Potato Maze

Written by Matthew Murray and Lux Chell.
Illustrations by Lux Chell.

Hey, hold on a minute. That's my name! I made this zine!

Inspired by my friend's candy review zine Sugar Needle and general insanity I decided to make crisp/chip review zine. I even managed to corral a friend into helping me out by reviewing some flavours and illustrating many of the reviews! Amazing!

This long and skinny zine features reviews of twelve different types of chips/crisps, hand coloured images throughout, and a fully functioning maze! (That logo took me forever to draw.)

Contact either Lux or I if you would like a copy. I'll be at Brighton Zine Fest this weekend if you'd like to get one in real life. You should go to the fest anyway, it's sure to be loads of fun.

Electric Baby

(This cover is actually NEON ORANGE in real life, but my scanner apparently hates colour.)

By Jimi Gherkin
myspace.com/jimigherkin
comicsandzines.wordpress.com

I've known Jimi Gherkin for a while, but for some reason I didn't pick up any of his zines until I was down at the Alternative Press Fair in London a few months ago. He's currently involved in planning the International Alternative Press Festival for May which sounds really fun! You should go, check out the website for more details.

I really had no idea what this zine was going to be about (I mean, look at the cover!), but it turned out to be a really fun and enthusiastic zine about loads of different things. Gherkin's apparent near constant optimsm in this zine is kind of scary to me, but it also kind of makes me jealous. Um, but enough about my mental state...

There's a guide on how to screen print at home (that's how he did the cover! It looks really good), a comicstrip showing how ideas are used in the "mainstream" and "small press" universes (which features a girl making a zine called "Vagina Party"), boundless optimism about how you are awesome and can achieve everything you want, only positive reviews of zines, encouragement to do nice things to other people, and a mirror on the inside backpage that is supposed to show you how amazing and special you are. Awwwww.

I mean, some of it is kind of lame, but at the same time I feel really horrible for writing something like that. Why should I say someone being enthusiastic and happy shouldn't be? I kind of wish I felt that way more often, and at the least Gherkin has made me smile with this zine.


(The interior pages are all NEON YELLOW, but my scanner didn't pick up that either. *sigh*)

Anarchist New York 2010

By Michael Duckett
http://wemakezines.ning.com/profile/MichaelDuckett

I really love traveling. Exploring other cities, going to events, meeting new people: all of these are fun (if scary) things to do, and I do them as much as I can (and then make zines about them!). When I can't, I like reading about other people's trips. I love looking at incredibly old guidebooks, and one of my favourite types of zines are those that are about other people's adventures.

I love seeing cities I've already been to through other people's eyes, and I love reading about people experiencing cities I haven't been to (yet), so I was looking forward to reading Duckett's zine about his trip to New York.

The first thing you notice when you open up this zine is that the extra piece of paper that tells you this is an (accidentally) interative zine. It seems that it got stapled in the middle (as you would expect zines to be stapled) by accident, and so your first task is to pry them out, flatten the zine, and then find something to tie the whole thing together using the supplied holes (I used sparkly ribbon stuff from a present or something that someone sent me).

While this format is certainly neat, it does create a few problems, namely that at times the text of the pages goes all the way to the edge, and you can't actually read everything without difficulty.

Of course the greater problem regarding reading comprehensibility is the journal style used by Duckett for this zine. The pages combine illustrations, hand written text, typed text, collages, and photocopied text and images from other sources. There's a lot of information here, and at times it can be hard to figure out who's talking, and what bit you're supposed to read next.

This is a problem I had with Duckett's last zine, where the haphazard way the material is all collected at times just confused me. This one is certainly more coherent, and the asides about anarchist history in New York are both relevant and interesting (though it does assume you already have some knowledge of who some of these people are and why they're important).

One bit I really enjoyed, and this is incredibly nerdy and stupid, was when Duckett just recounts the plots of various Marvel comics in between other pieces of history, treating them as though they really happened.

During a battle between the mutant team X-Factor and their enemy Apocalypse on board the Super Villain's flying head-quarters, the ship struck the Empire State Building, causing the building's antenna to fall off

Stellar! Overall Duckett's zine is definitely interesting, and gave me some new information, but I sort of wish it was laid out in a less cut 'n' paste style.

Sugar Needle #35

By Phlox Icona and Corina Fastwolf
P.O. Box 66835
Portland, OR
97290, USA
$2 and a stamp, or send some awesome candy.

