About a Ghost Town Bike Tour

By Celeste
PO Box 226
Irvine, Alberta
T0J 1V0
ofcourseyoucan.tumblr.com

I love exploring abandoned buildings, though I really don't get many opportunities to do so. I did recently get to check out a weird fake building that is actually a train tunnel ventilation shaft, and that was pretty cool even if the building itself wasn't that interesting.

This zine is primarily photos of abandoned buildings that Celeste discovered while cycling through (I think) rural Manitoba. The black and white photos accurately capture specific moments of the decay of these buildings: rotting staircases, collapsed roofs, debris, remnants, and general signs of nature returning to where humans had "conquered".

Each photo has some typewritten text placed over it. Some of these pieces describe (in a rather poetic manner) the buildings the photos were taken in, and what was found inside them ("honeycombs, the hard work of bees, smashed."). While others just talk about the idea of ghost towns in general, and how civilization can change and move and retreat from where it once was. They also explain some of the various reasons why a rural community might wither and die after being successful.

The text describes the few encounters with actual people that happened on this trip, and how these encounters describe "what a town is like just before it becomes a ghost town". Or, in one case, how a family that doesn't speak English (but rather "something like german") gets annoyed when you visit the cemetery where their goats are grazing.

I liked this zine and its descriptions of crumbling buildings and towns, though I think you can find the same decay and abandonment in cities as well as rural areas. Despite the continued existence of certain buildings throughout human history, we seem to forsake things far more frequently than not.

Brighton Bike Fest 2012 Zine

brightonbikefest@gmail.com
brightonbikefest.org

Recently someone emailed me requesting a copy of the zine I made about cycling from Vancouver, BC, to Portland, Oregon. How exciting! Of course, then I read this zine about a bicycle festival and realized I can't even remember the last time I rode a bicycle. Maybe more than two years ago? Crazy!

This collaborative zine mostly functions as the program for the bike fest in question. There are pages with the schedule of events, text about the event itself, and maps showing where various things take place. However, there are also collages, art, reasons why riding a bicycle is awesome, and other stuff like that.

Bicycles are awesome, bicycles festivals are awesome, and zines are awesome, but I would have gotten more out of this one if I'd actually been able to go to the events it talked about.

The Breveteur: Cycling in and Around Halifax, Nova Scotia (Second Edition)

By Sarah Evans

This is a zine about possible bicycle trips you can take in the Halifax area. There are directions (that make no sense to me, as I haven’t lived here that long), blurry photocopied photos, hard to read hand writing and….

Wait, all of that makes it seem as though this zine is terrible! But it’s actually pretty neat. There are awesome fold out maps showing the routes you can take, brief snippets about historical sites of interest, anecdotes and stories about bicycle trips along these routes, and recommendations on various restaurants to go to.

Admittedly it doesn’t cover the sort of bicycle trips I’d be interested in, as most of these are all about just going for a ride in all that lovely nature (bleh) and most of the goals for people to cycle to are things like beaches (double bleh) and places to go swimming (blurgh).

As much as I love cycling, I love using it as a mode of transportation. I want to go from point A to point B, and whether Point B is five minutes away or hundreds of kilometres doesn’t really matter to me, but the idea of cycling a 100 km loop just to look at trees or whatever is entirely unappealing to me. (I’m not that big on “going for walks” either, although I enjoy walking and walk pretty much every I go.) I’d much rather have a guide to urban bicycle trips that could be planned. I know Halifax isn’t that big, but there must be some neat hidden things in the city that I haven’t seen!

So yeah, if you live in (or are planning to visit) Halifax, and want to go on some bicycle rides through the surrounding area you should check this out. I think I'm missing the second edition addition though. I'm not sure what's in that, or if it's just updates so owners of the first edition don't have to buy the whole thing again.

When You Can't Stand Yourself Walk Outside: Ten Foot Rule Journal Comix Spring 2007

By Shawn Granton
PO Box 14185
Portland, Oregon
97293-0185
USA

I’m pretty sure I’ve read this issue of Ten Foot Rule before, but if I did I didn’t review it for this site (or at least I can’t find it). So here we go!

Granton’s diary comics are about cycling, travelling, travelling to cycle, writing about cycling, and going to lots of zine and small press events. He seems to do a lot of things, and makes me feel kind of lame for spending too much time playing Mario Kart (that is part of why I haven’t been writing reviews of late…).

