Zine Interview Part One

Shortly after the last interview, another girl asked to interview me about my site and my zines for her honours project at Liverpool John Moores University / St. Helens College.

I'm going to split this interview into two parts, with the second one going online tomorrow.

1. When did you first become aware of zines and where did the initial interest come from?

I don't remember exactly, but I'm guessing it would have been around late 1998/early 1999 during my first year of high school. I would have been fifteen at the time and remember going to parties at a punk house in which my friend was renting a room. I recall a couple of zines from that time period, though exactly when I picked them up I do not remember. I think the first ones I read were actually by people I vaguely knew (ie. friends of friends), but it was a long time ago. I didn't make my first zine until about four years later when I was in university.

2. You're clearly passionate about the zine industry, what attracts you to it so much?

I'm a big fan of DIY, and the idea that you can just make your own magazine and sell/give it away is something that really appeals to me. I enjoy the way it sidesteps the mainstream, and find it interesting how literally anything can be the subject of a zine. The only thing that really unites them is that they're printed on paper.

Going back to the DIY aspect I like to encourage people to make stuff and do things. I really enjoy making and trading artist trading cards, and it bothers me sometimes when people say things like "Oh, I'm not an artist" and don't want to create something. I can't draw anything, but everyone has skills doing something. I really wonder what the education system is doing to kids that stops them being creative and wanting to learn.

The same applies to zines. Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone has something they're passionate about. I want to encourage everyone to create more, though I don't know how good a job I do of that.

3. You feature a wide range of zines on your blog, where do you source them from?

I get a lot of zines from zine events. I was recently at the Brighton Zinefest and got a bunch from that. I also go to a lot of comic book events (this one was the most recent). I usually try to trade/swap with other people at the events (I am bad at capitalism), but I also buy them sometimes.

People also send them to me in the mail. I usually get one or two emails a week from people asking if I could review their zines or comics. I always agree! I pretty much always send them a zine back too.

4. How do you differentiate between a 'good' zine and a 'bad' one?

Woah, how philosophical! How do we differentiate between good and bad anything? Or even the very concepts of good and bad?

Reviews are very personal things, and I know there are zines that I don't particularly like that other people really enjoy. I've also learnt that putting a robot or a monster into your zine is probably going to make me like it to some degree.

But I think the most important thing is care and effort. Some people equate "do it yourself" with "do it quickly and badly", and while there is certainly a place for 24 hour zines and similar projects I find myself incredibly frustrated when I come across zines filled with spelling, grammar, and layout mistakes. Just because you want to hand write your zine and use a "cut and paste" style doesn't mean the content has to be a first draft.

5. From your time reviewing zines, do you have any favourite or stand out issues that you could highlight?

I've reviewed over four hundred zines and minicomics by this point, and going back and making a short list would be incredibly difficult...

But! I really enjoy Peach Melba, a monthly list zine made by a 13 year old girl. She's already up to issue 19! I've read/reviewed more issues of PM than any other zine, so it kind of sticks in my mind.

I just read a zine (Loserdom #21) with a massive (over twenty pages!) series of interviews with four or five different punks who lived in a small town outside of Dublin in Ireland in the early '80s. It's a fascinating look into a subculture, a time, an the people who lived during them.

There's a lot of comics I've really enjoyed, and some artists I've enjoyed are Philip Barrett, Will Kirkby, Nich Angell, Nikki Stu, Isy Morgenmuffel, Steve Rumlad, and I could go on listing all day really.

Come back tomorrow for part two!

The Last Ten Videos I Watched on YouTube Interview

It turns out that moving continents can be more stressful, anxiety causing, and crazy than I had anticipated. You'd think I'd know better by now. Reviews should return next week, but until then I'll be running some interviews I recently completed.

The first is an interview about my zine The Last Ten Videos I Watched on YouTube that I completed for a girl who attends the London College of Communication (apparently my zine is in their library!). Her project was about how video sites effect how people interact with art, and apparently my zine was interesting to her. Amazing! I still have copies of this zine available, so if you'd like one just let me know.

What made you choose the videos you did for inclusion in the zine?

It was literally the ten videos I watched in full on YouTube in chronological order after I decided to make the zine. It was just after the Lady Gaga Telephone video came out, and the internet was filled with people talking about that, so I choose that as the starting point, and over the next few days I screendshotted (what an awkward word) and wrote about every video I watched. I didn't include videos I didn't watch all of (and there was at least one I stopped so I didn't include it in the zine, I can't remember what it was or why I didn't want it though), or videos I had open in the background so that I could listen to the music.