Candy! Sugar Needle is a pretty rad zine featuring reviews of lots of different candy! This issue features some UK candy that I sent to Corina, though it seems as though I sent her some that wasn't too exciting (maybe the packaging just doesn't photocopy well). I do love that Corina reads all the ingrediants of the candy she reviews, and that she was greatly amused by some of the things used to colour the candy I sent her.

This issue also features musing on imaginary types of candy that the writers would love to eat, an article/interview with a surf rock band (which, of course, asks them about their favourite candy), and reviews of lots of different candies from around the world.

I love the tall + skinny format that Sugar Needle uses, and the hand coloured images on the cover and througout the interior are really "sweet" to use a terrible pun. If you're into candy (or chocolate) this zine is definitely worth checking out, and if you send the creators some candy you'll probably get mentioned in the next issue. Hurray!

Skill Shot 12

Seattle’s Pinball Zine
PO Box 20204
Seattle, WA
98192, USA
$5 for a five issue subscription
chickenwithpenis@yahoo.com
myspace.com/skillshott

Sometimes I feel as though I either lived in the lamest city in Cascadia or that there was clearly a super awesome secret city that I just never managed to discover while I was there.

This is because every time I’ve gone to Seattle or Portland I’ve had an awesome time, and even now that I live thousands of kilometres away from those places I am still discovering amazing things going on there. If I was willing to live in the USA* I would move to one of those cities in a second.

Anyway, this is a zine about pinball. It lists a top 12 favourite pinball machines of the moment, pinball news and gossip (tournaments, where new pinball locations are, custom machines people have made), strategies for specific games, challenges, and a list of every (?) pinball machine in Seattle, broken down by region.

It’s so neat to see that there’s still an active fan base for something that I generally think of as a dead form of entertainment. But as long as people keep playing, other people are going to keep making pinball machines (that must be such a weird job).

I’ve never really had any interest in pinball before, and I’ve barely ever played, but now I want to. I want to find the most fun machines. I want to maybe get good at them. I feel like I spent too many of my early years reading books instead of going out and playing in arcades. Drat.

*I’m not. I would get shot. Also: the politics are super fucked.

Kame Hame Ha!!

Kame Hame Ha!!
By Celso and Crosses

Energize! Psi Blast! Eye blast! No, it’s not a Dragonball Z fanzine (or at least not directly, though that would be awesome), it’s a zine explaining the rules to what is basically an insanely complicated rock-paper-scissors variant.

Directions on how to perform each move, of varying levels and complexity, are accompanied by illustrations of school girls, business men, policewomen, hobos, and construction workers (anybody can learn how to play!) executing them, and advice on the type of noises you should make when doing so ("Gzzaa!"). For the really complicated super moves there are photos showing you step by step how to complete them.

Even if you have no intention of playing the game (I, sadly, probably never will) this zine is still worth picking up just because of how awesome/ridiculous everything is, and how enthusiastic the authors are. There’s also a super sweet fold out. I love fold outs in zines.

I only wish the guy I’d gotten this from at the Portland Zine Symposium last year had done a workshop teaching people how to play this game. Then maybe I would have gotten to play.

Portland, Oregon Hip Hop: Four Essays on Style and Place

Portland, Oregon Hip Hop: Four Essays on Style and Place
By Martha Grover
PO Box 14871
Portland, OR
97293, USA

This fantastic zine takes a look at each of the four elements of hip hop (graffiti, break dancing, deejaying and emceeing) and how they’re represented in Portland.

Grover’s well written essays discuss how each of these elements exists in “one of the whitest major cities in the [USA]”, and how those involved in the scene there struggle with “keeping it real”. Through interviews, explorations, and memories Grover tracks how hip hop culture has grown, and in some cases thrived, in her city.

The first piece, on graffiti, originally appeared in “The Raven Chronicles” (whatever that is), and is presumably the inspiration for Grover to go out and find out about the other parts of hiphop. She talks with graffiti artists and discusses the idea of graffiti as a type of hidden conversation between multiple parties. She gains, and communicates, an understanding of tagging that I had never comprehended before (I love graffiti, but have never gotten the quick tags people put up). Plus she wanders around an abandoned building. Awesome.

The next piece focuses on break dancing, or b-boying, and continues in the same format. She goes on a trip with a long time break dancer, who has played an influential role in getting Portland on international break dancing maps, to tour the many practice locations his crew have gotten kicked out of, interspacing it with information gained from interviews and research.

