If Nothing Else the Sky

By Dave Roche
PO Box 221041
Chicago, IL 60622
sites.google.com/site/ifnothingelsethesky/home

Okay, so I have a confession. Before I stayed at Dave Roche's house during the ALA conference in Chicago I'd never read any of his zines. Sure, I knew who he was, I knew what On Subbing (his book about being a substitute teacher) looked like, I might even have read the back cover when my brother distroed it, but I'd never (knowingly) read anything he'd actually written.

But after meeting him, talking to him, and hearing him read excerpts from his zines I realized I really wanted to read his zines, and was excited to start his newest one, about his travels in SE Asia and Australia.

I really like travelling (I'm sleeping on my friend's floor in Kentucky right now!), and I spent a bunch of time living and travelling in Australia and SE Asia a few years ago, so I was excited to read about Dave's experiences. Though while there is definitely the appeal of "I've been there!" and "I slept at that place!", the true appeal of this zine is Dave's writing style: humourous, informative, and a little bit self-deprecating.

Dave worries that he might be getting too old for the punk rock sleeping on strangers' couches style of living and travelling. At what point does he stop being that cool zinester guy, and starts being that weird old guy with a beard? (Clearly the answer is "never!".) Dave also has to deal with realizing how incredibly privileged and rich (at least comparatively) he is in SE Asia, mandis and squat toilets, getting bitten by a penguin in Australia. Dave goes on tour with a punk band, stays with an anarchist robotics scientist, tries to explain why he isn't married yet, and has lots of other adventures. There's a lot of content here, and I can't describe every story, but there are a number of excerpts on his website and you should check them out!

 If Nothing Else the Sky is huge for a zine. It's almost a hundred pages (perfect bound), mostly text, and will take a while to read,  but thanks to Dave's DIY-punk ethics/terrible business sense, you can order it for just $5. If you liked Dave's earlier books, enjoy travel stories, or just like reading zines by funny/kinda weird people, it's definitely worth checking out.

These Things Happen volume 3

By Sam Carbaugh

www.samcarbaugh.com

This is a flip comic, with two different stories that are, in part, inspired by The Yellow Wallpaper. (Just reading that wikipedia article kind of depressed me.) One half of the comic (the one with the blue cover) features a story about an old man thinking about his dead wife. The other half features a cover that has nothing to do with the contents. Instead the story is about a woman who is confined to her bed by her husband for some unnamed malady. She attempts to hide the fact that she is writing, but according to him even that is too much strain upon her.

The story isn't that long and I wasn't sure if the woman actually was physically sick, if it was somehow psychological, or if it was being induced by her husband. It's not clearly spelled out, and I think that's part of Carbaugh's plan. It made me kind of uncomfortable as I wasn't sure what to think of the characters in here. So, um, I guess it succeeded on that front.

The art in both stories features people becoming totally overcome by their own negative thoughts. It's a cool way to show how isolated people can become inside of their own minds. It's also a visual effect that wouldn't be possible to do in prose, and so is a sign of how comics can do awesome things that other mediums can't!

Daily Doodles

By David Yoder

davidyoderisawesome.blogspot.com/

I totally appreciate it when people set creative goals for themselves and try to make/do something every day. Sure, maybe the content that is created isn't amazing, but just the act of doing something can be important for people.

However, I'm not that big a fan of people creating things along the lines of "I can't think of an idea" (please ignore my award winning play written in highschool) or "I'm a whiny jackass", and hell, I understand that people can be depressed and that creating something can be a way of helping to deal with that, but I guess I just don't want to read them.

That isn't to say that all of the comics in here are like that, only a few of them are, but it happens that the last one in the comic is all about that so it kind of stuck in my mind. But there are several comics in here that I really liked. There's a comic about a girl finding Iron Man's gloves which I thought was cute, the jellyfish comic below, and one about a werewolf in a grocery store. (What? One of my favourites features a monster? Who would have guessed...)

I also dug how each page has it's own "Daily Doodles" logo in a different hand drawn font style. Neat!

O Woe!

By Bill Volk

This comic begins with a giant, space-faring, "stegosaurussed", god sperm flying through outer space. An auspicious beginning for sure! The story then becomes about the evolution and societal progression of a race of "wee scummy men".

The society that Volk creates is pretty neat, and I especially liked the incredibly decadent concept of "doubling" that was done by the incredibly rich people in this comic. Doubling is when someone, in order to prove their wealth, has exact duplicates of everything they own created, and then never uses them. The society goes to pretty insane extremes in their pursuit of showing off how rich they are, and how other factions of society respond.

While I liked this idea a lot, I wish more time had been spent on it and maybe the personal experiences of some of the people in this world. Also the ending is a total cop-out. Lame!

Roctober #50

www.roctober.com

I originally wasn't going to review Roctober. It's the size of a magazine! It has a colour cover! It's full of ads! But, they were invited to be at the Zine Pavilion at the ALA conference a few weeks ago, and they do only have a print run of 2,500 (though when does print run determine if something is a zine or not?), but what finally changed my mind was that this was an anniversary issue filled with content from every issue of Roctober up to this one, including when it was just a small photocopied thing (I think...).

Roctober is primarily a music magazine, though it's got a pretty eclectic mix of stuff. This issue features loads of reviews (most of which I didn't read, though I did check out the one of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, which terrifyingly made over $400 million dollars internationally, and seems to be in the top 150 grossing movies ever...), interviews (such as with the White Sox organist and a member of the New Monkees), in depth bios/retrospectives of artists, and way more.

There is _a lot_ of content here, and I didn't actually read all of it as that would have taken forever, and a lot of it I wasn't that into. There were some pieces I didn't even try to read due to the formatting (I think I've read enough huge walls of text with no paragraph breaks), but overall the layout works pretty well. I wasn't super fond of the way font sizes and faces sometimes changed from page to page, but I understand that this is reprinting older material, and that other people like it when that sort of thing happens (I generally prefer a more consistent look throughout zines I make). If you're into music more than I am (which honestly wouldn't be hard), you might want to check this out.

(over)heard in a library

I made the cover and put together this collaborative zine that was created at the Zine Pavilion at the American Library Association conference in Chicago. It's filled with stories of weird things people have seen or heard in libraries.

If you go to the tumblr, you can download some PDFs. Check it out!

No More Touch! A Love Story

By Mary Karaplis/Mei K

tiny-vices.com

The cover and title of this comic make it seem like it's going to be a lot more...confrontational than it is. As though most of the comic is going to be about someone incredibly bitter and jaded about relationships. And while Karaplis might be bitter and jaded, it doesn't really come through in the comic. While it starts with her heart being broken, she soon (or at least a short number of pages later) finds another person, and eventually falls in love with them.

While some of the comics in here are kind of cute, I think my disconnection from them probably says more about me and my past history of relationships (ie. I have not been in many long term relationships) than the creator. Of course, I'm sure it doesn't help that I don't think the people in this comic seem like people I'd want to go out with. (Really? You need to remind your partner to shower?!)

What I do like is the artwork, which is really cute. I didn't scan the image, but there are some pictures of drunk owls in here that are totally adorable.