[print] Charlotte Brontë: The First Zinester

2779.Here in Zinelandia producing zines is second nature; a little-known section of the municipal code stats that you have to either be creating one or planning one or you have to move to Gresham.

Fortunately, the Zine Police will let you off if you just say you're planning a zine. It's like having a screenplay in Los Angeles; the default position is that you're going to doing one any day now.

Written circa 1830, when the eldest Brontë sister was 14, a very tiny, handwritten volume, one of a series of "Young Men's Magazines" (the mind is intrigued here) is smaller than 1.5" x 2.6" but packs 4,000 words and a setting in Glass Town.

Big deal. I was perusing similar volumes in the zine stacks at the Multnomah County Library just last week.

But if you wanted it, you'd of have to had ponied up about $1.1 million at Sothebys.

If Charlotte were alive today … well, hell, she'd be scratching at her coffin lid demanding to be let out. But still.

More Zines I've Seen

2059.More zine coolness available at your local Multnomah County Library (seriouslys! They have a zine collection!). Contact information, where available, embedded within the review, taken striaght from the publications. Typos are mine.

The Zine Standard Deviation by J.V. Whimper (jvwhimper@gmail.com) bills itself as "Science for you, not for them", and lives up to that promise. The main feature of the hand-sized zine, "Caffeine from Green Coffee Beans", noting that green coffee beans (unroasted, that is) have more caffeine in them than roasted, is an experiment designed to see if the high-test beverage can be extracted and consumed via one of two cold-brew methods. Short answers: yes and yes (though it be tasting as crap), and the buzz is quite real.

The zine rounds out with an advice column (Ask Dr. Dūm), a quick bit of myth-busting (Science Will Break Your Heart), Graphs!, and a 4 panel comic on the back cover (Scientist and Robot).

I thought this one a bit of fun, and actually seems like it would be a great introduction to the scientific method – the procedure of the caffeine experiment seems solid.

The next two zines are perfect for those times when life is leaving you cold and you just want something that'll give you a little lighthearted smile.

Monsters Make A Stew, by Lisa Eisenberg (lisa.rosalie@gmail.com, http://i_draw_pictures.livejournal.com), is just what it says it is; a gently funny, simply drawn series of panels showing some kinda squishy, cuddly, friendly-looking monsters getting together at a friend's house to make and share a stew. I don't know if there was any sort of message there except "get together and share good times with your friends", but whatever there was, it left me with a light feeling.

The comic is almost completely wordless, save for a monster on the cover saying that he could bring the peppers (and he did) and one of the monsters at table at the end signifying his satsfaction with a petite burp. Most charmingly cute.

Above: Scene from Monsters Make A Stew, by Lisa Eisenberg.
Copyright, the artist.

Super Crazy Cat Dance, by Aron Nels Steinke (http://aronnelssteinke.com) is billed as a "super fun crazy comic for kids and grownups alike", and it also lives up to its billing. All black and white and using a joyously simple illustration style (see scene below), we get to see a girl celebrating all the cats she knows, teaching another girl how to do the SCCD, dancing to the moon, and then returning. It's the kind of stuff that makes you smile to read even if you are a dog-person, because even the dogs and the kitties lay down together at the end of the comic. Gently funny, and done by someone who must be a gentleman, as it's dedicated to his girlfriends three cats, which I find nifty.

Scene from Super Crazy Cat Dance by Aron Nels Steinke, copyright the artist
How can you not like this stuff?

Two more and I must dash.

Oregon 101 features Angela Wyrens and Chris Phillips (ohthedrama2003@yahoo.com) car tripping down the Oregon Coast (hence the title). They see the Sea Lion Caves, explore tidepools, sleep in the car, panic over getting something stuck in they eye, and have a minor car repair issue.

In other words, the same sort of thing that just about all of us go through on a car trip to the coast on a tight budget. I really related to it.

Scene from Oregon 101, by Angela Wyrens and Chris Phillips
Copyright, the artists.

Finally, a serious one with a lighthearted tone. Just about everyone has heard of the Dvorak Simplfied Keyboard layout (it's an option on just about every computer) but just what is it? The Dvorak Zine: Changing the World One Keyboard At A Time by Alec, Frunch, and GCB (http://DVzine.org) wants to not only show you but bring you over. They are Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts and evangelists, and not only want you to know the history of the typewriter and keyboard but bust some myths along the way:

• Sholes, perfector of the Typewriter and the iconic Qwerty layout, didn't do that to slow down fast typists – since the board was laid out before the typewriter was even released, there still were no typists, but did it because the original mechanism was likely to jam.
• After the typewriter was released by Remington, Sholes tried to come up with a more logical arrangement, but it was too late – The Qwerty had already taken the world by storm, as had the typewriter
• Dvorak is hard to learn – actually it's quite easy. And since it's available in just about every computer made, you can have a Dvorak keyboard at any time.

You may be fine with Qwerty (as I am) but if you want to learn Dvorak, this conversationally-written and graphically-friendly zine, complete with three interesting personalities, should get you well down the road. It even functions as its own learning aid, and is replete with references.