She discusses the idea of break-dancing as an incredible technical thing where slight variations and difficult moves can only be appreciated by people who know what’s going on and breakdance themselves. (I experienced this last summer when I saw a battle in San Francisco. Some of the other people watching would ooooh and aaaah over things that didn’t look that impressive, but were presumably difficult to pull off.)

The other two pieces are similar: she interviews people who are involved in different parts of the scene and tries to understand why they have committed their lives to them. I won’t go into them too much here, as otherwise I will just go on forever.

Near the end Grover asks questions that I, a similar white hip hop fan, cannot answer: why do we (white people) listen to, and connect with, white rappers like Aesop Rock and Sage Francis while ignoring tracks by black musicians? By asking this question I feel she disregards the many, many white people who do embrace black music (look at the music charts to see), but she was probably thinking of the hipster/indie/alternative people who don’t listen to pop music.

My only complaints are fairly minor, there’s some typographical and punctuation errors that only stand out because the rest of the package looks so good, a few photos, especially in the graffiti section, would have been nice, and the piece on emceeing doesn’t go quite as in depth as I would have liked. But as Grover admits that in the piece I can’t really complain.

This zine is well worth checking out if you have any interest in hip hop or even subcultures in general. You might even discover some new artists to check out, I did.

(Look! An interview I did with a break dancer in Thailand. Seemingly one of the only of my print journalism pieces that's still online.)

Sugar Needle #34

Sugar Needle #34: The (Almost) Vegan Issue
By Phlox Icona and Corina Fastwolf
P.O. Box 66835
Portland, OR
97290, USA
$2 and a stamp, tall half sized.

Sugar Needle is a zine that reviews candy. That idea alone makes it pretty rad, but when combined with the format (I love that tall size), hand colouring, imaginary candies that the writers wished existed, and candy sent in from all over the world you have an awesome package.

This issue focuses mostly on vegan candies, which I was excited about. As a vegetarian I am frequently frustrated when I discover candy (or anything) has gelatin or some other animal product in it. Why are you putting that in candy? I do not understand!

There’s loads of reviews of different candies and chocolates in here that will probably make you hungry (I want to try the grapefruit parrots), plus images of the packaging so you know what to look for, and an interview with a vegan chocolate truffle maker in Portland. What more could you want? Well, other than answers to who comes up with these candy flavours (Elvis peanut butter and banana crème Reese’s), and why chocolate covered bacon seemed to be everywhere last year. Ew.

How Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Changed My Life

Hot Milk Presents: How Mystery Science Theatre 3000 Changed My Life, Or, 13 Lessons I learned from the Best TV Show Ever
By Tyler Hauck
www.hotmilk.org

Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (MST3K) was a TV show that featured a guy (“not too different from you or me”) and some robots stuck on a satellite and forced to watch really bad movies. To keep his sanity he, and the robots, made fun of the movies. It was basically just B-movies with commentary, and, if you’ve never seen it before and think the concept is insane, it really did exist.

It wasn’t shown on TV where I lived as a kid (in fact, I don’t know if it’s ever been shown on TV anywhere outside of America), so I found out about the show in a kind of ridiculous manner: fan fiction. Not fan fiction about the show, but rather bad X-Men fan fiction that other people made fun of by writing in the MST3K characters making fun of the story. The first time I ever saw a picture of what the robots looked like (in an issue of Mad magazine of all places) I was actually kind of upset, because I thought they looked so crummy.

Eventually I managed to track down some episodes of the show, but even today I’ve only seen maybe half a dozen of them. I still think it’s a pretty awesome idea, and I’m sure someday I’ll actually manage to watch more of them, or of the various spin offs that have been produced.

Hauck’s seen a lot more of the show than me. In fact he may have seen every episode, and if not, he’s seen most of them. The fact that he made this zine ten years after the show stopped being produced shows that MST3K had a major impact on his (and other people’s) lives. At the least MST3K helped create a market for all the terrible retro and genre films of the past. Would Mexican wrestler El Santo be as well known without this show? Would people purposefully seek out watching bad films just to make fun of them without MST3K making you think it was fun to do that? Okay, well probably. But this show totally helped that movement along.

However, Hauck has taken away more than just the pleasure of laughing at old crummy movies from MST3K; he’s learned thirteen lessons that changed his life.

In between lists of the best songs, skits, inventions, and best and worst films, Hauck presents the things he has learned. And what things! The idea of using old films as primary source documents of the past to learn about how people used to live, discovering that lots of people who have made good stuff have also made a lot of crap, that your heroes are imperfect, that poorly dubbed foreign films still show you how people live in other countries, that being amateur isn’t the same as being bad, and more.

