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.

Three Wishes

By Jonathan Eaton
thisis65.com

Three Wishes is about a genie that appears to grant Jonathan wishes after he rubs a "random shitty old lamp". There's a catch (of course there's a catch! Genies are jackasses), and the genie will only grant two of Jonathan's wishes. The third wish is one that the genie decides upon, and Jonathan must live with that decision forever.

Seeing nothing problematic with this deal whatsoever Jonathan wishes that he could play the banjo, then he wishes for a banjo, then the genie brings back three people from the dead and makes Jonathan deal with them. Those three are:

• "Wickedest man in the world" Aleister Crowley!
• Sucidial, misunderstood poet Sylvia Plath!
• Popcorn mastermind Orville Redenbacher! 

What would you do if these people suddenly showed up and you had to deal with them? The clear answer is "go camping", and so they go out to the woods, and to be honest I'm not sure how they're all supposed to fit into that tent that Eaton drew. They make lots of popcorn, get lost, encounter wild animals, deal with a kind of lame and contradictory ghost,  and encounter a popping corn bandit.

Overall it's pretty good, and there are definitely some funny bits but it also reads like something that was created a page at a time with no real plan or goal (though maybe I'm wrong). Things just kind of happen, and characters disappear for pages at a time, only for everything to stop, presumably when Eaton got bored. That's better than it getting dragged out forever if the creator has no interested, and I enjoyed reading what was here.

Corporate Ghost

By Mary Karaplis/Mei K

tiny-vices.com

I'm sure many of you have worked jobs you didn't enjoy. Whether they're customer service jobs where you sell stuff you don't care about, or office jobs where you do the same thing every day, or whatever it happens to be. It sucks! Especially when, as happens to the ghost main character in this story, you used to really enjoy your job (when it involved haunting grave yards and scaring people), but don't now that you've been reduced to a ghost consultant. Which seems awful!

You might remember from when I reviewed another of Karaplis' comics that she drew this sweet Spirit token for Magic the Gathering for me. Killer!

While this comic kind of makes me sad (I don't like it when people have to work jobs they hate), I do enjoy the artwork. Lots of adorable ghosts! Plus a terrifying one that is a huge boss ghost filled with tinier ghosts, kind of like a gelatinous cube.

Hope for the Future 7

By Simon Perrins and Andrew Livesey
www.hftf.co.uk

Reading this comic now is a little bit frustrating, as I saw the guys at various events in the UK, but never picked up their comics. I even read the first issue online, but didn't read any more. Why is this a problem? Because I really enjoyed this issue and want to read more, but am in the wrong country. I will just have to read all their comics online (well, at least it saves me some money).

One thing that's pretty neat is that about this comic is, despite the fact that it's issue seven and features a full page of small text recap, it's enjoyable without any prior knowledge of the characters other than "they're university students who keep getting into supernatural trouble". In this case they're traveling back in time to the far off and distant lands of the mid-90s. How horrible!

They're on the trail of a painting with some mysterious connection to something. We don't really know what it is, but the story's well written enough that it seems as though there will be a decent pay off at some point (though not necessarily in this issue).

The art by Andrew Livesey plays a large part in my enjoyment of the story. It reminds me of Andi Watson and maybe a bit of Steve Rolston. The characters are angular, pointy, and a bit blocky, but they're generally attractive, individualized, and the overall art features some nice toning. It really looks nothing like the cover at all! (Which is a good thing, as the cover didn't really grab me, partially because I didn't really like the movie it's based on...)

Also: there are monsters!

But ignoring my obsession with monsters (and ghosts), this is a supernatural adventure comedy that's well written and fun. I wish I'd started reading it sooner.



(Maybe not really representative of the general art, but a pretty rad page nonetheless. click to see it bigger.)

Show & Tell

By Andrew Waugh and Gary Bainbridge
thismeanswaugh.blogspot.com
unterweltcomics.blogspot.com

A split minicomic! How exciting! I really love the idea of these things where each person gets half the zine/minicomic and does there own stuff. It means your stuff gets shown to twice as many people! You should make one with me.

The one problem with these things is that there can be a dissonance between both sides, which is what happens here. Bainbridge's side has a story featuring some people sitting around in a pub talking about rape alarms, then a comic that makes no real sense to me at all. In comparison Waugh's side features a woman offering tea to a ghost that is in her house accidentally and some awesome drawings of monsters and things. I guess that is always the problem with anthologies, even if they are themed.



The first comic in Bainbridge's side is apparently a sequel to an earlier piece. It starts well, with a couple of pages featuring a nice arrangement of panels and a guy jumping around on top of buildings. Yay! Is he a superhero or something? I don't know, but I think it all works pretty well. However, it falls apart when it just becomes people hanging out in a bar and talking. I don't really think these work that well in short pieces. I mean, there's a bit of a flashback, but it's mostly just four pages of people's heads telling anecdotes to each other. I don't know who these characters are or why I should care about them. Ultimately I think this would have worked better as prose.

