Zinefest

by Robert Boyd

Zinefest made a move from the Museum of Printing History to Lawndale Art Center this year. The reason apparently was that the Museum of Printing History had a fire and is still being repaired. But I like Lawndale better as a venue--the Museum of Printing History is cramped and confusingly laid out. Lawndale was much more open. The downside is that Lawndale had an exhibit up and the tables and art had to somehow co-exist. In some ways that was cool--there was a big fun sculpture by JooYoung Choi in the middle of the big ground-floor room which added a nice visual focus. Here's what the sculpture looked like before it was surrounded by zinesters tabling:


JooYoung Choi, Freedom From Madness

I tabled at Zinefest this year. I haven't tabled a convention in years and years. I had to remember Chris Oarr's dictum, "Sittin' ain't sellin'." But I'm old now and standing all day is tough on my feet! And hardly anyone else is standing. But to me it's easier to make contact with people if I'm standing--if we're roughly face to face. I can say "hi" and that is an invitation to them stop and browse.

I had three items--EXU #1, the art magazine I published last year; It's All True by Scott Gilbert, the collection that Gilbert self-published in 1995 (!); HTX Artist Cookbook, an interview zine put together by the Civic TV Collective. The HTX Artist Cookbook was free so they went pretty quick. But I had to explain to many, many people that it wasn't an actual cookbook. There are no recipes in the HTX Artist Cookbook--it's a collection of interviews with Houston artists talking about how they do their work.


My table

Ironically, JooYoung Choi is a contributor to Exu. Even more ironically, her contribution featured some of the same characters she displayed in her sculpture above. She is part of the generation of artists who grew up with video games and cartoons who like to create characters that then get reused in their work. Her piece in Exu was called The Daily Veritas and the original is a large (6' high, I'm guessing) painting.


JooYoung Choi, The Daily Veritas in Exu

I like the Steve Ditko/Dr. Strange vibe of this work (the painting and the sculpture).

The main reason I was at the show was that I was giving a talk about the career of Houston cartoonist Scott Gilbert that afternoon. This was done partly to promote Gilbert's upcoming retrospective, which I am curating. In exchange, Zinefest paid me 75 smackers and comped me the table.  (The tables at zinefest are incredibly cheap. Zine publishers who can get to Houston should make a point of exhibiting at this show.)


Nathaniel Donnett (left) and Dean Liscum (right)

Among the visitors to the booth were artist (and Exu contributor) Nathaniel Donnett and long-time Great God Pan and Exu contributor Dean Liscum. In the photo above, Dean was showing Nathaniel where he got shot in the face (!) on Halloween.


Inés Estrada reads HTX Artist Cookbook at my booth

Directly across from me was Inés Estrada, a great cartoonist who also had some art in Exu. She is from Mexico City but lives in San Antonio now. I highly recommend her book Impatience, a collection of short stories. I bought a "new" graphic novel by her called Lapsos (Estrada actually completed it in 2014, but this edition, published in Spain, is new). She does something in both these books that I have never seen elsewhere--she publishes them with subtitles. Usually when comics are translated, new words are lettered into the word balloons and captions. This is always a compromise, because the translation has to be almost the exact same length as the original text or else it looks wrong. It's especially awkward with translations from Japanese, since Japanese text has a completely different orientation than Western languages--up and down instead of side to side. Subtitles comes with their own problems, but it works well with Estrada's work.


Inés Estrada, Lapsos cover


The Alabama Song table. Left to right: Rachel Cook (curator at DiverseWorks), Gabriel Martinez, Regina Agu

I didn't get to visit all the tables because I was anchored to my table. I did make a couple of rounds. This was the Alabama Song's table. Alabama Song is an alternative art space run by Gabriel Martinez and Regina Agu. They are an unusually comics-friendly art institution, I think partly because Gabriel makes his own minicomics. They have twice sponsored Comix Gauntlet, where several cartoonists each draw a comic story in one day at Alabama Song, then the art is taken to copy.com and printed into a zine. It's a little like the 24-hour comic challenge but it takes about 8 hours. But they also do poetry readings, lectures, classes, musical events and visual art exhibits. I gave a lecture there once called Comixploitation!