I thought it was an interesting look at what I actually watched on Youtube, and kind of showed how random some of the stuff up there is.

What made you choose YouTube as a zine subject?

I think it was a combination of several factors, primarily being people not understanding what a zine was and when you told them wondering why you didn't just do it as a blog or a website. I'd recently made a zine in the same format (sideways quartersized?) and realized that an image of a YouTube video would fit on the page pretty well. So I thought "Why not make a zine that _would_ make considerably more sense as a website?". YouTube comments (and many comments on websites in general) are generally thought of as stupid and things that you should ignore, so I found it amusing to write some and print them in a zine, "forcing" people to read them.

You might not be able to tell now (or from the quality of the zine you read), but I really attempted to make the zine look as much like YouTube as possible. It has the same fonts, style, and images as the website did at the time. Funnily about a week after I finished making the zine YouTube revamped the design of their website so that my zine now also functions as an archive of what YouTube looked like in March
2010.

Why make this zine in the first place?

Why make any zine at all? Why make anything at all? Because I thought it was a funny thing to do, and because other zine projects I was working on where getting bogged down as I got fed up with them. I like to have a new zine ready for each zine event I go to (even if I don't always manage!), and I made this one in less than two weeks before a Midlands Zinester meetup I helped organize. I can spend ages on zines that I care about a lot, but I seem to get more response from the silly, funny ones that take less time to make (my guide to last year's Eurovision song contest, a zine that reviewed various flavours of crisps). One of the best responses to this one have been people telling me that after reading the zine they've gone out and searched for some of the videos I "reviewed". I don't think this zine could be more successful than that.

I started making a second issue of YouTube videos, but I stopped about halfway through grabbing images. I've got about five videos screenshotted (and some of them are pretty good!), and another one bookmarked, but somehow it would seem weird to specifically go out and watch videos that are wierd on purpose. I liked the mundanity of some of them. I am currently working on another zine about the internet, which is a story/history inspired by a Wikipedia page. We'll see how that one goes.

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And just because I can, here are a couple of quotes about the zine from some people.

Jimi Gherkin (one of the organizers of the London Alternative Press Fairs, and who I reviewed last month) said "I really enjoyed [the] zine [...] [I] wish I'd thought of it!!".

Lights Go Out (a UK punk fanzine) said "Genius! [...] Seriously such a fun and unique zine!".

Like vs Shit

By Bernard Boulevard and Gordon Gordon
Chow Chow Productions
PO Box 20204
Seattle, WA
98102
USA

My slang usage is pretty ridiculous sometimes. I totally say "like" and "rad" and "totally" and "killer" like all the time. On at least one incidence I impressed someone with my knowledge of literature, philosophy, and history despite saying something along the lines of "I love going to art galleries and shit like that". I've been told I speak Russian like a Russian valley girl (whatever that means). My accent is vague to the point that other Canadians don't know what part of Canada I'm from.

What I'm really saying is that just because you may say the word like from time to time (or constantly) it doesn't mean that you're an idiot. Yeah, I fall into that trap too when people say things so filled with slang, but you shouldn't really judge people on that sort of shit.

And speaking of shit! I was hoping that this zine would go through all the different definitions of the word "shit", but it only mentions a couple of them. I was having a conversation with my brother a while ago about how hard it is to learn English, and we thought of all the different ways you can use the word, so let's list some:

1. Excrement. "That dog shit on the floor."
2. Something terrible. "That book was shit."
3. Something good ("the" is always required for this one). "That zine is the shit."
4. A bad situation. "You are in deep shit because of what you did."
5. Pot. "Oh yeah, this is some good shit."
6. Things in general. "Just need to clear all this shit off my desk."

There's loads more! Maybe we need to get Joe Decie to do another minicomic.

Little Garden Volume 1 Part 1

By Ayo

Whereas yesterday's comic suffered from a lack of monsters, this one is nothing but monsters! Monsters with wings! Monsters with hoofs! Monsters with three eyes! Monsters with horns!

Okay, so I guess they're pretty much just mostly human women with some weirdness, but that's close enough for me. The images contained in here aren't really a comic, rather they just show random snapshots from the lives of these women letting us know how their community functions. They farm, they deliver mail, they hang out, they go swimming. There's no plot, but rather we see these characters just living their lives. It's a fun little book even if I'm not really down with the portrayal of males (either a target of derision or tied up).

The art is pretty clearly not for everyone. There's an ugliness to a lot of it that appeals to me somehow. I find it kind of hard to describe, though funnily it's the way the lips and eyelids are drawn that make these characters look the most monstrous rather than their extra appendages.