Bainbridge's second piece is just incomprehensible to me. Three pages of random close ups of liquor bottles and other things, while narration and speech bubbles say things like "Yes, fly, I chess came knife at for her sake." I have no idea what any of that means. At all.



Waugh's side of this comic is far more my sort of thing. The first story is a cute little one with a medium attempting to summon a spirit. She's successful, except that it ends up in the old lady's house next door. The ghost is unresponsive, and the old lady is more annoyed than anything else. I guess it's happened to her before. It is basically just several pages of the old lady talking to herself, but it manages to be funny and a bit sad at the end.

Waugh's second piece is the super awesome "Big things hiding behind small things" and makes this whole comic worth picking up. It's just pictures of big things (ogres, dinosaurs) "hiding" behind small things (lamps, shrubbery), but I love drawings of monsters, and the expressions of fear and awkwardness Waugh somehow manages to show in robots and man-eating plants is pretty impressive. There's also a wooly mammoth, which I somehow managed to not scan. You'll have to get the zine to see that.

The Gentleman Ghost

By Jack Fallows
jackfallows.com

You can probably tell from the cover, but just in case you can’t, this isn’t a story about the DC comics supervillain. (Who I think is pretty boss, despite knowing absolutely nothing about him. I’m not even sure I’ve read any comics that have featured him.)

Instead we have a comic about a different gentleman ghost! Clearly this is a huge subgenre of comics. I love stories about ghosts that just go about their days doing normal things despite being dead. The gentleman ghost has a shower, he goes to the shops, he reads the newspaper, and more! And that’s just the first comic! There’s also a version of the mummers play and a really dope one page (and 47 panel!) origin story that tells exactly how the Gentleman Ghost came to be.

It’s silly, but I like the way Fallows draws the ghost, his accessories, and the backgrounds. I would gladly read further adventures of this character. Even incredibly boring stories become exciting when they feature a posh ghost! The gentleman ghost goes to the beach! The gentleman makes some toast! The gentleman ghost does his laundry! The possibilities are endless.

Smoo #3

By Simon M.
smoo.tumblr.com

The cover to this issue of Smoo promises gorillas, Egyptian gods armed with ray guns, what appears to be a dwarven (dwarfen? My spellcheck is no help) warrior, and a giant monster releasing lots of ghosts. How exciting!

However, while all those things are featured in the comic, they’re not the focal point of a story. Instead Simon leads us through a tale of his anxiety and nervousness, something that many of us (or at least I) can relate to.

Simon’s story drifts in and out of fantasy imaginings, uses flashback interludes to help set the mood, and somehow manages to make a phone call seem interesting. The panels with the phone call feature tentacles of anxiety and swearing swishing around in the background, and appearing all over town, threatening Simon through the idea of what they represent. Simon’s nervousness is also represented in a horrible heartshaped monster that runs around screaming, presumably imitating the pounding of his heart at certain times.

The actual story that Simon tells isn’t that important (though it is a bit frightening just for the apparent randomness of it), what is important is the way he tells it. Simon’s panel layout is inventive and attractive. Panels overlap, are connected by tubes, use nonstandard borders, or sometimes don’t bother with borders at all.

I enjoy the random fantasy elements Simon has included in his story, but I think I would have enjoyed the comic even without them, as they way Simon lays out his pages is really nice and attractive. The interlude section is just landscape pictures, with big skies and telephone poles. But they’re well laid out and match the story that is being told in such a way that they help to put you in the same mindset Simon was in at the time.

I also enjoy the different lettering styles that Simon uses for the various sound effects and styles of speaking.

This isn’t a perfect comic, but I like the craft that Simon has brought to it, and examining the way he’s put it together. I am looking forward to reading more of his comics in the future.

Ghosts

By John Allison
www.scarygoround.com

I wasn't going to review this originally. "It's all glossy!" I proclaimed (to myself). "This wasn't made on a photocopier at all!"

But then John Allison was one of the exhibitor's at the Birmingham Zine Festival, which clearly means that he makes zines. Plus, he has had characters in his comic Scary Go Round create zines, and in the back of the most recent collection of that there were links to two you could download and print off yourself. I'll review those too, so this is really three reviews in one!

I've been reading (and enjoying) Scary Go Round (and Allison's new comic Bad Machinery) online for years, so I was excited when I managed to pick up Ghosts, a comic that is only available in print. It features many of the same characters as Scary Go Round did, but now in exciting black and white! (Or is it a very deep blue?)

However, I was kind if disappointed by the story included here. Allison's art is just as good as it usually is, though the lack of colour does detract to some extent, and I enjoyed the design of the ghost. However the story didn't really manage to grab me for some reason. I laughed at some bits, I found other bits amusing, the characters seemed to be themselves, yet it didn't click, and I cannot explain why.

The back of this comic also features two pages of (fake) letters concerning ghosts, (how to get rid of them, and how to get better ones to show up the neighbours), which are pretty funny, and a one page story by Maury Dennis which is basically just one big long slog until the last sentence punchline which is pretty amusing.

