Small Press Review - zines, comics, mini-comics and ephemera

By Owen Heitmann

32 black and white folded A1 pages, two staples

The collection of drawings, comics and short stories is impressively professional, especially for first zine. And despite the fallacious issue number, this really is the author’s debut zine. I have no idea what he plans on calling his second one.

Heitmann has published some mini comics before this, and kept a regular webcomic for a while as well. He’s got a clean, attractive cartooning style, though it occasionally comes off as a bit too stiff and practiced. Unfortunately, most of the comics feel distinctly uninspired, with obvious punchlines or no clear point. I was surprised, then, that some of the short stories are actually entertaining. There’s a re-telling of Ukranian folktale in here which is actually quite good, and a piece of fantastical satire that won me over despite its reliance on obvious puns. A few of the stories lean more toward the surrealist side of things, but they feel more like abandoned writing exercises than anything of much substance. There’s also an essay in here as about the connection between high school nerds and punk rock music, which is well-written enough even as it belabors some obvious points.

Interspersed with the stories and comics are illustrations by Heitmann and vintage Victorian-era cartoons which he has written new, satirical captions for. These are also a mixed bag, ranging from mediocre to inspired. The re-captioned cartoons never reach for anything higher than juvenilia, but though some of them over-reach their jokes, others would feel right at home in the pages of Mad magazine (which is a compliment). The best piece of illustration, a gripping image of a woman with octopus arms lying unconscious in a hospital, is displayed wisely on the back cover, but most of the interior drawings only show a dim glimmer of the imagination featured in that piece, and some of them are bland enough to be word-processor clipart.

If the contents are a mixed bag, the design and layout can’t really be faulted. Each page is laid out in a clear and interesting way, and the variety of the material means that each page presents something new or different. This reads more like magazine than a typical zine, which is a good thing. The flip-side of feeling like a magazine is the lack of any real personal material – even the autobiographic stuff is pretty generic.

Heitman is clearly talented, but I think this zine suffers from a shortage of really great material. A lot of the pages here seem like filler or work that would have been better left in a sketchbook. If everything was as good as the best stuff in here, I think this zine would be pretty excellent, but the dross drags it down to just average. Still, for a first zine it manages to be a decent debut. Here’s hoping Heitman brings out his strongest work in the next issue!

by various Wellington artists

Twelve black and white A1 pages, folded A1 paper, two staples

This is a group zine from Wellington, New Zealand, circa 2004.  Though it seems to be deeply entrenched in the local art scene, this issue also adheres quite closely to its theme of Art & The Beret.  The sharpness of those dual focus points are actually this zine’s biggest asset, along with a stable of talented contributors.

I’ve read a few zines that try to tackle a broad subject like “art” and end up rambling on about nothing.  By examining art in the context of the beret, a road that would appear to lead to even less of nothing, the Dangerous Liaisons crew manage to make the subject more interesting, simply because of the limit it imposes.  There are a couple of essays, some cartoons and a bizarre short story here, all unique and creative, but more importantly kept short and to the point, even if the point is occasionally elusive or absurdist.  What keeps it all from floating away into pointless irreverence is the way it places itself in the Wellington art scene.  Breaking up the whimsy is an interview with local artist and zinester Bryce Galloway, a review of a recent gallery show, and a brief field report from a local traveling in Europe.  This works as not just a piece of art itself, but also a dialogue between artists and a document of an artistic community.  Are there more zines like this out there?  I’d like to see them.

by Gabrielle Bell

32 black and white pages, color cardstock cover, two staples.  Slightly larger than folded A1 paper.  Published by Drawn & Quarterly.

Gabrielle Bell is an indie cartoonist in her early ‘30s who lives in New York.  This comic presents stories from her life, which according to the diary dates above each one, take place over the course of a year.  Bell demonstrates a deft touch at being able to cull random moments from her life into a compelling narrative.  Taken together, the various stories present such a cohesive portrait of modern alienation tempered by escapism that each time I read the book I left it feeling almost defeated.
In the first couple of stories, Bell documents being on tour with a few other cartoonists, but most of the details of the trip are left out.   The most dramatic stories in the book happen here, but they are things that happen to other people, stories related second-hand.  In fact, nearly everything meaningful that happens to the people in this book comes through some sort of medium, whether it is through the internet, television, post office boxes or telephones, through stories or imaginary scenarios.

