Mild Peril #11

By Dean and Pete
mildperil@hotmail.co.uk
myspace.com/mildperilzine

As we head down the path to BIG CHANGE (not with a bang, but a whimper) I come across another old punk zine. Several years old, other issues already reviewed on this site, almost unreviewable because you either are interested in it or aren't. Let's go!

This thick zine is filled with what you would expect from a punk music zine. Rants (the politics! That is the part of punk I really enjoy), band interviews (I only read the parts on touring and life in other countries at this point), tour diaries (the short distances here still blow me away), show reviews (generally ignored!), vegetarian recipes (possibly good!), random jokes, pictures, and drawings (confusing!), and CD and record reviews (completely ignored!).

You probably already know whether or not you're into this sort of thing, and my review can be summed up as "generally positive". There're some spelling, grammar, and layout issues, but those have never really been a strong point of the punk scene, and really don't detract from the overall product. Am I burnt out? I think I might be despite only writing one review in the last week.

I guess the only reason I reviewed this at all is a misplaced sense that I should review _everything_ I've been given, and wondering where I should send the punk records a friend gave me before returning to Canada. I want them to be reviewed, who (in the UK) should I send them to?

Bostin Heroes

By Matthew Craig, Jack Davies, and Donato Esposito
www.bostinheroes.com

I'm sick, tired, don't really want to update this right now, and people are complaining about me on another website. After a year I'm thinking about changing how this site will be done. But that'll have to wait until next week, and so we charge headlong into another ill-thought out review.

I'm not as a big a fan of superhero comics as I once was, but I still enjoy reading some of them. They're such a large part of the market it's kind of hard to pay attention to "mainstream" comics and not have any idea about them. However, this leads to a couple of points.

If I'm going to read about superheroes I'm probably going to read about ones in the Marvel/DC universes. I've known those characters for most of my life, and, sometimes surprisingly, I still "care" about some of them.

Actually, the above isn't necessarily true. I end up reading a lot of mainstream superhero comics cause that's what's around. Four comics for a pound including the first issue of that recent Image series that's supposed to be pretty good? I guess I'll end up reading Daredevil spinoffs and issues of Supergirl when they are, more or less, free. Mainstream superhero comics are everywhere, and if I don't desperately need to read the newest issue right now you can pick most of them up pretty cheaply.

I'd _actually_ rather read well produced, creator owned superhero comics. I mean, I do have a soft spot for Spider-Man 2099, or whoever, but given the choice between buying an issue of that or Invincible, I'd go with Invincible hands down. However, I'm also like four volumes behind on Invincible, and there are countless other superhero comics out there that are well written and well drawn, meaning that yours has to be really good, or have a clever hook, in order to attract my attention.

The hook in this one is that its set in the Midlands, and it's cute enough seeing monsters smash up Birmingham (I've been there!), but no more or less than seeing Kuala Lumpur be destroyed (actually, I've spent more time in KL...). Rather, the setting of Birmingham really just drives home the sort of weirdness of the UK comics retail industry. Birmingham has over a million people and two comic book shops. The town I grew up in (St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada), has a population of 100,000 people, and yet had (last I was there) something like 2 and a half comic shops. Do more people in North America just read comics? Do people in the UK get their comics from somewhere else? (There is a long tradition of newstand comics here, many of which reprint North American comics.) I just don't know.

Another problem I have with superhero comics is that after reading Tom Strong, and having him talk to his enemeies instead of just punching them, sometimes I wonder why people are fighting giant monsters? Isn't there a better way? Of course, I like monsters punching things as much as the anxiety ridden person who wishes he could punch his way through all of his problems, but I know that in real life it's not like that.

This is long and rambly, and doesn't really tell you much about the comic (it's a labour of love for the genre!). I'm gonna blame the sickness.

dilettantes & heartless manipulators issue 49

spurzines@gmail.com
Spurzine
PO Box 41
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia

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!

