Polite Fiction 2

By José-Luis Olivares

joseluisolivares.com

So I go travelling for two months and manage to keep to my three times a week schedule despite sleeping on people's floors and couches and not having consistent internet access.

Then I get back to Vancouver, and immediately start missing updates. In my defense I was sick, and had to move house, and blah blah blah. If you're reading a zine review site you know that the combination of zinester with blogger probably produces more excuses than anything else. ; )

Anyway, before I left on my trip I scanned every single zine in my review pile, and now there are only 13 left! (Of course I got _a lot_ on my travels, and also people sent some to me while I was travelling, including my brother who sent me a huge box of old ones, so this site won't be going away any time soon).

This is a pretty strange little comic. It's made up of several stories, all but one of which are in black and white. Some of the "stories" don't really have a narrative, such as the first one "Running Bird". It's about a weird bird headed person that runs a bunch. They just run past abstract backgrounds and some of the pages remind me more of pop art (sorta like Keith Haring). It's kind of interesting to see this style of comic, though I personally don't really care for it that much.

The second comic, "Tree-Island Birds", makes more "sense" in that things happen in reaction to other things and there's a narrative. A person washes up on a desert island, and has to deal with being stuck there with the birds who make it their home. It's actually kind of depressing, though I'm impressed by the amount of emotion Olivares gets out of the artwork considering the person has basically no facial features (see below).

There's also a dream comic, and a diary comic that is actually about diary comics and why some people make them. These use a different style than the other comics, and actually have text and dialogue. I think the diary comic was one of the more interesting of that style that I've read recently, though more on that soon.