In the second section, Bell’s computer breaks down and she has to manage without it for five days, which at first causes her to panic because she doesn’t know how long she’ll be able to last without the Internet.  This leads to a rumination on how MySpace is both addictive and effervescent – Bell becomes addicted to it, but when she deletes her account no one really cares one way or another.

When she gets her computer back, she asks the computer technician to disable its wireless card so that she will have to go outside to engage in the outside world, but he tells her it’s not possible.  That connection is impossible to escape.  Even Bell’s homeless friend Jacob keeps a post office box as his connection to the outside world, and it seems imprudent to dispose of it altogether.  “All the good things that’ve happened to me came through e-mail,” says her friend Alice.
But finding real meaning in the real, physical world doesn’t come easily, either.  Later, Gabrielle goes to a party and is desperate to make a connection with someone, only to find herself trapped talking to the only person more desperate than herself.  In another story, she tells her writer’s group that she just can’t get interested in anything, so they go for a deep-sea fishing trip.  The trip itself provides some inspiration, but ultimately ends with store-bought fish and watching a Planet Earth DVD.
The final story is taken from Bell’s childhood, where she runs away from home to return to summer camp, only to find it deserted.  The story nicely underscores the themes of rest of the book, about how difficult it is to find excitement, contentment or real satisfaction.  Bell wisely doesn’t linger on any of this angst, keeping a light touch and using humor in most of the stories, which makes the book feel breezy even as it delves into existential angst.  Throughout the book, Bell admits that her problems are self-centered, and even “bourgeois,” but she can’t escape them anyway.  I suppose this is what made me feel defeated when I finished the book: If someone who is as bright of a cartoonist and as brilliant a storyteller as Gabrielle Bell can’t find peace, then who can?

By Totty (Harriet) Rankine

42 glossy pages with an even glossier cover.  Folded A1 paper, two staples.  Published by Nyiri Publications.

When I was recently in Coober Pedy, a remote mining town in South Australia, I picked up this short autobiography of an aboriginal woman.  Part of a series of small books by Aboriginal authors, this probably isn’t technically a zine, since it actually has a publisher and an ISBN number, not to mention the $12 price tag.  However, it not only feels line a zine, since it’s just folded paper bound with some staples, it also reads like a zine – particularly it reads like an personal, autobiographical zine.

Rankine delves into her childhood, adolescence and family history in a very informal way, dropping a few anecdotes here and there, jumping forward in history as she sees fit, and introducing family members quickly and then never referring to them again.  Her voice comes over strongly, to the point that the book almost feels like it was transcribed, which only emphasizes how personal this story is.

As an Aboriginal woman born in 1943, Rankine would have faced plenty of hardships in her life, but as the title suggests, she’s more inclined to focus on the joy and humor of her life rather than the sorrow.  Her respect for her family and neighbors is as steadfast as her stubbornness to be herself no matter what.
Plenty of wonderful family photographs and maps illustrate this book, which are helpful in filling in Rankine’s sparse descriptions.  I imagine that for a member of her family or community, this book would be invaluable.  Historians, too, will likely find her personal account useful in shedding light on what remains a relatively under-reported section of the modern Australian community.
However, my knowledge of the times and places that Rankine describes is extremely limited, and I suppose I wanted this book to be something that it isn’t.  I wanted a detailed primer on Aboriginal life in the mid-20th century, but this isn’t that book.  This book doesn’t try to describe or interpret history – it is simply one woman telling her own story about what made her life worthwhile.  For that alone, it is worth reading, but I wish that I had a better grasp of the historical and cultural context to more clearly understand where she was coming from.