Even if you already love MST3K and know these things, you can still learn stuff from this zine. Did you know that in the early seasons a lot of the props and materials they used for the show were dumpstered? (Awesome!) Did you know that the films of Aleksandr Ptushko (The Sword and the Dragon, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad) are actually good? I’ve never even seen any of the episodes that feature his films, but based on the descriptions of them here I’m going to have to go and track them down, along with some more episodes of MST3K.

Let’s hope someone still keeps circulating the tapes.

Bothy Zine

Bothy Zine
By Mike
A weird square size.

So a bothy (how do I pronounce that?) is apparently a house or hut of some kind that is out in the woods or the countryside or some place and people going on hikes can stay in them. Nobody seems to own them, and they are looked after by the people that visit. That sounds rad! Too bad I had to figure this out by myself, because this zine doesn’t actually tell you and assumes you already have a bunch of knowledge about things that maybe all English people already know. (What’s a beaker person? Is it like this?)

After figuring that out, I still had a bit of a hard time comprehending this zine. There were times when I thought that the pages were out of order, or that some of them were just missing entirely, because there is a narrative here, but it is incredibly jumpy. It goes all over the place, and skips things, and other bits just seem to stop.

This is because the zine is mostly just a straight up reproduction of a journal and sketch book that Mike kept while he was hiking around these places. He flat out states that he was frequently exhausted during this time, after spending entire days hiking through marshes and forests and stuff. So the sketches, notes, and ephemera are at least partially the product of an overtired mind I would think.

The zine would definitely have benefitted from a rewrite. The information contained within is interesting, but the way in which it is presented is just a mess. I know Mike can tell an actual story, because a couple of times he tells about previous trips he had taken, and those make sense.

Some of his sketches are pretty good, and I liked the quotes from the guest books that were left in the bothys (bothies?), I always read those in places to see what people say.

Despite all this, Mike seems like a guy I could get along with, and the zine definitely succeeded on two fronts: it told me these places existed, and it made me want to go visit some! (When it’s warmer.)

Russia, Georgia and South Ossetia

Russia, Georgia, and South Ossetia: A Geopolitical Picture Book for the Perplexed
By Maria
maria-sputnik.livejournal.com
One dollar, half sized.

This was a pretty awesome zine, as I have a total hard-on for Russia and all those former soviet places (damn useless degree). It attempts to give background information on Georgia, and why on earth Russia went to war with it (a hint, it involves something from underground that is crucial to the world’s economy).

It starts with historical information on the country, the various groups of people that live there, their cultures, and conflicts that exist between them. Then it gets into information on Gazprom, the massive Russian natural gas company that sells gas to large parts of both eastern and western Europe.

There’s politics, dirty dealing, and black mail. Thrilling stuff! And it’s all illustrated by photos, maps, and diagrams. There’s also a section on further reading! Exciting, maybe I will check some out.

I’m always up for reading more about what a horrible and corrupt place Russia is, and this zine totally scratched that itch for me. It’s worth checking out if you have similar interests.

Anarchy and Alcohol

Anarchy and Alcohol
By CrimethInc
www.crimethinc.com
Half sized.

This is some pretty heavy stuff. The two essays* within are, more or less, on the dangers of alcohol, and how it is destroying both the punk scene and society.

Punk and alcohol have a history. The stereotypical punk is probably blitzed out of his (or her) mind on the cheapest alcohol around, and throwing bottles at people. And while some of them are, you could say the same about any sub group of people. Plus there’s the straight edgers (no drugs, no drink), who is a significant part of the punk scene in some cities.**

I think it’s important for zines on topics like this to exist. For many people alcohol is a problem, and creating dialogues within communities where it is frequently abused is important. When the major programs that exist for dealing with addiction are based around religion, the need for alternatives is incredibly important.

Despite all this, the first essay seems kind of crazy until the postscript where it says that it was written from an extreme “no alcohol ever” position to hopefully create acceptance of a “moderate” position somewhere between "no alcohol" and "alcohol alwa"ys. Viewed as such it’s a far more reasonable piece of writing; the writer doesn't expect people to do what they say in the piece, in fact they come right out and say that it’s okay to drink (and be drunk).

Without that disclaimer it’s somewhat hard for anyone who drinks alcohol in moderation (though I suppose even alcoholics generally don’t think they drink too much) to take it seriously. The idea that all anarchists are drunken louts who never get anything done is hard to take serious because, well, I know some who aren’t. And no, they’re not drunken louts who get things done, or sober people who get nothing done either.

