Les Carnets de Rastapopoulos #8

By Robert Gauvin
Les Carnets de Rastopopoulos
2-7 Larch Street
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada
K1R 6W4

This is one of the neatest zines I've seen in a while. It's about Gauvin's attempts to get a penpal in the early 1980s. At first he is content to exchange letters with people from penpal organizations, but soon he has a new goal in mind: a penpal "on the other side of the Iron Curtain". In the early '80s this must have seemed super exotic, and also considerably more difficult than finding someone in Denmark to trade letters with.

Gauvin decides to write to the Czechoslovakian and Yugoslavian embassies and, much to my surprise, actually gets a response! He writes to some youth organizations in those countries and after several months he finally gets a response! Of course it's in Serbian which isn't too helpful to someone who lives in small town New Brunswick.

And then the next day there are 14 more letters, then 12, then 16... In total Gauvin received about 250 letters (mostly in Serbian), which included photos, Yugoslav dollars, lipstick prints, and cut outs of the original article printed in TV Novosti magazine that said he wanted a penpal.

"There was so much mail suddenly flowing from Yugoslavia to the small obscure rural Atlantic Canadian post office of Bouctouche people along the postal supply chain took notice. This one time a letter arrive in a magnificent colour poster elaborately folded to act as an envelope. There was hardly any trade of my address on the surface. Just "Try Bouctouche" scribbled on it by a postal employee along the postal supply chain. Guessing it belonged with the hordes of correspondance heading to that previously unknown destination point."

Soon after the letters from Yugoslavia begin to dry up, a letter from Czechoslovakia arrives. At first Gauvin is afraid that he'll get hundreds more letters in a language he can't understand, but this time the majority of the letters arrived in French and English. This led to a new problem, how to choose which letters from the hundreds received that should receive replies.

This zine reminded me of getting a penpal letter in a class soon after I moved to Canada. I feel bad because I didn't reply to it because it was from some "boring" girl (I was 8!). I'm much better at responding to mail nowadays.

I thought this zine was cute and funny and I'm looking forward to reading more issues. Plus it has some neat maps in the middle that show all the countries in which Gauvin has had penpals. There are a lot of them!

David Yoder's Awesome Journal #7

By David Yoder

Diary comics are pretty popular nowadays, especially compared to the past (when they didn't exist at all!), but for the most part I don't really get them.

Well, that's not true. I "get them" in the sense that I understand one of the major reasons that people make them: it causes you to draw every day. And if you want to get good at anything, then you really do need to do it every day.

However, for the most part diary comics don't do much for me, and this is because most people's lives are kind of...boring. I mean, we complain about people posting pictures of the food they ate on facebook or twitter or whatever, so why should making a comic where "I went to a restaurant" is a major event (and yet no additional information is supplied)?

Artwise these comics don't do that much for me, but I think that's probably because they're made without any real planning. The borders are all shaky and hand drawn, and some of the panels are just whatever space is left on the page.

Of course, some people really enjoy reading diary comics. I guess they enjoy the view into someone else's day to day life, but I think I mostly find them kind of boring. But hell, it's not like if I made them they'd be any better (Saturday: Ate cake for breakfast, went to a thrift store with a friend, bought a kinda janky chest of drawers for $5, went to another friend's house to play Unexploded Cow and watch Striptease Samurai Squadron).

Oak & Linden #2

By Pat Barrett
patbarrett.com

The first comic in this issue of Oak & Linden is a pretty awesome one about people going to war with gods because they are jackasses who eat all of their goats (see below).  It's pretty great, and uses an interesting art style where the characters look more like palaeolithic art than what you would expect to see in a comic.

The other comics use art styles that are more like what you'd expect in a comic. The one I liked the most was a sort of bizarre dream type comic about a guy who steals a wallet and finds a woman inside it. It was pretty strange, but I liked how things happened for seemingly no real reason. Just like in a dream!

The longest story in here is about a jackass space captain who takes advantages of the aliens on the planet he crash lands on. I'm guessing it's supposed to represent how white people treat developing nations, but mostly I just think the space captain is a jerk.

Plus there's a diary comic called "The Trouble with Diary Comics", about how people keep asking to be in your comic once they know you make one. I thought it was pretty funny.

Werewolf!!

By various

Usually I'm not that big a fan of anthology comics. I mean, sure some of the contents will be good (usually), but I'll also not care for or actively dislike other content. Of course, most anthologies aren't about werewolves, and that creates a completely different set of judging criteria.

Werewolves are a type of monster, and I love monsters, so already I'm in favour of a comic anthology about werewolves. The stories in Werewolf!! range from slice of life comedy to all out nun action, so there are werewolf stories for everyone!