No review for today, as I’m about to head out the door to Coober Pedy, an underground Australian city which happens to be the opal capital of the world.  I’ll see if I can find any zines there to review for Tuesday!

Created by Lee Falk, written Falk, Tony De Paul and Claes Reimerthi; illustrated by Paul Ryan, Wilson McCoy, Sy Barry and Heiner Bade.

Issue #1496 is 100 pages, Issue #1519 is 34 pages.  Comic book size, black and white newsprint with glossy covers.

Australia has a relatively small local comics industry.  Comic book shops exist and seem to do good business, but they deal almost exclusively in American imports, which are generally sold at double the cover price to account for the cost of shipping them halfway across the world.  The only Australian comic book publisher that’s sustained success is Frew Publications, which publishes a single comic: The Phantom.  They’ve been at it for 60 years now, putting out black and white reprints of the original American comic strips and newer stories from Europe.  The Phantom appears fortnightly at newsagents and comics shops, reportedly selling about 30,000 copies.  What’s made The Phantom so perpetually popular in Oz is a bit hard to gauge, though if nothing else, the markups on American comics have made it the only reasonably priced comic book in the country today.

The first Phantom comic I picked up was back in February.  A copy of the 2007 Christmas special (issue 1496) was sitting around one of the comics shops in Adelaide, so I picked it up on a whim.  The issue reprints four stories originally serialized in American newspapers from as far back as 1949 to as recent as 2007.

The stories demonstrate how The Phantom isn’t really a typical superhero.  For one thing, he’s based out of Africa, where legend has it that he is an immortal spirit of justice, called The Ghost Who Walks.  This myth is propagated by the fact that there’s been a Phantom protecting the innocent for over 400 years – it just hasn’t always been the same guy.  The title and costume are passed down from father to son, and today’s Phantom is actually the 21st in the line.  The Phantom doesn’t possess any supernatural powers, just an impressive family legacy, which is actually pretty cool.

The Phantom’s family takes center stage in the Christmas Special issue, with the 1949 story revolving around his relationship with future wife Diana, a 1979 story devoted to Diana choosing a name for their daughter, and a tale from 1981 starring The Phantom’s toddler son as he wanders around the jungle.  I imagine it’s a bit like what the TV show 7th Heaven would be like if it were about masked heroes living in the jungle fighting gorillas and punching out cult members instead of about preachers dealing with teen pregnancy and alcoholism.  Which is to say that it’s awesome.

I tried to pick up the 60th anniversary issue for this review, but it seems to have sold out, so instead I bought the most recent issue after that one (issue #1519).  It’s a regular issue, about a third of the size of the Christmas special, and only features one story, a new tale which debuted in Europe earlier this year.  The story focuses on the adventures of an earlier Phantom, who has to deal with murderous British colonialists in Barbados.  One of the strengths of this franchise is that because The Phantom has a long family legacy, it’s possible to tell stories set anywhere over the last 500 years, so it’s cool to see a writer take advantage of that.  Unfortunately, the story itself is a bit generic, and we don’t really get to see what makes the sixteenth century Phantom any different than the twentieth century one.  I’m glad I picked up the earlier issue, which gives a better cross-section of the character’s history and shows off what makes him unique.

