audio receptors" while the villain (in the future) is talking to him because "no man may know his own destiny!".

The next comic is a sort of "behind the music" expose about a rapping robot. It's pretty fun, though I can't say that I enjoyed the colouring that much, and Barrett's characters all have this bizarre bendyness to them that I find kind of horrifying. The characters don't have elbows or knees, but instead seem to be able to stretch like Mr. Fantastic (or any of the many other stretchy characters, I personally like the Elongated Man). While this worked fine in the Lincoln comic, it just looks weird to me in the more realistic setting.

There's also a kind of depressing and creepy comic about a guy and his girlfriend (who also lack elbow joints), and the bizarre baseball-related nightmare of a guy who has a film projector for a head.  Overall I enjoyed three of the four comics in here, and I'm curious about seeing other work that Barrett creates (well, not if they're like that girlfriend comic).

Sunder

By Eroyn Franklin

eroynfranklin.com

So I've been reading a bunch of HP Lovecraft's stories recently so that I can run a Call of Cthulhu campaign. I'd never read them before as I'd heard they were...filled with ideas, but also racist and weirdly written. And they definitely are weirdly written, though I've yet to run into any of the super racist stuff I'd kind of been led to believe existed in his stories (that's supposed to be HP Lovecraft, the comic is the Planetary/Authority crossover). There's just the kind of casual background racism I sort of expect from early 20th century fiction. Despite that I am generally enjoying them, and it's kind of cool to finally read these stories after so much time reading things influenced by them. Plus I'm super excited to be running a game based (somehow) on the mythos.

So then I picked up this short zine that uses a word that wouldn't seem out of place in a Lovecraft piece as a title, and found the contents kind of creepy. The zine features illustrations of the author and text describing how they are feeling mentally and emotionally. Now, I'm pretty much entirely making up any connection between the two works, but when the text talks about "the space between the warp and weft", and the "absence that gives other things their shape", I'm more or less convinced it's describing the indescribable and unnameable worlds and creatures that exist in Lovecraft's work. The accompanying artwork is kind of creepy and reminds me of the flickering of dimensions and loss of self that exist in Lovecraftian fiction. 

But like I said, I'm making all this up as I'm in the middle of reading The Dunwich Horror. But I guess I liked the zine, even if the last page made me shudder.

Black Sea Sickness

By FJ XA (I think)

This is one of those zines that I thought looked really cool on first impression, but the more time I spent with it, the less I actually enjoyed it.

The cover seems really neat, using harsh blacks, with zipatone style shading (which I love!). The same style is continued inside, and at times it reminded me of art by Nikki Stu and Warwick Johnson Cadwell. (Both of whom I've utterly lost track of since moving back to Candada, dang.)

But while the art looks fine for all those huge solid blacks, any time it goes into more delicate linework a major problem arises. It's really fucking pixely and ugly. And not awesome pixel art, but just that the lines are incredibly jagged. I think the art work must have been scanned in at too low a resolution, as I can't really imagine the author wanting their work to look like this.

The art itself still looks pretty damn awesome when I look at it from a distance. It features monsters, magic, and some imagery that is kind of frightening (though I guess I find the idea of solid black tentacle-entities moving around scarier than other people might).

There's no real story to speak of, I mean, I guess things happen on some of the pages, but that's really all it is, things happening. There is no dialogue and what little text there is features the same style as the cover (which it took me about a million years before I realized said "Black Sea Sickness", and not just "Black Sickness", for whatever reason I just couldn't parse it).

While I find this an intriguing zine, I'm not sure if I could ever recommend it because of the problems with the art reproduction. I would be interested in seeing more work by the author, but a google search for the title just leads to a spam site trying to sell drugs.

Amazing vs Asshole

By Bernard Boulevard and Gordon Gordon
Chow Chow Productions
PO Box 20204
Seattle, WA
98102
USA

This is one of a series of really weird little zines. They're short, thankfully, as I'm not sure how much of these things I can read. (And yes, I do try to read every single word in every zine I review on this site. If I don't I generally mention it.)

So this is two sort of strangely written rants, one about how people overuse the word "amazing" making it meaningless (ie. towels aren't amazing, major events are), and the other about how some people are assholes, but real assholes can be awesome? Like I said, it's rather strange. And all accompanied by pictures of the aforementioned assholes, both people and the physical part.

I'm not really looking forward to reading the ohter one of this series that I have, but as this is apparently the third printing of this issue I am apparently somewhat alone in that.

Text Message Minicomic

By Dan Berry
www.flickr.com/groups/textmessagecomics/

People send ridiculous txt msgs, a visit to Texts From Last Night will teach you that. But people also send incredibly boring text messages: “What time will you arrive?” “Your dinner is getting cold.” “Can you get some milk please?” These are hardly pieces of dialogue that will get you excited about reading comics.

But what if cats are saying them? Instant hilarity! Or if it’s some ghosts threateningly asking someone what they want for dinner. Or a guy singing a song to a bear about how he should give him a ride to shops because his car is broken. Or monsters that eat hats! Then the comics become amazing.

Sure some of the comics Berry has drawn are just two people talking to each other, but even then Berry’s sort of weird looking people are fairly amusing, and the text messages degenerate into people talking about lazers and punching cats. Are these real text messages Berry has sent and received? If so those ones are far more interesting than mine (most recent: “I will be late tonight”).

It’s a super cute idea, so congrats to Warwick Johnson who apparently came up with it. I want to read his next!

Enter::view Enter:view: (stories)

By Zachary:Abstract
www.myspace.com/ratsuit

I really like how this zine looks. I love the bizarre art, the multicoloured pages, the random photocopies thrown in, the text switching from black on white to white on black, the found objects, the fact that parts of it look like a photocopy of a photocopy. For whatever reason, it all combines into one awesome whole.

The content is completely unintelligible.

Okay, so the found photocopy of a bunch of different keys and what they’re used for is intelligible, but the text in here? I have no idea what’s going on. And I know that’s the point, the cover (and other pages?) is put on upside down, text comes from different directions. It’s all supposed to be confusing, but most of the text doesn’t actually make any sense.

There are parts that seem like dream transcriptions, things ebb and flow like dreams, and everything is told from a first person stream of consciousness style. But at other times I have no fucking clue what the author intended other than “weird for weird’s sake”.

“There were no howler monkey machine guns in my pocket, no lazy paper bags in my purse at all. I had no candle lit creamer packets or dinosaurs falling out of my anus, no velocity raptors formed into plastic underwear. Oh, no.”

I mean what?

It’s not all this unintelligible, but reading it reminded me more of incredibly bizarre spam messages I’ve gotten than anything I’m actually meant to understand. I actually wondered if parts of this were written by a computer program that just spits out random words. Or if you could actually tell the difference between something written in this style and something a computer program could produce.

Still, if you’re into nonsensical, stream of consciousness zines check it out.