Moon Hat 1400 Issue #8

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Sex wizard? I love that band! No wait, I mean I love collage, which fill this that zine to the brim. (And the reason there's nobody credited as creating this is that the editor is listed as "Dick Awesome", and there's no internet contact for anyone involved.) (Edit: I was emailed some websites! They're included above.)

So yeah, I like both making and looking at collages, and some of the ones in this zines are pretty good. They combine hand drawn content with comics, text, photos, other stuff from a variety of sources. I like the chaotic nature of the content, where a box of Kraft Dinner is on the same page as pixel-art hunters or buildings have giant floating eyes in the sky above them. I also like the redialogued comic ad for Dungeons and Dragons that had a character casting an "adventure spell" so they can skip the boring stuff and go straight to the end castle.

But, at the same time a lot of the content here seems kind of juvenile and mean spirited. And while some of the content and humour is fine, I don't think it's really necessary to have "Santa (TM) touched by butthole." or whatever else. Maybe I'm just over-sensitive.

025.431

By Ella Dawson, Zoe Forster, Caitlin Verney, and Ruth Collingwood

This is a group zine featuring a pretty wide variety of content. The first piece is half photos and half text and is about interesting/important graveyards that Dawson has been to. It's pretty cool, but the photos suffer from being reproduced by photocopier and having text pasted over them. Graveyards are rad!

The next piece is on big cats, and features a number of drawings of roaring cats, as well as a review/plot summary of a movie about one of those weird celebrity big cat performance people from the USA. Animal performances always make me kind of sad.

The longest text piece was a story about the trials and tribulations a woman went through in order to get a pet cat. It made me miss the cat I had back when my family lived in Canada. Biscuit, you were awesome.

There's also some found objects, collages, and other stuff. The whole thing seems sort of like a collection of found objects, and the library numbering of its subjects makes it seem like you're just wandering around a library reference section reading things at almost-random.

Control Freak #1

By Ox
smallideals.blogspot.com

I love collaging. Look, I even started another blog devoted (mostly) to making them. I also love looking at zines that are filled with lots of awesome collage work. They're inspiring! Look at all these new techniques I can use! Look at what they've done just be rearranging other people's work. Look at what they've managed to turn into art despite whatever boring crap it was originally!

Except (except) that I then look at my own stuff and think it's all crap! Well, not crap exactly, but considerably less exciting looking. I'm made hundreds of these things, but I'm not exactly experimenting very much with form am I? Well not until I read a zine like this and then for a little while after maybe my trading cards are a bit more interesting. Until I go back to cutting up old maps.

Anyway, Control Freak has lots of awesome collages, found objects, photographs from weird cameras, drawings, and more. It's an art zine that I really enjoyed. Now I want to look through it again.

Pobble eh Come? 2.5

By Emma
emmajanefalconer.moonfruit.com

According to Emma this zine is nothing but nonsense. There's no deeper meaning to any of the "art" that she's made by combining images and text, she just did it because she liked it/thought it was funny.

Though I guess sometimes art is like that: it doesn't matter if there's a deeper meaning as long as it looks cool or amuses you in some way. It's the old "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."

Emma combines different words and images to create surreal and nonsensical sentences ("You thread so many lions on to one man-sized babygro..."), recipes that I laughed out loud when reading ("Savoury Feta Cheesecake: 60g Edwardian pornographic dioramas, 1 multi-tenatacled treat..."), and other nonsense. I thought it was funny, and wished I knew where I could rent a singing monster. Lexington Road I suppose.

Oh for Olives #1

By Emma Jane Falconer

This is a tiny zine of collages that are, according to the inside cover, “not meant to be artistic”. There’s nothing new or incredibly originally about the collages done here, but it’s not like the ones I make are either. Still! I like these quite a lot.

Most pages use recontextualized (ooooh, big word), images with unrelated text over top to create ironic or surreal situations. We discover that to remove potatoes we must pour what seems to be the contents of a milk jug into someone’s ear, that dog yoga and pure Icelandic cod liver oil is what makes your tummy rumble, and that some people have awful beards. How horrid!

I think I need to get Emma to trade artist trading cards with me. I’d really like to have some things like this as originals.