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.

Ripping Thrash #26 / You Can't Say No to Hope #13

Ripping Thrash by Steve
www.rippingthrash.com
PO Box 152
Burton-on-Trent
Staffordshire
DE14 1XX, UK

You Can't Say No to Hope by Jon
myspace.com/youcantsaynotohope

This zine was sent to me by Zinemonger Distro, a distro that distributes free zines. Awesome! Go check out the site to find out how you can get some!

Punk music almost seems like the default type of music for zines. Not necessarily because all zinesters listen to punk music, but more because fans of other types of music have seemingly abandoned zines and embraced newer technologies to a greater degree.

This isn't to say that there aren't other zines about other types of music out there, or that punk music doesn't have countless websites and blogs devoted to it, just that the lo-fi, diy asthetic that is embraced in punk and leads to bands releasing music on vinyl means that zines are seen as a more acceptable form of media for the genre.

I'd love to see zines about electronic music or hip hop, but I think in the case of the latter I've only ever seen them in a museum exhibit (seriously!). Can you suggest any?

From that intro you can probably guess that this split zine is about punk music, and while I like punk music it's clearly not my genre of choice, so while I will generally read through all the reviews of shows and albums they frequently don't really register with me and I rarely bother looking anyone up.

Thankfully this zine does have content that's not reviews. You Can't Say No to Hope... begins with a fairly amusing hatelist, and is followed by a pretty awesome section about rabbits! I really love reading a zine you expect to be about one thing and then discovering that whoever made it also really loves this other thing and is going to include it even if it's kind of jarring. These pages include how to follow rabbit tracks in the snow, and some disgusting rabbit facts, rad! Plus there's an account of how Jon's football team is doing. I really find it kind of bizarre how punks in the UK frequently seem to be into football and play in leagues and follow teams. Still, good on them for actually being active.

Even ignoring all that, if you enjoy finding new punk bands by reading reviews and interviews then this split (and other issues of both zines) is probably worth checking out.

Your Pretty Face is Going Straight to Hell #9/Telegram Ma’am #18

By Miss Tukru and Maranda Elizabeth
www.tukrulovesyou.com knifecrime.etsy.com

I went to the Brighton Zine Fest earlier this year and on the second night there was a dinner with bands and stuff performing. It was pretty fun. I drank rather a lot because I am terrible at social situations. I had multiple cans of cider, and when I finished those I still didn’t feel drunk enough, so I asked the goth girl sitting next to me if I could have some of her red wine.

Now if sober I would know not to drink red wine, and in fact had said I shouldn’t earlier in the evening, but by this point I was drunk enough to think it was a great idea. Soon my memories turned into a haze. The show ended, everyone went to a nearby pub. I flitted about talking to lots of people I don’t remember. Then I’m outside walking back to the house I’m staying at and I’m cold. Then I’m waking up the next morning hung over, still in my trousers, and lacking my hoodie.

I got up and examined my stuff to see if I’d lost anything. I still had my wallet and ID, but all of my zines were gone. I must have given them to other people while drunk. I also had candy wrappers in one pocket, and a copy of this zine in the other, presumably things people had given me in return for my zines. I stumbled around for the rest of the day terribly hungover and even worse at social situations, but I did at least manage to get my hoodie back by going back to the pub (where the girl tending bar asked if I was okay after the night before, what had I done?).

This is a split/flip perzine, and isn’t really the sort of thing that I usually go for, though I do really like the cover of Your Pretty Face is Going Straight to Hell. It’s full of social anxiety, depression, and other fun things like that (and which I am experiencing right now, drat), but none of it is really written in a style that appeals to me that much. At one point one of the authors writes “i don’t re-read what i’ve written.” (yes, with that capitalization), and I can’t really imagine doing that with any of my zines.

At least I’ve learnt (hopefully for the last time), to stop drinking red wine.

rum-muffel

A Rumlad/Morgenmuffel collaboration
By Isy and Steve Larder
www.stevelarder.co.uk

Morgenmuffel and Rumlad are both zines I like a lot, so the idea of them doing a collaborative zine of some sort was exciting! Also a little worrying, what if the aspects of both zines that I liked combined into something terrible? Like combining dinosaurs and bicycles (in this instance it would lead to a crushed bicycle and an injured and angry dinosaur, not something awesome).

However, I didn’t need to worry, as Rum-Muffel is a really good zine, albeit a bit different from its parents. Isy and Steve go on an adventure in the wilds somewhere “up north”, I think it’s Scotland as they also go to Edinburgh but I’m not sure. Anyway, they go up to some mountains and are woefully unprepared for snow and cold and I, as a hardy Canadian, can only laugh at their misfortune. Ha ha ha ha.

Steve and Isy took the neat method of alternating pages while telling the story of a trip. I’m not sure how they worked this out as each page seems to lead on pretty well from the previous one. Perhaps one person did one page, than passed it on to the other person to continue. That seems like a time consuming way to make a zine!

However they did it, it works really well, and it’s interesting to see how their styles influence one another as artists, and how they focus on different aspects of the trip. Also the size is awesome.