Frunch introduces us to Dvorak. A scene from the Dvorak Zine,
copyright the artist.

Technorati Tags: Zines, Dvorak keyboard, cats, liff, monsters, PDX Zines

Zines I've Seen

1952.Herewith, a few delights I've found along the way. Moar as I find 'em.

The Multomah County Library is an unexpected place to find zines, but find them you will. Check-outable too. They say that it's a very personal medium, and zines have been around long enough that the observation is a bit trite, but it's the truth. This first one is particularly personal, and one of the first I looked at since I decided to stop fearing the zine.

Some|body, by Amaris Summer Hayden, is as personal and witty as it is poignant. So far as I've been able to find, two issues have been published; Chapter 1, in July 2006, and Chapter 2, in May 2008. The covers, made to resemble medical file folders (right down to the colored first-three-letters-of-the-last-name labels on the tabs) are created from actual trimmed-down Pendaflex Esselte™ brand folders. The detailing on the cover, consisting of the clip-strip on the top and the big ol' paper clip on the side, were hand-done. A "Patient Information Sheet" is attached to the inside of each's cover It makes one pause after reading the story within, thinking that the person to whom all these events happened and, we estimate, are continuing to unfold.

Idiopathic Pulmonary Hypertension is a particularly dreadful disease. You may have heard of it when the "fen-phen" diet medicine controvery broke some years back, when it was called Primary Pulmonary Hypertension. In IPH, constriction of pulmonary arteries (typically with no known cause) cause oxygen-deficient blood to return to the heart from the lungs. This causes the heart to pump harder to compensate, causing enlargement of the right ventricle, overstressing and wearing out the heart at an astounding rate; average survival after diagnosis, via right heart failure, is a mere 2.8-10 years.

Add into this the fact that the author was a mere 27 when diagnosed, and had a 6 year old son when diagnosed, causes the reader to ask themselves questions which were theretofore somewhat corny, such as "what would I do if today were my last day?".

Hayden will live to see her son's 17th birthday, unless the dice roll against her before then, and the odds are not in her favor.

The author uses all variety of cut and paste, drawing styles contrasting detailed realism and childlike on the same page, in a very unafraid style. I suppose anything I say up past this point would be a bit maudlin and lachrymose, so I'd just suggest that anyone who wonders about life, mortality, and how short life can be (and how much observation you can pack into an abbreviated lifespan).

Her last contact address is Mszine@gmail.com.

The Superman Stories, by Mark Russel, is wry and deadpan. In the mode of ironically reinterpreting past icons in a modern light, he recreates Superman as a superhero who doesn't have an alter ego (who really believed that just a pair of glasses and a suit made Kal-El look like a normal newspaper reporter? And I suppose you were totally fooled by Sandra Bullock's 'regular' garb in Armed and Fablulous?) and is kind of a self-centered, tempremental, misogynist fellow–a real jerk at times.

Through a series of vignettes–fifteen "episodes" and a series of intersitials called "The Lois Lane Dialogues" which make you wonder why she puts up with the jerk–we learn much: why Lex Luthor hates him (turns out Superman's the reason he's bald); What Superman's "Indian" name is; that Superman is constanly pestered by leopards; what interruped Superman when he tried to bowl; why Superdog was a menace to the city's butcher shops (and how Superman dealt with it) and more. There's even a "Superman Warnings List" on the back, with such forearmings as:

• 3: Superman does not eat food that has been prepared in a microwave oven. Hot-pockets, pizza rolls and Jolly time popcorn are all unknown to him.
• 7: Superman's two favorite smells in the world are Bark-o-mulch and taco meat. Number three is Lois' hair.
• 9: Superman doesn't enjoy shopping, except for grocery shopping. But he doesn't like to stick his hand too deeply into the fruit displays, for fear of being bitten by tarantulas. Whenever he mentiones this to Lois, she secretly laughs to herself.

The spare, icon-line graphic treatment of the cover is what drew me to it (especially the 1-2-3 illustrated sequence of Supe taking off which has nothing obvious to do with the text beside it). The dry humor kept me reading it.

Mark Russell is also known as a Portland-based writer and cartoonist who self-published The Penny Dreadful. He also has been published in McSweeney's, which means we admire and hate him, because we sent them a list once and it was rejected. It was brilliant.

Technorati Tags: print design, graphic design, humor, zines, personal stories, mark russell, amaris summer hayden

At Least One Thing I Want To Do This Year ...

1891. ... would be to create a zine of some sort.

I've really been getting into the zines I can find at the Midland branch of the library, which is the closest one to me. There was a really well-done one called Steampunk Magazine which has caused a household-wide interest in Steampunk in general (also those wonderful steampunk-y laptop casemods I've been seeing on BoingBoing.

I don't know what all will be in it yet (of course I could do it on design but we all know how easily distracted I am).

We'll be playing around with this. Make it fun and find a way to add value to the communication. Stuff like that.

Technorati Tags: ZehnKatzen, Samuel John Klein, 2009, Stuff To Do

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