Electric Baby

(This cover is actually NEON ORANGE in real life, but my scanner apparently hates colour.)

By Jimi Gherkin
myspace.com/jimigherkin
comicsandzines.wordpress.com

I've known Jimi Gherkin for a while, but for some reason I didn't pick up any of his zines until I was down at the Alternative Press Fair in London a few months ago. He's currently involved in planning the International Alternative Press Festival for May which sounds really fun! You should go, check out the website for more details.

I really had no idea what this zine was going to be about (I mean, look at the cover!), but it turned out to be a really fun and enthusiastic zine about loads of different things. Gherkin's apparent near constant optimsm in this zine is kind of scary to me, but it also kind of makes me jealous. Um, but enough about my mental state...

There's a guide on how to screen print at home (that's how he did the cover! It looks really good), a comicstrip showing how ideas are used in the "mainstream" and "small press" universes (which features a girl making a zine called "Vagina Party"), boundless optimism about how you are awesome and can achieve everything you want, only positive reviews of zines, encouragement to do nice things to other people, and a mirror on the inside backpage that is supposed to show you how amazing and special you are. Awwwww.

I mean, some of it is kind of lame, but at the same time I feel really horrible for writing something like that. Why should I say someone being enthusiastic and happy shouldn't be? I kind of wish I felt that way more often, and at the least Gherkin has made me smile with this zine.


(The interior pages are all NEON YELLOW, but my scanner didn't pick up that either. *sigh*)

(This review was originally published on 365 Zines a Year.)