By Bill Volk
This comic begins with a giant, space-faring, "stegosaurussed", god sperm flying through outer space. An auspicious beginning for sure! The story then becomes about the evolution and societal progression of a race of "wee scummy men".
The society that Volk creates is pretty neat, and I especially liked the incredibly decadent concept of "doubling" that was done by the incredibly rich people in this comic. Doubling is when someone, in order to prove their wealth, has exact duplicates of everything they own created, and then never uses them. The society goes to pretty insane extremes in their pursuit of showing off how rich they are, and how other factions of society respond.
While I liked this idea a lot, I wish more time had been spent on it and maybe the personal experiences of some of the people in this world. Also the ending is a total cop-out. Lame!
Фиды
I originally wasn't going to review Roctober. It's the size of a magazine! It has a colour cover! It's full of ads! But, they were invited to be at the Zine Pavilion at the ALA conference a few weeks ago, and they do only have a print run of 2,500 (though when does print run determine if something is a zine or not?), but what finally changed my mind was that this was an anniversary issue filled with content from every issue of Roctober up to this one, including when it was just a small photocopied thing (I think...).
Roctober is primarily a music magazine, though it's got a pretty eclectic mix of stuff. This issue features loads of reviews (most of which I didn't read, though I did check out the one of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, which terrifyingly made over $400 million dollars internationally, and seems to be in the top 150 grossing movies ever...), interviews (such as with the White Sox organist and a member of the New Monkees), in depth bios/retrospectives of artists, and way more.
I made the cover and put together this collaborative zine that was created at the Zine Pavilion at the American Library Association conference in Chicago. It's filled with stories of weird things people have seen or heard in libraries.
If you go to the tumblr, you can download some PDFS. Check it out!
By Mary Karaplis/Mei Ktiny-vices.com
The cover and title of this comic make it seem like it's going to be a lot more...confrontational than it is. As though most of the comic is going to be about someone incredibly bitter and jaded about relationships. And while Karaplis might be bitter and jaded, it doesn't really come through in the comic. While it starts with her heart being broken, she soon (or at least a short number of pages later) finds another person, and eventually falls in love with them.
While some of the comics in here are kind of cute, I think my disconnection from them probably says more about me and my past history of relationships (ie. I have not been in many long term relationships) than the creator. Of course, I'm sure it doesn't help that I don't think the people in this comic seem like people I'd want to go out with. (Really? You need to remind your partner to shower?!)
What I do like is the artwork, which is really cute. I didn't scan the image, but there are some pictures of drunk owls in here that are totally adorable.
So this past weekend I got to attend the Iowa City Zine Librarian (un)Conference. It was a pretty awesome experience. I got to meet a bunch of librarians who deal with zines in their collections, participate in some great discussions, and volunteer to do more work. Yay! (Wait, more work? Yay?)
If you didn't get to attend there should be notes on each of the sessions up on the wiki (check the schedule page), and there are youtube channels with recordings of at least some of goings on too.
One of the things we decided on doing was putting more content on zinelibraries.info, so hopefully in the next few months you'll start to see photo tours of zine collections, zine reading lists on various topics, and more. Awesome!
I can't wait until the one next year. Hopefully I'll be able to attend!
PO Box 26183
Baltimore, MD
21210
USA
I'll admit, I wasn't really sure what I was reading until I got to the final page of this zine and read the guidelines for people who want to submit to future issues. So what is Docs? Well, it's brief three topic/page biographies of people: living, dead, or entirely fictional.
And by "biography" I'm speaking pretty loosely, there are pictures, and sheet music, and weird stories, and to be honest I really didn't have any idea what I was reading the first time through. Where these true? They didn't really seem to be...
By Pete Jordanhttp://www.cityofbikes.com/
Hey! This isn't a zine! It's a book! What gives? Well, parts of it were originally published as zines, so it totally counts. Dishwasher is Jordan's tale of his life and the decade plus he spent washing dishes all over America in his quest to wash dishes in all 50 states. That sounds kind of horrible, but Jordan has a writing style that is incredibly enjoyable to read, which can be seen in the fact that I read this book in two days, and that the 16th issue of Dishwasher (which was never released) was going to have a print run of 10,000! (And I thought it was good that I'd printed almost 100 issues of Two Fisted Librarians...)
Recently I got to help run the Zine Pavilion at the American Library Association annual conference. It was in Chicago, and the conference had about 27,000 people attend. Wow!
Overall the conference was really cool, I met lots of awesome librarians, got to interview some comic book creators and zinesters, ran a Call of Cthulhu game, and helped educate a lot of people about zines. You can check out the Zine Pavilion tumblr which has photos and videos and other stuff on it.
By Paul Jon Milnehttp://cargocollective.com/pauljonmilnehttp://gristtothemilne.blogspot.com/
Unemployment seems to be a bigger part of culture in the UK. I mean, I've had plenty of friends who have been unemployed, and who have collected unemployment benefits, but people seem to make less of a deal about it. Perhaps that's because it's harder to actually collect. I've never had an opportunity to collect unemployment in Canada, but was able to get it in the UK despite never having worked there. (Hurray!)
But going "on the dole" seems to show up a lot more frequently in UK media, I mean, I've already reviewed comics about it, and the fact that it can show up in this bizarre science fiction comic really shows how the aspects of attempting to collect unemployment are part of the national consciousness.
If for some reason you are interested in my zines and happen to be in Chicago you can purchase some of them at Quimby's and The Boring Store.
Quimby's has the Roberts Street Casual Gaming Federation 2011-2012 Yearbook, Ten More Videos I Watched On YouTube (not pictured), Autonomous Oblast (probably never to be reprinted as it uses UK paper size), and Flash, I Love You, But We Only Have Fourteen Hours to Save the Earth. All of these are $2 each.