Much like how I made it my goal to review something for this site every day (or rather, have a review posted every day, which is somewhat different as it means I can write more than one at once then set them up to post while I’m off doing something fun, not that writing reviews every day and never getting feedback isn't fun), some people have gone and decided to do something really insane: make a zine every week.

Well, I say it’s insane, but really, if you’re just doing one page a week, it’s not that much work. I write more than that for this blog. Actually, let’s check. It seems that in the past week (or at least the week before I wrote this in December) I’ve posted 2,500 words on this blog, which is more than enough for a zine a week. Huh.

This zine is like a diary entry, or perhaps a letter to someone. No, it’s more than that; it’s a running account of the thoughts going through the writer’s head as they try to get a presentation ready for a conference. It’s a look inside their neurosis and fears, with stupid jokes, encouragements, asides, and everything you think about when you should be trying to get something done. I could probably write one about trying to write this review, but really, nobody wants to read about that (what is running through my head right now: volunteering, being crap and unproductive, girls, what to do on NYE, X-Men comics).

But really, what it comes down to is this: have you never made a zine before (or even if you have)? Why not make one in 2011. I challenge you to do it. Make one and I'll trade you one of mine. Go on, do it! Let's go!

Chicken with Penis: Fresh Meat

chickenwithpenis@yahoo.com
PO Box 20204
Seattle, WA
98102, USA

I reviewed one of these before and thought it was terrible. It’s just gross, poorly drawn, comics (strips or single panels) about penises, shit, dead babies, and other crap. Uh, whatever. Why did I even bother reviewing this one if I thought the first was so terrible? I guess I forgot how bad it was.

In fact, do I have any more issues? I should go find them and review them now too, just so I don’t have do so in the future. Aha, here’s another issue.


Chicken with Penis: Super Retarded

Same as above really, except with extra references to AIDS, bestiality, and a bizarre appearance by Marvel superhero The Mighty Thor and some of his supporting characters.

I’m willing to allow that I might have found a couple of the jokes in here funny in another context, but combined with all the stuff I thought was terrible I just don’t care.

Footnotes Issue 3

footprint@footprinters.co.uk
www.footprinters.co.uk

In some ways this is really more of an ad for the Footprint printing co-operative than a zine. But they print zines, and there’s enough content here for me to review it. Partially cause I don’t really want to review something more in depth right now. Lazy!

There are accounts of some of what’s been happening at Footprint, zine events that they’ve been to, brief “reviews” of some zines they’ve printed recently and enjoyed (three of which I’ve reviewed and enjoyed), info on the services they offer, information on what co-ops are, and some layout/design tips.

There’s also a pretty interesting page on risographic printing which I’m sure sounds more interesting than it actually is.

I dunno, I guess if you have a zine you want a lot of copies made of and you live in the UK they’re worth checking out. I usually just go to Staples (bad Matthew), but I also generally only make like 20 copies at a time. (Nobody wants my zines!) Footnotes' got an awesome wrap-a-round cover image at least.

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.

Peep Show 2011

By lots of people
More info

If there is one question that I have asked more than any other this year it is “is this a zine?”. After a year I have decided that the answer is “Yes, if I bother to review it on my blog”.

And thus, this calendar! It was created by twelve different female cartoonists associated with the Centre for Cartoon Studies. Each of them has drawn another cartoonist in a pin-up style. Some of the artist have chosen to represent specific things related to the month, while others have gone the route of representing certain aspects of their models’ personalities. And some even feature references to specific pin-up artists!

The art is generally of a fairly high quality, and it’s interesting to see how the artists represent each other. I was a little disappointed by the calendar part though, while it does include (incredibly important) dates such as Canada Day (shame on you for not knowing when it is), I thought it would have been more amusing to include more random holidays. Or alternatively they could have gone the comic book route and listed creators’ birthdays and the dates when certain comics came out. Oh well, you can’t have it all.

In response to this calendar a group of boys at the CCS made their own beef-steak calendar. You can find more information about it here and here.


(Colleen Frakes as drawn by Lena H. Chandhok.)