I really miss cycling. I haven’t owned a bicycle since I left Vancouver a few years ago, and the last time I remember spending any significant time (ie. more than an hour) on a bicycle was getting lost while trying to find an art gallery outside Copenhagen in 2010. Reading Granton’s comics make me miss cycling even more. Okay, so maybe I don’t want to be cycling at exactly this minute (it’s cold! And it is raining or snowing frequently), but the general idea of cycling appeals to me. Hopefully in the spring time.

I like how enthusiastic Granton is about cycling, and how he makes it a major part of his life. I also liked the comics about tabling at comic and zine events. That’s something I generally don’t like doing, but it’s interesting to read another person’s thoughts on the process.

One neat thing Granton does while traveling is write postcards to himself. These are included here and are nice little snapshots of what he was doing on the day he sent them. Plus it’s interesting to see what postcards he chooses to send. (Gosh, can you tell I’m a mail nerd?)

Daily diary comics are interesting in that you are able to see what is going on with someone’s life over a long period of time. However, there are lots of limitations with the format. The short nature (most that I’ve read are only three panels) mean that they give a skewed view of what’s going on in the person’s life. They can focus on the macro (“I went to work.”) or the micro (“I ate an orange.”) and it’s only by reading lots of them that you start getting into the head of the person creating them. When a major life event can take up the same amount of space as a day when you stayed in bed and played video games you start to see the limitations of the form. Yet, I still enjoy reading them and getting a peek into other people’s lives, no matter how limited it may be.

I like bicycle

By Shawn Granton

This tiny little not-quite-a-zine features art that Granton has done for various bicycle related things. There are poster and flyer illustrations, art from an ad, and art created for a bicycle shop.

I guess this is more of an advertisement for Granton's art, but I do like it (yay bicycles), and at least I learnt about the filmedbybike festival, even if I can't go and see it. Sigh, I miss having a bicycle.

Ten Foot Rule Winter 2009

By Shawn Granton
$2
PO Box 14185
Portland, Oregon
97293-0185
USA

Was Snakepit the first comic to do the autobio three panels a day thing? Or did it just popularize it to such an extent that everybody (including me, no you can’t see them) has done their own three panels a day journal comic?

Shawn claims that he’s the laziest “daily journal style cartoonist” around, but he’s managed to put out multiple issues of TFR, and some of his comics have more than three panels, so he can’t be that lazy (even if he does miss some days).

Shawn lives in Portland and cycles a lot. In this issue he goes up to Vancouver for a new year’s 2008/9 that was incredibly similar to the one I had in the same city (ie. it is too cold and snowy, where are all my friends?), and then goes down to California to visit San Francisco and LA where he has uncomfortable random encounters with people he hadn’t seen for years.

I always find it kind of weird reading about people who have been to the same places I’ve been to (I was in that shop! I took that same train!), and this is no different. I’ve been to Portland and San Francisco, and I’ve done some of the same things Granton has done (the critical mass bicycle ride in SF). Still, I think it’s nice to read about that stuff, and I fully support anyone who likes bicycles as much as Granton does. Hurray bicycles!



(I wish the co-op in my town sold any type of tofu at all.)

Urban Adventure League Cycle Touring Primer

By Shawn Granton and others
urbanadventureleague. blogspot.com
PO Box 14185
Portland, OR
97293-0185
USA

Last summer I went on a pretty big bicycle trip from Vancouver in Canada down to Portland in Oregon for the zine symposium there (plus a side trip to Victoria). I made a zine about it.

If you read my zine you will discover that I was one of the least prepared cyclists ever and really shouldn’t have gone on such a trip. Like incredibly so. But I survived, had a good time, and met some awesome people. Part of the reason it went alright was thanks to Shawn emailing me some information on the best route I could take. I never actually met Shawn in Portland (or if I did neither of us realized), which I now regret.

Anyway, this is a zine packed full of all the information you need to go on a bicycle trip: what to bring, where to go, how to put a bicycle on a train (I wish I’d had more info on this), and how to go winter camping while on a bicycle (I hope I will never use this). Well worth checking out. I’m sure the Urban Adventure League is too! I wish I’d gotten to go on one of the midnight bike rides in Vancouver, or any of the bicycle events in Portland, but I always forgot about them until too late. Drat.