Related: The Australian on 60 years of Frew’s The Phantom

by Simon Grey

Twelve black and white pages, folded A1 paper, brown cover
This is a smartly-designed little book that features 101 Reasons Not to Dig Your Way to China, and from what I understand, subsequent volumes will feature other lists of 101 things.  Strangely enough, I recently came across an unrelated website devoted to the same sort of thing.  The website is designed to be informative, while this zine aims mostly at humor and whimsy, but they’re formatted mostly the same way.
It’s a cleaver idea, but reading bullet points gets tiring after a while.  Lists of ten are classic.  Lists of 25 can work with the right material.  More than that, and it starts to get cumbersome.  Anything over 50 is definitely pushing it, and reading a list of 101 things eventually becomes as much fun as doing taxes.  It’s a relief when it’s over.
If it’s hard on the reader, I imagine it’s that much more difficult for the writer, which is what makes this zine interesting.  You get to see the ideas ebb and flow, as Grey reaches for a train of thought that will provide another five or ten items for his list.  He’s mostly reaching for humor here, but getting through 101 jokes about digging to China is more of a marathon than a sprint, and there’s a sense that he’s pacing himself accordingly.  Nothing is laugh-out-loud funny, but there are plenty of bits that make me crack a smile, and the last item stood out as genuinely funny, though I read it more with relief and respect than knee-slapping.  It was a bit like watching someone make a final, all out stride for the finish line.  I appreciated the effort it took to get there, and I imagine that this is probably a great creative-writing exercise.
And make no mistake this is certainly creative writing.  Though the zine features pictures from a National Geographic article about China as design elements, none of the reasons to not dig to China have much to do with China at all.  Instead we get flights of fancy about a hollow earth filled with dinosaurs, mad scientists and someone named William “Monkey” Jones.  It’s all reasonably entertaining, although by the end it does feel stretched a bit thin.  More information about China is hardly necessary, but I wonder if it would have helped to beef up the content of these 101 reasons, and work to sustain reader interest a little bit better.  After reading Simon’s zine, I think that if I were to attempt one of these lists, I would read lots of related material beforehand so as to soak up as much information as possible to draw upon during the long haul to item number 101.  I’m not sure if I could come up with 101 things off the top of my head.

by Aron Nels Steinke

48 black and white 1/4 size pages with a cardstock cover

This is a small mini-comic that received a Xeric Grant, a competitive grant that helps comic creators publish their books independently.  Most of the Xeric-funded books I’ve seen have been significantly bigger projects than this black and white, pocket-sized mini-comic, so I was interested to see what made it grant-worthy.
Everything on display here has a basic simplicity to it — it’s a little square book made up of pages divided into four little square panels of equal size surrounded by lots of white, empty space.
The book leads off with a sort of artist origin story, about Steinke describing how he found his old comic books, realized they were crap and burned them all (except Spawn 1-7).  In the next story he visits one of the comics shops of his youth and disparages the place, although he does find a zine called “How to Self-Publish Your Own Comics.”  The art is simple enough that it’s easy to believe that Steinke picked up that zine and just decided to make a his own comic without worrying too much about becoming an “artist” first, but that’s not a complaint.  The drawings are very clean and effective.  They get the point across, and nothing is wasted.
Most of the book is devoted to a third story, about the author and his girlfriend encountering a supposed terrorist at the airport.  It’s here that Steinke’s abilities become more apparent.  Using the simple art and measured, expert pacing, he creates a story that is in turns funny, tense and sweet.  It’s not ground-breaking stuff, but it’s well told, and Steinke uses his simple pages to good effect.

The content is a bit slight with the first two stories mostly devoted to smug navel-gazing, and the third one being the kind of tale usually relegated to livejournal entries, but that’s not as much of a problem as how self-involved it all is.  Of course, auto-bio comics are by nature self-centered, but I’m not sure if I’ve read one that felt quite as self-satisfied as this.  Even the self-depreciation feels congratulatory.  It doesn’t help that the book ends with a statement that it was printed on recycled paper with soy-based ink, followed by an un-ironic declaration “I’m compromising my values for noone.”  Don’t get me wrong — recycled paper and soy-based ink are great, but they hardly define a set of values.  For the life of me, I can’t figure out what point Steinke is trying to make with that statement, but if I had to guess it’d be “I’ll do what I want, and I’ll feel damn proud of it!”  What he wanted to do was make a comic about himself, and fortunately it did turn out to be something he can be proud of.