The Sweeper

By Amy Peltn

I'm in Canada! I haven't even looked at a zine (other than to pack it) in over a week. There might be some radio silence for a bit next week, but if there are any gaps I should be back in action by April.

Sometimes I come across comics that just leave me utterly mystified. This is definitely such a case. I don't know why this comic exists. Twelve entirely silent pages of full page images like those below. A guy hangs up something on the fence (what it is I have no idea), his broom falls over, he picks up it, the thing blows away. What? Why did I read this?

Am I just missing something? Maybe if the main character had been a robot I'd like it more.

7String Volume Zero

By Nich Angell
nichangell.co.uk

This big, glossy, full colour comic is filled with impressive art and some pretty cool action, but it is more definitively a zero issue. This means that it gives some background info about the characters, has some (really nice) pin ups, and features a couple of short comics. They all help to set the up the world that Angell is creating, but the major story he's working on clearly hasn't happened yet.

That story is explained in the opening text page, which is probably the weakest part of the comic. Not the ideas, which feature a maniacal villain trying to destroy the "eternal cosmic melody" by stealing a magic flute and an "elite group of cosmic musicians" creating a seven stringed sword instrument to save the universe. But rather parts of the text are a bit awkward and could have used one more rewrite. Generally the short comics don't fall into this problem, but I guess Angell's skills lie more in drawing some pretty awesome pictures instead of paragraph after paragraph of text.

The first comic is a three pager with the main character, Zachary Briarpatch, facing off against a cowboy type character, and the thing it reminded me of the most is the pre-credits action bit at the beginning of certain cartoons and TV shows. We're introduced to the main character, see that he can do awesome things that are beyond the abilities of normal people ("But, that's impossible... No-one can harmonize that fast"), and defeats the bad guy. The end! It's a compliment to Angell's art style and use of colour that I can easily see it as the intro to a cartoon. The sound effects make noises in my head and I'm kind of upset when the opening credits don't come up and then we head into the longer incredible adventure.

Looking at Angell's art it's clear to see that his inspirations are manga, video games, and cartoons, but his combination of all these aspects is original and looks really amazing. Part of this is down to his fantastic use of colour, which at times reminded me of the teaser trailer of Molly Star Racer (did anyone actually watch the show that eventually came out? Was it any good?).

Design-wise Angell's characters are more human than those in MSR (noses!), though they are still fairly stylized, featuring incredibly pointy knees, and haircuts that can only exist in a comic book.

The only major failing of Angell's art is that at times I find his faces aren't up to the standard of the rest of the art, being less detailed and looking a bit strange at times. Upon realizing this I then wonder if Angell has designed his main character's hair so that he doesn't have to bother drawing his eyes. Hmm...

The action sequences sing, the colours pop, the story seems like it's going to rock, and to be honest I'm having a hard time thinking up any more music related analogies. I can't wait until Angell finishes this and I can read the whole thing.

Loserdom #21

loserdomzine@gmail.com
www.loserdomzine.com

One of my favourite things about reviewing things for this blog is that I read so many random things, and sometimes I am completely and utterly blown away by content I did not expect.

That is the case with Loserdom #21. I'd read some issues before, but nothing prepared me for the massive (over twenty pages!) history of the Dalkey punks that appeared in this issue.

Dalkey is a village suburb of Dublin in Ireland, and it doesn't seem like that exciting a place to live. Anto grew up there, and remembers being a little kid in the early '80s and being both scared and fascinated by the punks he saw hanging around town. Almost thirty years later he's tracked five of them down and interviewed them about what being a punk in that time was like, how they got involved with the scene, what music they listened to, how they dressed, where they hung out, how the group came to an end, and what they're up to now.

It is an incredibly epic piece of journalism, and feels more like the basis of someone's thesis in folklore, anthropology, sociology, or history than an article in a zine. It's a fascinating piece made all the more interesting because of the real emotions that the interviews conjure up in people. You can feel the joy and fun that these people had back when they were kids, and then, in the most brutal and unexpected part, there is a tragedy. I don't really want to spoil what happened, but it was a big enough thing that it was mentioned in newspapers at the time (which have been dug up, photocopied, and included here).

Even if that was the only thing in Loserdom #21 it would be worth picking up, but this is a massive zine and there's loads of other stuff too! Comics about riding bicycles, an interview with a woman who's been busking in Dublin since 1985, and more. Not all of it appealed to me, but that's always the case with anthologies, and I think this is definitely worth checking out.