Awaiting an Epiphany

By Rachel
www.awaitinganepiphany.co.uk

The Manic Street Preachers don’t seem that popular in North America, and I don’t think I could even identify one of their songs if you played them (album covers I could maybe recognize). I understand there is something of a mystique around the band because of the disappearance/suicide of one of their members in the ‘90s, but I still can’t see what creates such love amongst their fans.

I’ve talked to several people who have friends that live in the UK who are obsessed with the Manic Street Preachers. It’s kind of bizarre to look at this fandom that makes zines about the band, gives them presents, and goes to multiple shows on every tour (and then waits for ages outside to see them afterward).

(Hell, living in Canada the idea of going to multiple shows on any tour seems absurd, but that’s mostly because in the UK you’re probably within two hours of multiple cities, while two hours from where I live wouldn’t even get me out of the province.)

Rachel clearly understands the appeal of the band, even if I don’t, and they continue to be one of the things in her life that make her really happy. Which is great! I’m not going to pretend I understand her motivations for some of the actions she does in relation to the band, but I’m sure I do lots of stuff she can’t understand either.

At the very least her stories about going to shows and meeting members of the band make me think that the Manics are very appreciative of their fans, and generally seem like nice people.

I addition to all the stuff about the Manics Rachel also discusses her chronic fatigue syndrome, which isn’t really something I know much about but which sounds pretty awful, and a not very good article that was published after she was interviewed. She felt she had been misrepresented in the article, and it makes me kind of sad that journalists will write about people in such a way.

There’s also a well written piece on extinct animals, and the ways humans are driving more and more spices to extinction. This piece also touches on global warming, and reminded me how, like obsessive Manic Street Preacher fans, I cannot understand what is going on in the minds of climate change deniers, or, worse, those that acknowledge that it exists, but are continuing full steam (or oil burning) ahead with destroying the world.

So overall this is maybe not the most uplifting of zines (though this isn't to say it's depressing either), but it’s well written, and if you’re a fan of the Manic Street Preachers you should definitely check it out.

(Originally written for 365 Zines a Year.)

Culture Slut 24

By Amber Forrester
fight-boredom.com

Recently I met Amber, the creator of this zine. I’d traded zines with her in the past, but we hadn’t really stayed in touch or anything. Just before Christmas she was visiting Halifax with a friend of mine and several of us got together and played Pirate Fluxx (as recommended by Alex Wrekk, super zinester gaming). We also went thrifting at a Salvation Army shop and found a book about feminist zines. We talked about reviewing zines (oh the hilarity!), which isn’t really a topic either of us get to talk about very much, and traded the newest issues of our zines.

Amber’s zine is a perzine, which, for those that don’t know, means it’s about her life. Sometimes when reading perzines I am impressed by the brutal honesty of the writer. They talk about incredibly personal things in their lives: their failures, their successes, their relationships, their problems. It’s kind of intimidating if you’re thinking about writing a perzine yourself, because you wonder what it is that you should be revealing in them.

In the last issue of Amber’s zine that I read she had just broken up with her boyfriend and moved to Montreal. This time (several years later), she’s just broken up with her Montreal boyfriend and is having a hard time. She’s dealing with her alcoholism (a pretty scary thing that definitely isn’t discussed amongst young people), her feelings of self confidence and self worth, and her times feeling suicidal.

It’s all pretty intense stuff. But the entire zine isn’t just about those things.

Amber also discusses her “job”, which is being a guinea pig for various medical experiments at McGill. These range from the banal (smelling things), to the downright bizarre (a test on genital pain, twice, during which she fell asleep), to the scary (all the pharmaceutical tests). She says that she’s not taking things that aren’t already on the market, but it’s still a bit scary nonetheless.

One of the things I learned while talking to Amber is that she writes and edits her text before she gets them ready for this zine. This may surprise some people who have read her zine, as the entire thing is either handwritten or done using a typewriter, but I think the extra effort really shows and makes Amber’s prose more readable.

If you're into perzines, or living in Montreal, Amber's zines are worth reading, even if there is a distinct lack of monsters and ray guns.

(Originally written for 365 Zines a Year.)

Plan B

By Laura Bifano
www.laurabifano.com

Unlike the zine I reviewed yesterday, this comic does have monsters! Or one monster at least. Clearly I am biased towards unspeakable monstrosities.