32 pages, two-color printing, A0 paper with dust jacket

This is the newest issue of Kevin Huizenga’s series featuring his everyman character Glenn Ganges for the over-sized, internationally distributed Ignatz line of comics. It centers on video games, and is split into two sections. The first is a virtuoso exploration of the visual cues and symbols that create the videogame language of conflict, with its power meters and special moves. The second is a more traditional narrative about workers at a dotcom company playing a shoot-em-up game on the network afterhours, which shows the potency of virtual worlds to both delude and connect people.
Each section nicely demonstrates two elements that make Huizenga one of America’s greatest new cartoonists: first, a commitment to visual experimentation and pushing the boundaries of what comics can do, and second, is a steadfast dedication to his audience in lieu of the artist-focused “self-expression” that drives so many alternative comics. Initially, it seems that the first section is the experimental one and the second is the accessible one, but the strength of the first section is how readable and rewarding it is, in spite of being completely avant-garde, and the second story’s seamless flow belies the fact that it is the most complex narrative Huizanga has attempted, full of flashbacks, digressions and subplots. His skill is in presenting complex ideas in a way that makes understanding them effortless.

The first section is a stunning achievement, and almost certainly Huizanga’s best experimental narrative to date. The abstract figures featured here have been hovering on the fringes of his comics for years, but that all seems to have been a warm-up for this piece, in which Huizanga seemingly explores their every possible contortion.

The second piece sees Huizenga stretching in more conventional directions; this is the first Glenn Ganges story to feature a significant supporting cast, and the first that seems anchored in a specific time, the end of the dotcom era. If there is a misstep, it might be in providing too dense and detailed of a world – an early, shorter version of this story on Huizenga’s weblog strikes me as sharper and more affecting. Comparing the web and print versions shows just how meticulous Huizenga is – although the story remains largely the same, much of it has been redrawn and restructured to flow better as a longer story. Curiously, Glenn’s first-person narration in the early version has been changed to the third-person in print, which is odd, since Glenn doesn’t do anything to advance the story and only serves as a viewpoint character. The effect is to further remove the audience from the story, and results in some awkward captions, but perhaps this distancing is intentional, the same way that we are never permitted to see the face of Glenn’s wife Wendy, just the back of her head. Those points aside, this is masterful cartooning, at once ambitious and accessible.

Related:
*Buy this book from Fantagraphics
*Early version of the story: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6

Web comic

This web comic is written by Eisner-award winning cartoonist Hope Larson and drawn by her husband Brian O’Malley, creator of the astounding Scott Pilgrim series, who trades his usual chunky black inks for a thin-line pastel style here. One of the fascinating things about the Scott Pilgrim series is watching O’Malley’s art evolve over the series from garage-y and low-fi to a slick combination of ‘50s manga and Jamie Hewit. This thin-line style on display here is a further stretch, and if it is missing some of Scott Pilgrim’s manic energy, O’Malley uses it effectively to create a hazy, dreamlike atmosphere well suited to Larson’s fantasy fable about post-college life.

If the tone strays from that of Scott Pilgrim, the subject matter hews close enough that O’Malley’s character sketches for the story look like alternate universe versions of his Scott Pilgrim characters. There’s the shaggy-haired slacker, the beguiling ex-girlfriend, the alluring new girl with mysterious abilities, etc. The main narrative difference is that Scott Pilgrim gets the girl, while Bear Creek’s Paul gets duped by the girl.

Nola, the mysterious new girl in Bear Creek Apartments, is bright, ambitious and independent, just like Scott Pilgrim’s love interest Ramona Flowers. In both stories, the witless protagonist gets invited to the girl’s apartment for a drink and is soon the recipient of passionate, unearned kisses from the underwear-clad heroine.

While Ramona’s motivations haven’t been fully revealed in the still-running Pilgrim series, Nola’s are shown to be selfish and even sinister. Bumbling, boorish Paul becomes her easy prey. Whether Scott Pilgrim befalls a similar fate remains to be seen, but the most recent volume of his series seems to indicate a much happier ending, in which the perpetual slacker grows up and get the beautiful girl who should be way out of his league.

Both stories are fantasies, but which one paints a more realistic romance will probably depend on the reader’s perspective. Could it be that Scott survives Paul’s peril partly because his story was written by a dude? And what does it say poor Paul’s story was written by that dude’s wife? Probably nothing, but this well-crafted fable makes an interesting counterpoint to the Pilgrim series nonetheless.