The second essay is written from an anarcho-primitivist viewpoint, and while I found the history of brewing and alcohol it contained interesting and worth reading, even if you have absolutely no intention of changing your alcohol consumption (they drank how much beer in the olden days? Woah), I really have to take issue with one point.

The piece claims to be a case for straight edge, yet my understanding of that philosophy is that it is against all forms of recreational drugs, not just those created by capitalism. Claiming that hunter gatherers didn’t drink alcohol, and thus were free from outside affections, is just, um, lies. There are many drugs that occur naturally and require no preparation to be consumed, and can cause an alteration of the mind. To ignore these, and the idea that our ancestors didn’t do them, seems to be ignoring a fairly major fact.

Still, over all this is worth reading, as it contains thought provoking material, interesting history, and it looks pretty nice.

*And essays they are, the only thing really differentiating them from university papers are a lack of footnotes. Though I sort of wish they had footnotes, or at least some references for further reading.

**I think there’s a really interesting documentary to be made about the global straight edge movement. I’ve had straight edge friends who have come from different cultures and it’s interesting to see how in some places it's really tied to religion (in Malaysia some of my friends didn't like straight edgers because they were being "good Muslims"), while in other places it's not.

Another example is how in South Korea there are no illegal drugs available (or at least they are incredibly hard to acquire), so straight edge is just about the alcohol. However that can be a really big deal in a culture were drinking is so important.

Here’s links to an article about and an interview with a Korean straight edge band I wrote for a magazine.

Pizza Face

Pizza Face
By Laughter Riot and Gjet
Quarter sized.

The idea behind this zine is really great! Review every place in town (Portland) that sells pizza to discover which one is the best. I wish I lived somewhere that had this much cheap pizza (or other popular foodstuff) so that I could make one too!

The opening pages have the creators setting out what they’re looking for in a pizza: thin crust, fresh mozzarella, sauce that is just crushed tomatoes and spices. These people know what they are looking for in a pizza, whereas I am clearly an amateur in the field of pizza research.

There’re seventeen different pizza places examined in this zine. Each review rates the sauce, cheese, crust, atmosphere, cost, and cuteness of staff (genius!). Plus additional notes letting you know which place has the best vegan pizza, which ones sell beer, and who delivers until 4am (even if their pizza isn’t the best, you probably don’t care if it’s 3:30 in the morning and you’re ordering pizza).

I especially liked the review of the place that served “raw pizza”:
“Raw pizza is not pizza!! Period! Nothing to rate here because there was no sauce cheese or crust to judge in any sense of the word pizza. There were only veggies. And they were raw.” Fantastic.

My only complaint is that they didn’t include phone numbers for the places that deliver. How are you supposed to order one?!

Still, it’s definitely worth picking up if you live in Portland, even if just to find out which place puts alligator on their pizza.

Secret Space Inhabitants

Secret Space Inhabitants
Quarter sized.

The title of this zine is a complete and utter lie! It’s not about secret space inhabitants at all. It’s about creatures that live here on earth!

Unless it’s supposed to be about inhabitants of secret spaces, instead of secret inhabitants from outer space.

Factual or not, it features a guide to some thoroughly ridiculous creatures. There are descriptions and drawings of raccoon tailed birds, fungus farmers, tiny cyborgs that crystallize sunbeams, and the giant monster that lives under Halifax (why did nobody warn me?).

My two favourites were the skizzards, small rodent things that thrive on punk and metal music and live at the bottom of mosh pits, and the teapot whale, which brought back memories of the house hippo. Here is the video if you have never seen it before.



I was so sad when I discovered that the house hippo was not real. Everybody I knew wanted one. At least I can hold out hope for a teapot whale.

Eldash issue #1 – Are you really ready?

Eldash issue #1 – Are you really ready?
By Max
Quarter sized.

Are you ready for a level one Armageddon? Well, maybe, or at least you can get ready for it pretty quickly if you believe this zine that brings you through four increasingly dangerous types of armageddon.

What you should bring, what you shouldn’t (no electricity means no internet), plus useful skills and tips that will help you get by once society has collapsed to some extent. Should you bring a gun? Money? A dog? Am I going to die because I was never that good at chopping fire wood? (Fuck, I hope not.) Is that can of food that’s been sitting on the shelf for two years okay to eat?

The design of this is pretty rad*, under a beat up brown paper bag cover you have some nice red cardstock inter-title pages. It’s a nice looking package.

*ioactive.