Cat Week: The Ailurophile

sabba.khan@gmail.com

A few years ago I was walking around Vancouver with some friends. We saw a bunch of people standing outside a shop that had a sign saying “Klack Klack Empire” (or something similar). We walked over to investigate and discovered a lolcat art show.

We were kind of blown away by this. Paintings of lolcats. Wow. How had nobody thought of this? How had this not made it onto the internet yet? The paintings themselves were pretty much just copies of lolcat pictures from the internet. They weren’t inventing new poses or hilarious catspeak quotes.

So what do cats have to do with this zine (which features a fancy sewn binding!) Well, it’s drawings of cats. Some of them are fairly realistic normal cats. Some of them are ridiculous (though awesome, check out the pirate cat!). Some of them are cute, but none of them are hilarious or anything like that. Still, cats are pretty rad. I mean, I did just devote a week to zines (vaguely) about them.

Cat Week: Unicorns + Werewolves/Tubetastic

By Lizz Lunney
www.lizzlizz.com

Catweek! It continues despite the fact that this comic features absolutely no cats whatsoever. It’s even a flip zine (which I love) and so I have failed twicely in order to find a comic with a cat in it (I mean, I just went to a comic event and failed to get any, I am clearly incompetent). Why not stop cat week? Because I still have more non-comic zines featuring cats to talk about. It will never end.

Unicorns + Werewolves is the reason I picked this up, and it deals with what happens when a unicorn and a werewolf fall in love. Oh no! Opposites attract, rival families, babies of some new and unexplained species.

Though really, a cat is sort of a cross between a unicorn and a werewolf when you think about it (which is really all I have done this week). They’re both furry and like running around outside, unicorns care about their appearance, like indie music, and are adored by girls, while werewolves have claws, bite and pee on things, and are adored by girls. That pretty much spells out “cat” doesn’t it? I bet werewolves even sleep all the time. I guess the only major problems are that cats don’t transform into humans or have giant horns growing out of their foreheads. Theory ruined!

Um, anyway, on to how amazing tubes are. They have great fashion sense, they are very agreeable to other shapes (even if the shapes are a bit jealous of the tubes’ dancing abilities), and they sleep all the time. Hold on a second, I think that’s the missing element from earlier...

Cat Week: Sinead: Back to the Start

A Collaboration LitZine
salingpusa.com

The idea here isn’t a new one, one person starts a story then others continue it. However, as with most projects like this the result is incredibly uneven, with wide variations in quality and style, before it careens wildly out of control into nonsense.

The first two chapters involve characters who are broken, and I’m not at all interested in reading about a guy who repeatedly stalks girls (or the girl being stalked for that matter). Apparently the person writing the third chapter thought along similar lines as their piece ignores what had gone on before hand and instead features a house infested with cats. Now I do wonder if hundreds (!!!) of cats would even want to live together in an abandoned house, even if they were plotting to take over a town.

One of the later chapters doesn’t even try to tie in to what had gone on beforehand, and I sort of wondered if the person who wrote that chapter really understood what the whole project was about. However, by that point the story had degenerated into something rather lacking in a coherent plot and the remaining chapters degenerate even further.

I did like the idea that each chapter would be told from the point of view of a different person, but without a central idea to keep everyone on the same page, the result is inconsistent.

Also, staple your damn zines. I had to staple this myself to stop it falling apart while reading.

Cat Week: Cat Chops

By Steve Larder
www.stevelarder.co.uk

Steve gives us another comic-like-object. This one features a cat being rather rude to the narrator. My word!

To avoid this being the shortest review ever, I’ll mention that the cover seems to have been screen printed in some way. Rad.

Also here is a drawing of Rocket Cat that Steve drew.


I want that comic.

Cat Week: Krazy Katlady Cookbook Volume 2

A Vegan Cookbook (of food for humans)
By Heather

The introduction to this cooking zine says that it’s made up of recipes created after forgetting to go to the grocery store. As someone who has cooked a lot of food using limited supplies, I can totally understand this. However, it’s also pretty clear that this person lives somewhere that you can actually buy ingredients.

Like last time, I struggled to find a recipe from this that I could cook using what was available to me in the shops near my house. Tofu? Only silken. Nutritional yeast? No chance. At least this time it explains what Tony’s sauce is.

Sure there were a couple of things I could have made (corn bread! I even made it earlier this week), but generally they seemed to be things I wouldn’t like that much, or which I already had an awesome recipe for (peanut sauce nom nom nom).

However, there is content here other than recipes I cannot make. There are pictures of cats. Lots of pictures of cats. In fact I have to wonder if the creator of this cookbook really just wanted to showcase her cats. There are 22 photos of cats in this zine, plus two pages of bios! Apparently the owner has eight cats! That is a lot.

I generally prefer cookbooks that are filled with stories, so that even if you aren’t that interested in the recipes it’s worth reading. I’d have loved it if this zine interspaced the recipes with funny cat stories. As much as I like cooking, I sometimes want a funny cat story more than a recipe.

Portion of the profits are donated to no-kill animal shelters and animal rights organizations.

Cat Week: Cat Socks

By Steve Larder
www.stevelarder.co.uk

Despite Steve warning me that this comic wasn’t as good as Rum Lad I was definitely looking forward to it. However, he was right to warn me as it’s really nothing like Rum Lad at all.

It’s really more like a children’s story book. Each page has a picture of a cat and a simple sentence describing what’s going on. The drawings are cute and everything, but there’s a reason why I don’t read many children’s books.

I’m still looking forward to the Rum Lad/Morganmuffel split zine. That one better not disappoint!

Cat Week: Independent Kitten

By Shelly

IK is a perzine filled with the seemingly completely haphazard content you often expect from such projects: book reviews, collages, musings, and pictures of cats.

However, I do generally like those things, and, despite the randomness, there is some stuff in there I enjoyed.

Shelly lists her four favourite places in Portland, one of which is a Mexican place that I repeatedly failed to go to both times I was in the city. It will haunt me forever. Damn you taco truck and your delicious, ghostly, vegan food.

There’s also a brief essay on Shelly’s relationship with her grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s. The last line is really sad: “I also wonder if it makes things hard on her, if it would be easier to leave her routine and not have these strangers appearing and occasionally crying.”

I don’t know how I could deal with that, from either end.

Cat Week!

Aaaaaaah Cat Week!

Because I read three zines in a row that were about cats.

Because I knew that I had other zines about cats.

Because otherwise I wouldn't have gotten to put last year's Portland Zine Symposium program on the site and I already scanned it.

Because you love cats (I know you do, otherwise you wouldn't make zines about them).

Because I just bought a (£2) box of cat postcards and need to send them. And you want one don't you? Send me your address!

Because when you write six reviews in a day you start getting wierd ideas in your head.

Because they are so cute and furry.

Because it is cat week.