One Thousand Lies

By Laura Terry

www.bravesailor.com

This was a cute little story about a travelling itinerant who returns to LA to visit his former guardian, a bit shot lawyer. There's an immediate disconnect between the lives of these two people. One who is constantly dealing with huge piles of money, and the other who has all of their belongings strapped to their back.

The comic is about telling stories, and features the traveller telling increasingly ridiculous stories about some of the places they've visited on their travels. There's a city where the library is where you go for drug deals while intellectuals hang out in the playground providing answers for people, one where the railway tracks separate the mobile part of the city from the permanent part, and a city that was built to reflect the universe, but is now eerily empty.

The rapport between the two main characters is well represented, and you can tell a lot about the relationship between the characters just from their body language and the way they talk to each other. The dialogue and actions manage to reveal a lot about their interests and how they feel about both their own lives, and the lives of each other. That the friendship even exists despite the vast differences in lifestyles says a lot!

The stories are all fun, and even when they're being "creepy", it's still in a humourous way. The art works pretty well for the story it's telling, and Terry is good at making pages of "talking heads" look visually appealing as the characters banter back and forth. I also enjoyed the use of gray shading to give depth and shadow to the artwork.

First, a story I call...

So last fall I was one of the organizers for the Halifax Zine Fair (hey look, you can already apply for a table for this year!). It was pretty fun making sure everything was ready in time, though a little stressful too. The most stressful part was when we asked one of the people tabling at the fair to leave.

This wasn't an easy decision to make. The other co-organizer had heard multiple complaints concerning the items this person was selling. We took a look at this zine, which was being given out for free, and several of us discussed the content and what we thought we should do concerning the creator.

Asking them not to have the work in question on display wasn't an option, as they only had a few things and I think they would have had nothing left if they removed what we'd heard complaints about. So we made the decision of asking them to leave the zine fair. Thankfully they left without any real fuss, and the rest of the zine fair went without any other incidents. You can read the creator's take of the day (including several complaints they received about their work) on their blog (http://dmgermain.blogspot.ca/2012/10/too-hot-for-zine-fair.html).

So this zine has sat in my review pile ever since with me wondering what I should do with it. Except for later issues of a zine I really didn't enjoy due to it's humour style I've reviewed every single zine or minicomic I've received for this site (or if I haven't they're in my review pile and I will get to them eventually). Should I review this one? Just write a post about it? Ignore it? Not quite as hard as asking someone to leave the zine fair, but still a question I thought about a lot.

Now firstly I think there's definitely an element of irony involved in asking someone to leave a zine fair based (in part) on a work that says "always read a book before forming an opinion of it" (which we did on the day of the zine fair). As for the content, I think some of the characters depicted within are definitely offensive, and claiming the work is satirical doesn't make that go away. Even excluding that the art, writing style, and design don't appeal to me, and the final few pages are, to me, gruesome and gross in a completely unnecessary way.

So did we make the right decision? Yeah, I think so. I'd prefer not to be the organizer of an event that contained material such as this. So I'll stand by what we did, while hoping that I don't have to deal with a situation like that again.

Piltdownlad #4 - The Nasty Oh-Dear

By Kelly Dessaint and Walt Hall
PO Box 86714
Los Angeles, CA
90086
www.piltdownlad.com

I remember when I read the second issue of Piltdownlad  I wondered if the story it told was true or fictional. In this issue Dessaint says that they "understand how distracting it can be for the reader to not know whether a work is fiction or if it's autobiographical", and how they combine the two because they "like a good yarn, regardless of how factual the details are".

Despite this, the intro goes on to say that the stories in this issue are, apparently, all true, admittedly with dialogue created after the fact. However, in this case I kind of wish for the inability to determine whether a story is true or not, because some of the subject matter included in this zine is pretty distressing, if told in a way that made me want to know what happened next.

The tale in question concerns foster homes, child abuse, mental hospitals, and other stuff of that ilk. Dessaint pulls the trick of starting at the end of the story (or at least the middle) with him and his brother arriving at a foster home. You know that something has to happen for them to have ended up there, but you don't know what it is. Dessaint moves back and forth through time, effectively teasing the reader until the truth is revealed. It is, as I said, upsetting in regards to what happens to the people in the story, but at the same time it ends with such a teaser that I want to find out what happens next.

Also included are a writeup about the 2012 LA Zinefest, an account of being a punk fan in the 1980s and tracking down records, and a bunch of zine reviews (including a review of one of mine). It's all well written and well put together, and I would read more issues if I had them.