WJC Comics No 3

By Warwick Johnson Cadwell
warwickjohnsoncadwell.blogspot.com

Cadwell's comics shouldn't really work. His artstyle seems to ignore so many things that I think should be present in "good" comic art. The characters' proportions don't make sense, the panel to panel consistency is weak, and characters warp and change.

And yet I love his style. There's something about the way he draws weird looking creatures, robots, and even humans that really appeals to me. His work has energy, dynamism, and an appeal I find hard to pin down.

Of course it's not all perfect, the reproduction on this is kind of terrible. Greys come out so dark it's hard to make out any detail, and I just know we're missing out on certain aspects of the art. Storywise it's just a chase scene, but it's effective at what it does, and as part of a longer narrative it would work really well.

Cadwell has a book coming out from Blank Slate Books later this year, but until then I'll just have to keep looking at his blog so I can discover awesome drawings like this one of Batgirl vs. Killer Croc.

Qwerty Pop

By The Thomas Ferguson Band
www.mixcloud.com/ttfb
fulsomeprism.wordpress.com

Every now and then I get a zine and I have no idea where it came from. This one was made for a typewriter festival (in February) at the Sticky Institute (a rad zine shop in Melbourne Australia). Well, no, that's not exactly true. The creator of this zine was asked to make a mixtape/cd about and inspired by typewriters for this event. What on Earth do you have to do to get a reputation as someone who can make a mix based around typewriters?! (I guess the answer is just "be pretty good at making mixes", and this guy is. I listened to the typewriter one already, and am now listening to another right now. Hurray!)

You can listen to the mix in the link above, and it's actually pretty rad. This zine acts as a companion piece to the mix, and I'm a little disappointed that it's a halfsized zine. I make a fair number of mix CDs (do you want to trade? Let me know!), though none with as weird a theme as typewriters. Quite frequently I make little booklets to slip inside the CD case. This zine works in much the same way my booklets do: there's information about the bands, the individual tracks, and random anecdotes about how the music was discovered. It's all pretty fun.

This zine also had a weird and awesome story as an insert. The story is a first person narrative about someone, who is completely oblivious to society as they don't know what money is, serving Salvador Dali in a super market. It's presumably an attempt at creating a Dali-esque piece in text form. I'm not familiar enough with Dali to really know how successful the author was, but I enjoyed it.

Plus the mix features a Missy Elliot/typewriter mashup, I mean, what's not to love about that?

Carck Presents Menagerie

By Harriet Jones & Vicky Samuel

Oh look at the adorable kitty cat! Awwww. And it's head is on a folded paper spring thing, how clever!

NO! Do not be fooled! This zine is nothing but smut! Once you open it you are exposed to a pop up penis! And that's it, it's kind of funny, but I can't imagine how much work went into cutting, folding, and gluing everything together for this. And the penis even sticks out of the side! How shoddy! (I'm joking.)

It's kind of impossible to review something like this. I do really wonder why there are twenty three different website addresses on the back page. Are they sites related to the creators of this zine? Why am I supposed to go look at them? I have no idea. (Actually looking at them it seems a couple might be related to the creators, but I really can't be bothered looking them up.)

Fifty Fearful Faces

By David Mack
www.monkeyfingers.net

From the title and cover of this zine you may be expecting it to be fifty drawings of monstrous faces. Well, you'd be completely wrong if you thought that, because however you count it there are not fifty faces in here (there's either more or less depending on if you count the cover).

Of course Fifty Fearful Faces sounds a lot better than Thirty-Six Sortof Frighting Heads, so it becomes obvious why the cover was chosen.

I'm not sure how much fear the drawings within inspire within me. A fair number are gross or somewhat unsettling, and I'm sure if I saw people that looked like this in real life I'd be terrified, but as drawings they mostly lack in scarification.

That's not to say the art isn't good! I really enjoyed the drawing below, and there's a heavily lined drawing of an alien/monster thing that becomes increasingly scary the longer I look at it. *shudder*

My Zine #6 Christmas Special

By Alyssa
www.lightsgoout.co.uk/products-page/

At the Brighton Zine Fest a few months back I saw the youngest zinester ever! Apparently when this was made she wasn't even six! Wow!

