What We Did For Kicks

What We Did For Kicks

from Blackguard

36 pages, digest size, by James Andre with art by Jacek Zabawa, Jase Harper and Luke Pickett, www.milkshadowbooks.com
...Kicks is a lit zine with a bunch of short stories and poems, mainly dealing with drug-fueled nights and days. The writing is strong and relentless (James also wrote the excellent pornstore zine, XXX Neon Sign), really dragging the reader into these seedy, strung-out scenes. There is some less grim stuff in here, like the story "Low Level Geeks With High Level Lighters' about a school formal which the narrator and his friends decide to sabotage with smoke bombs. There's also a bizarre story, 'Punkzzz On The Prowl' (set in 1979) about a group of punks stealing beer, then wanting to chain whip some "pretty kid", but they couldn't find him, but before that they attempted to pierce their nipples and cocks with syringes, which didn't work because the needle blunted too quick, so they instead got out a homemade tattoo gun and one of them wrote 'hate' on his neck, figuring he could change it to 'fate' if he ever got a job.
There's real mutant-looking illustrations throughout that fit these stories well.