The nun story ("The Bad-Ass Habit" by Laura Terry) is pretty good, though I do have to wonder why the concept of warrior nuns seems to be so ingrained in our culture. I mean, do people even interact with nuns any more? I don't think I've seen one in years. I sort of feel bad for anyone that became one, it seems like such a weird way to live. Anyway, none (hah!) of that is brought up in this story which features a nun choking a werewolf with a rosary.

There's a cute/sad story by Nick Patten that is really more about a vampire than a werewolf, but it _also_ has a mummy in it, so I'll give it a pass. "Fail Wolves" by Betsey Swardlick features vegan werewolves and their attempts to get some fake chicken. Since it involves bicycle chase scenes and characters in dumpsters I thought it was pretty fun.

The other comics in here are pretty good too, though I won't bother going through them all individually. Needless to say, if you're interested in reading some werewolf comics you should check out this one. (And the first issue.)

Polite Fiction 2

By José-Luis Olivares

joseluisolivares.com

So I go travelling for two months and manage to keep to my three times a week schedule despite sleeping on people's floors and couches and not having consistent internet access.

Then I get back to Vancouver, and immediately start missing updates. In my defense I was sick, and had to move house, and blah blah blah. If you're reading a zine review site you know that the combination of zinester with blogger probably produces more excuses than anything else. ; )

Anyway, before I left on my trip I scanned every single zine in my review pile, and now there are only 13 left! (Of course I got _a lot_ on my travels, and also people sent some to me while I was travelling, including my brother who sent me a huge box of old ones, so this site won't be going away any time soon).

This is a pretty strange little comic. It's made up of several stories, all but one of which are in black and white. Some of the "stories" don't really have a narrative, such as the first one "Running Bird". It's about a weird bird headed person that runs a bunch. They just run past abstract backgrounds and some of the pages remind me more of pop art (sorta like Keith Haring). It's kind of interesting to see this style of comic, though I personally don't really care for it that much.

The second comic, "Tree-Island Birds", makes more "sense" in that things happen in reaction to other things and there's a narrative. A person washes up on a desert island, and has to deal with being stuck there with the birds who make it their home. It's actually kind of depressing, though I'm impressed by the amount of emotion Olivares gets out of the artwork considering the person has basically no facial features (see below).

There's also a dream comic, and a diary comic that is actually about diary comics and why some people make them. These use a different style than the other comics, and actually have text and dialogue. I think the diary comic was one of the more interesting of that style that I've read recently, though more on that soon.

Today 2

By Stef Bradley

todayzine.wordpress.com

Today is filled with brief one page comics/illustrations that seem to be about random things from Bradley's life. They cover silverfish infestations (and how they'll EAT YOUR BOOKS), watching horror movies between hands held up to your face (scary!), having shoes thrown at you from a moving car while walking down the street (I once had someone throw a basketball at me from a car), wind and weather, how their grandma had an encounter with an owl that she likened to a Second World War plane flying overhead, bowling, and other weird and random stuff.

I think the story I liked the best was the one about a terrifying plan by "bigwigs" at Bradley's primary school to have kids drink more milk. It involved a lifesize plastic cow that had to be milked everyday by the kids. Apparently it traumatized everyone.

Bradley has an art style that I really enjoy. It's fairly simple, but the people represented always seem to be incredibly emotional. They're always screaming or grinning crazily or crying or feeling something to an extreme level. It makes it seem as though Bradley and their friends and family live in a state of constant emotional overdrive. Tape drive broken so that you can't listen to Van Halen tapes? Clearly the rational response is to fall on your knees, scream, and cry. Plus I like the way that hair is drawn. It's not super complicated, but I think the way lines are used looks pretty neat.

Guts Power 2

By Paul Jon Milne

http://cargocollective.com/pauljonmilne

http://gristtothemilne.blogspot.com/

It is the futuristic year 2003 and the UK is all messed up due to a time travel incident or something. Nobody really seems to know exactly what happened, other than it was an event called "the Body Riot". At any rate, time no longer really happens, there are weird monster things everywhere, buildings seem to be made of decaying....something, and horrible government agencies generally just try to make people more depressed (just like now!).

In this world are Bebox (human?), LoveLaffs1820 (part ober-dominensional sentio-gas), and Dearth (human?), and they'll overthrow the government and make things right! Well, once they manage to get back on the dole (unemployment) and get some money so they can go clubbing first.

This comic is _weird_. I get the feeling that Milne has a whole history set up that explains all the strange stuff going on, but at the same time they could just be making it all up as they go along. Either is entirely possible.I generally enjoyed the weirdness in this comic and the random asides and injokes that happen. A robot version of Robert Burns called Robot Burns? Genius! Someone who's mom (or one of their moms) is a sentient gas that appears to live in a flower vase? That's great! But at the same time some of the things that appear are kind of gross and grotesque and I'm just left going "What is that?"

While I enjoy some aspects of the art, like the thick lines around the characters, I found other parts to not really be my thing (though that could just be the "ick" factor). I would be really curious to see what this world and these characters look like in colour though.