I think it's awesome how creative kids are, and how tragic that so often people stop creating by the time them become adults. I don't know what it is about the school system that erases the creativity and enjoyment of learning that kids have, but we should probably fix it...

This full colour (!!!) zine features drawings of Santa Claus, a snowman, some sort of horrible monster (yay!), trees, other Christmasy stuff, and what I think is a giant beetroot (but I might be horribly ). Super awesome. I hope she keeps making these forever.

Halifax Hooligans

So the reason for the recent break in service is that I moved back to Canada. Hurray! Just in time for my tenth anniversary of becoming a Canadian.

I've moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in large part because of the Anchor Archive Zine Library. It's a pretty rad place, and I spent yesterday (Sunday) volunteering. I'm sure I'll be around a bunch, and hopefully doing more shifts. I'll also be there to do Food Not Bombs (Sundays), participate in the craft nights (Tuesdays, come make artist trading cards with me!), and other stuff.

Also, from here on our pretty much all of the zines I review on this site (and make myself) are going to end up in the library. I'll look into linking to the entries in their database.

Apologies for the terrible image quality for the next little while, I was hoping to have access to a scanner, but I couldn't get the one at the Anchor Archive to work.

Onwards!

Zine Interview Part Two

The first part of this interview went online yesterday.

6. You have made a lot of zines yourself, what inspires you? How do you decide on a subject matter?

My recent zine series (Oblast) is pretty scattershot in what each individual zine is about, but if you look at my zine history as a whole the overarching theme is one of travel. I love travelling, and a lot of my zines take the form of rewritten diary entries of my trips to various countries.

More recently (over the last year and a half) I've been doing zines on more random stuff (YouTube, potato crisps/chips, etc.), and I think a reason for this is that I haven't been writing for magazines and newspapers as much as I have in the past. I used to write for magazines and newspapers in university and afterwards when I lived in Asia. This really helped me use up my creative juices (for good or ill), but my crisp review zine is a pretty clear successor to some of the articles I wrote in South Korea where I reviewed types of soju (a Korean alcohol) or weird ice cream flavours.

I just write about what I'm interested in at the time and hope other people will like it too.

7. How would you describe the style of your own publications?

All of my most recent zines have been laid out using a computer design program. I use a free program called Scribus, but I have experience using Adobe InDesign. I guess my style is slightly more "polished" than some creators, but at the same time I'm clearly going for a different aesthetic than people doing cut and paste zines (though I've made those in the past).

(Edit/addition: Also, my handwriting is terrible!)

8. What do you find to be the positives and negatives of publishing your work in this way?

The work gets published and is out there. I mean, I could make a blog, but I'm not sure how well the haphazard and random things I write about would go over.

I like having a mini project to work towards, and when I'm done I can hand it to someone and say "Here, I wrote and made this". That's something I couldn't do with the print articles I've written (where once the issue it's printed in is gone, it's harder to show people).

Since I have a physical object that I created I can also swap/trade/sell it to other people. They can even act as a sort of business card, providing my contact info and an example of what I'm capable of doing.

9. Do you have full control of every step that goes into creating your zines, from concept through to printing?

Yes. Well, you are limited by the amount of money you have to spend (ie. colour printing is expensive), and the quality of the printers/copiers you are using. It's frustrating to photocopy a bunch of stuff and have it all be slightly crooked, but I can't let it bother me too much.

10. What advice would you give to someone who would like to start creating their own zines?

Just get out there and do it! Zines can be photos or drawings or collages or comics or essays or poetry or stories or reviews or any combination of the above or anything that can be printed on paper. You don't have to make hundreds of copies of your first zine if you don't want to, you don't even have to make any! (I have numerous zines in various states of completion that I gave up on.) However, my friends have been excited to see my new zines, and it's nice to get feedback on what you've created from people you know.

And that's the end of the interviews! (Well, I was also interviewed on video recently, but that was for something not zine related. Proper reviews should return on Monday.