Still, Scary Go Round is really good and you should read it. A new story starts today!




One of the final storylines in Scary Go Round was about a fight between two high school students, one scrawny and pathetic with strangely shaped hair, the other bigger and stupider (as is usually the case in fights like this). Two of the other characters made a zine as a sort of event programme to sell at the fight, and Allison created it and offered it as a PDF download.

It's interesting to read a zine that is written so as to seem to be made by fictional characters. Allison has their voices down pretty well, and the low-tech feel here (typewriters and hand written corrections) looks pretty good. I do wonder where he got the photos he used to represent his characters. They look pretty much like how you'd expect them to. It's kind of creepy.

There are also some fight techniques listed, which include greasing yourself up and fighting naked ("Imagine a big old nudey raining blows down on you, isnt it a horrible thought?"), or getting a chimpanzee drunk, dressing it in your clothes and sending it off to fight for you.

Rounding out the zine there are some pretty awesome music reviews written in the style of another character. They describe Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" as "a Nazi scientist's idea of what the future of girl pop was going to sound like", and a Pink track as "written by a computer or someone who hates music." I kind of wish all music was reviewed like this.




Okay, so what's harder than creating a fake zine made by pretend teenagers? How about one made by pretend little kids? This one is supposed to be made by some characters in Allison's comic who are like eight or nine years old.

It is filled with spelling mistakes, stuff about British celebrity things I barely understand, and poorly drawn comics. I often wonder how comic artists intentionally draw badly, is it incredibly difficult for them to get things to look "just right"? Anyway, this is kind of amusing, possibly even if you haven't read the comics it's based on.

The only bad thing about these zines is that the PDFs they're available from are formatted so that each page is a full page! Terrible! I resized them down so that I could print them off in proper zine format, but it totally screwed up the quality as I was using jpgs and stuff. Oh well.

Smoo #2 1/2

By Simon M.
smoo.tumblr.com

This issue, according to the back cover, features "odds, sods and discarded ideas" and is filled with seemingly random pieces of art and short comics. It's kind of unfortunate, as I enjoyed the art, but the content seemed a bit light. Also: no skeleton doctors inside. Disastrous.

What we do have is an autobio comic about eating horrible food in a hotel room instead of going outside, some reminiscences from childhood and holidays, and a piece on guilt that has some amusing drawings of simon dressed in clothing from varous historical eras and an awesome picture of a judge that kind of reminded me of the Alice books for some reason.

There's also a reather strange piece where Simon's head is filled with either nothing or ghosts. Odd.

But still, I enjoyed this, the pieces with plots were enjoyable, and the art is really quite good. Simon draws a lot of lines in his artwork to give his pieces more details. Sometimes the lines are used in a way similar to grey-toning, creating shadow and depth, while at other times they add texture to the images. Also there's lots of drawings of cute ghosts, and a pretty rad robot. Congratulations all around.

Ouija Interview No. 4: Mack, Agatha, and Samantha

By Sarah Becan
www.jakze.com

More ghost stories! This one is pretty brutal and sad, and if you liked how fun and lighthearted the previous one I reviewed was then this one might not be for you.

A tale of murder, depression, and incest is brought to life through the three ghost characters introduced here. It's pretty brutal stuff and made me kind of sad to read it, because I know that things like this happen in real life and there's not really anything I can do about them. Boo.

The writing here is kind of strange and considerably less linear than the straight question and answer style of the previous issue I read. The ghosts respond with answers that don't really answer anything, repeat the same word over and over again, and I guess act more like what a spooky ouija board encounter is supposed to be like.

As for the art, Becan continues to draw really rad ghosts and gets a lot of expression and feeling out of their limited features. Plus this time she has three different ghosts to draw, and is able to have them interacting with each other a little.

Ouija Interview No 2: Chip

By Sarah Becan
www.jakze.com

Okay, I know I've been alternating between comic and noncomic reviews on the site, but now that I have a big stack of minicomics to read that's what you'll be getting for the next little while. Thankfully, this one is pretty awesome.

I know I've seen some of these before, but I'm not totally sure where, and for whatever reason I didn't buy them (unless they are secretly hiding in my "to read" pile, but that is hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers away).

I don't know if these are really the result of using a ouija board or not, but they sound fairly authentic as far as that thing goes (as in completely made up, but in the right format). Each page has a narration box on top that poses a question, then a single panel below that features a picture of a ghost responding to the question. I really dig the way Becan draws the ghost (who's name is Chip), with creepy eyes, and a stitched up looking mouth. Creepy! And yet still smilling and looking really happy.

There's not that much for Chip to do in each panel, but Becan makes the most of it. Chip flails around, changes expressions, and Becan somehow uses his limited facial features to imply that the person asking the questions is a total moron. Awesome!

So what questions are asked? Chip tells how he died, what the afterlife is like, what he the point of life is (getting laid), and tells a disgusting, but still funny, joke. He seems like a pretty rad guy.