This is a wordless comic about a little girl (based on the author) dreaming about becoming a mermaid. She loves mermaids (like a certain person I know), and thinks that being a mermaid will be the best thing ever!

Of course when she actually encounters a “mermaid” she finds it is less awesome than she would hope, and her dream is irreparably shattered.

The art is fantastic, the wordless storytelling is excellent, and the story is both funny, and a little sad (the disappointment of the mermaid! The disappointment of the little girl). The price on this thing is (in my opinion) kind of outrageous, but Bifano is a really good artist (check out this amazing painting of a unicorn), and I feel like her work would be much better presented as part of an anthology like Flight, where it would be presented at a better size and a better price, and where far more people would be exposed to her work. Hopefully that'll happen in the future.



(Originally written for 365 Zines a Year.)

The Filth Issue 2

thefilthsubmissions@gmail.com
www.wix.com/the_filth/zine

I feel kind of bad saying this, but the thing I liked most about this anthology is the sewn binding (you can see it on the edge of the cover, it seems to have been done by a sewing machine). It’s kind of a weird thing to like, but I appreciate it when people have gone to the extra effort to do things like that.

The actual contents, however, don’t really appeal to me. There’s your average mix of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and some other stuff, and like any anthology or magazine you’re not going to like all of it, but in this case I didn’t like any of it.

This isn’t to say that the content here is necessarily bad, just that it wasn’t really my thing. I mean, I do read a fair bit (I generally finish at least two books a month, but I tend to prefer genre fiction (I’m reading Mogworld right now and really enjoying it!). At the same time, I do have a degree in Russian Literature, and read a pretty varied range of stuff, but I tend not to read stories about drug addicts, junkies, and people who like endin’ a lot of their sentences with apostrophes. (That is the weirdest complaint ever, but it’s true.) Why have I gone on about this so much? Because the two longest pieces in the book are about minor criminals and drug use. Not really my thing (I didn’t even like The Wire though, so what do I know).

I’m also not really interested in people telling me about how they became a single parent with four children. I just cannot understand their mindset in any way, and the piece doesn’t really delve into why the person actually had their children.

In fact, the most interesting thing in this zine, to me, was one of the characters talking about a prescription medication I’ve been on. And that was more of a “oh, I recognize that pharmaceutical name and very few of the others mentioned” than anything else.

Actually, that's not true. There was an interview with a musician that interested me enough (ie. it talks about how awesome robots and comics are) to look him up online, but, alas, I can find no mention of Music to Defend Reality from Marauding Hordes of Inter-dimensional Hostiles Volume 1. (Edit: Oh wait, apparently it was sent to me, I just found it in my "box of zines to review". It's actually pretty good. )

Again, I will say that none of the work here is necessarily bad (well, some of it is), just that the content matter really doesn’t appeal to me as it (mostly) lacks spaceships, monsters, humour (at least a type I enjoy), and characters I can relate to. But maybe you’ll like it.

(Originally written for 365 Zines a Year.)

Entropy no. 4: Good Neighbours

By Aaron Costain
www.aaroncostain.com

This short comic is an adaptation of one of Aesop’s fables and after reading it I realized that I know nothing about Aesop whatsoever. Well, that’s not true, I’ll list the things I do know.

1. Liked telling stories about animals.
2. Is dead.
3. From ancient Greece (?).
4. Male (?).

So I looked this person up on Wikipedia and discovered that “his existence remains uncertain”. Aha! That explains why I don’t know anything about him. Hell, people apparently can’t even decide what continent he was from (he’s been depicted as a black Ethiopian). The page also discusses how many of the fables attributed to Aesop were from other sources, and if Aesop did exist he certainly didn’t create all the stories credited to him. So in truth there are only two things we know about Aesop.

1. May have existed.
2. May have created stories.

But, we know that this specific comic does exist! It tells the story of the eagle, the cat, and the sow (pig). It’s a kind of weird story, and I can’t figure out a moral for the story other than “cats are lying jackasses, only out for themselves, and not to be trusted” or maybe “lie to other people, and play them against each other to provide for yourself and your family”. Either way, I don’t think I’m learning the correct moral from this story.

The comic is pretty cute though, tells the story pretty well, and overall is successful. Plus: drawings of cats doing cat stuff! Everyone loves that.



(Originally written for 365 Zines a Year.)