Synesthesia

A5, 20 colour pages

£3.62 (+ £3.62 p&p)

Synaesthesia (the condition) is sensory confusion. Your house tastes like cake. Your lover’s voice smells like fresh cut grass. Your favourite song feels crunchy. The number seven is green, for some reason.

Synesthesia (the zine) dives headfirst into delirium. Stacey Matchett evokes a sense of desperate, inescapable confusion in her pastel colour palettes, bold rainbow scribbles and delicate black linework - it’s a beautiful assault on the senses. 

Usually when poetry and artwork appear together in print, the images end up playing second fiddle; they usually serve as garnish, pretty pictures to illustrate the words. Matchett turns this convention on its head. The bright images dominate the pages of this zine, holding hostage the reader’s psyche and rendering the accompanying poetry somewhat redundant. It’s not that the poetry is particularly poor, more that within the psychedelic pages of Synesthesia its role is secondary to the artwork.

When I first encountered Matchett’s work in volume one of Break the Chain, I described it as “grunge expressionism”. Reading through Synesthesia, it seems clear to me now that her work is too nebulous to fit within that category; her art style shifts throughout the pages, and yet each drawing bears her stylistic signature.

Matchett does a great job of creating a collection of artwork centred upon a theme without falling into predictability – each page explores a different facet of a disorganised mind and does so with a touching vulnerability.

You can buy your copy of Synesthesia here.


Review by J.L. Corbett

Cheeky Monkey

16.5cm x 24cm, 32 colour pages, colour cover.

£3.50 p&p

One of the great things about zines is that they can be about absolutely anything. Having said that, I was rather taken aback recently when a guy approached my stall at Leeds Zine Fair and handed me what appeared to be a zine geared towards children.

Cheeky Monkey follows its eponymous character and his raccoon sidekick on their bizarre, occasionally psychedelic quest to uncover the truth about unseen character Ali-Ra-Ra, and why he’s pestering the entire jungle community for avocados. The story manages to be zany enough for kids to enjoy, whilst remaining sufficiently wholesome to keep their parents happy.

The creators (Fred Morris and Dominic Linton of King Louie's Lab) have clearly done their homework with Cheeky Monkey. They’ve borrowed devices from kids’ television programmes and made them work on the page. The narrative voice is reminiscent of the speaking style from currently popular cartoons such as Peppa Pig or We Bare Bears, and the main characters pose on the back cover like they’re in the opening credits of a kids’ TV show.

It’s a good effort from the South London zine-makers, especially considering that they’re treading new ground in marketing their zines to children. With luck, Cheeky Monkey could be a gateway for younger readers discovering the world of zines.

Cheeky Monkey is available for purchase here.


Review by JL Corbett.

Bizarrism No. 15 [July 2017]

Chris Mikul, PO Box K546, Haymarket NSW 1240, AUSTRALIA + cathob [at] zip.com.au Price: $8.00 Trades? Maybe. If your zine is very good. Contact first; Size: 11.75" x 8.25" Page count: 44

Some really great stuff in this new issue. Here's my Top 3:

1 - 'The Protests of Sandy Berger' - If you've ever found yourself wondering about those people who walk around town - or even stand in the one spot - wearing hand-written signs about UFOs or religion or THE EVILS OF PSYCHIATRY, then you will love this article. Sandy Berger walked around Sydney in the 1970s and '80s wearing signs warning of the evils of psychiatry, and that's just ONE of his many alternating endearing/infuriating quirks;

2 - 'In the Town of Marwencol' - The story of Mark Hogancamp who, in 2000, was almost beaten to death outside a New York bar, and with his resulting head trauma/memory loss created a WWII-era town populated by Ken and Barbie type dolls and wrote hundreds of pages to tell their stories, and took hundreds of photographs of scenes from their dramatic lives. Absolutely fascinating;

3 - 'My Favourite Dictators No. 9 - Kim Jong-il [with illustrations by Glenn Smith] - I get mixed up about Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un, but the former is the Daddy [now dead] and the latter is the son, now firing rockets all over the Pacific and making a damn nuisance of himself. He's also the star of one of the greatest episodes of South Park! ... Or perhaps I'm thinking of the movie...

If you're alive, you must obtain a copy!