Gabriel Martinez, Soledad (cover)

At the Alabama Song table, I picked up Soledad, a science fiction comic by Martinez. It's kind of a paranoid thriller where the main character, Tomás, who works on a spaceship that acts as kind of a warehouse for ships carrying cargo. He receives a transmission about how he is receiving a cargo that includes the body of a politician who may or may not have been assassinated. The body may contain evidence of malfeasance. It's hard to tell if this is a continuing story or if it's just a fairly oblique self-contained story.


Gabriel Martinez, Soledad pp. 14-15


Sarah Welch and Gabriel Martinez

Sarah Welch is a Houston cartoonist who was one of the administrators of Zinefest. (She also contributed to Exu #1.) She and her partner had a table which she attended when her official duties would permit. I first became aware of her work at Zinefest three years ago when I bought the first volume of her series Endless Monsoon. I bought the two most recent issues of that series, Only Humid and Very Pleasant Transit Center.


Sarah Welch, Only Humid cover


Sarah Welch, Only Humid pp. 12-13


Sarah Welch, Very Pleasant Transit Center cover

The comics focus on two young women navigating life in Houston (hence the title). The comics are realistic and atmospheric. They aren't super-plot-heavy, but there is an overall story arc. A lot of what they deal with is the character's living situation. Her art is fairly naturalistic, and she prints with a risograph, which permits her to add a small number of spot colors (green and sometimes brown).

Welch is a resident artist at Lawndale and a few days ago, she gave a studio tour and was asked by the artist studio program director Lily Cox-Richard about the political content of her work. Welch was a little uncomfortable with that question. Understandably, in my opinion. Her work isn't very political--it's much more personal. It deals with the quotidian. Anything political is at most implied.


Katie Mulholland and Sarah Welch, Brackish pp 27-28.

In addition to the issues of Endless Monsoon, I also bought Brackish, a collaborative artzine that Welch did artist Katie Mulholland. It is a collection of drawings depicting Houston and vicinity (real and imagined). In the image above, the drawings on the left are by Katie Mulholland and the right is by Welch. I was surprised by this because I know Mulholland an an abstract painter--it was really intriguing to see her drawings of real things.


Laidric Stevenson

Laidric Stevenson is a photographer from Dallas who produces a beautiful photo zine with Janna Añonuevo Langholz called Meeting New People Isn't The Easiest Thing.


Meeting New people Isn't the Easiest Thing cover


spread from Meeting New People Isn't the Easiest Thing

Meeting New people Isn't the Easiest Thing features full-page square photos. The photos are printed full-bleed. The photographers aren't credited, but on their website, they describe the work as a "photo conversation between Laidric Stevenson and Janna Añonuevo Langholz." This suggests that maybe each two-page spread contains one photo by each photographer. But I don't know. Some of the photos are beautiful and a few are exciting, but mainly they are quite deadpan. The subjects are not necessarily exciting. But the presentation and selection are fantastic--Meeting New people Isn't the Easiest Thing might be my favorite zine from the festival.


Peachfuzz booth

Peachfuzz is a feminist fuckbook. I like the concept both because I like naked ladies and because it seems so deliberately archaic. I mean, who reads nudey magazines anymore? Are they even still published? I picked up a copy in Austin last year. I liked their tshirts:


Peachfuzz tshirts


Ashley Robin Franklin and her booth

Ashley Robin Franklin is an artist from Austin. I picked up her journal zine Soggy Pizza which is fantastic. Essentially she publishes pages from her journal which combine handwritten text and drawing. Now usually people's sketchbooks have a limited interest--you have to be really into an artist to want to see her practicing and trying things out. And few really combine text in an interesting way. But there are obvious exceptions. Robert Crumb's sketchbooks really come across as diaries. Ditto with Franklin. She combines a variety of media (pen and ink, watercolor, pencil, collage, etc.).


Ashley Robin Franklin, Soggy Pizza cover


Ashley Robin Franklin, Soggy Pizza pp. 8 + 9

She is a really good cartoonist which is why I think Soggy Pizza works. It's not a comic, but she combines image and text in a very natural and effective way. Her journal is very self-critical, which is a common trait of cartoonists I have known. She beats up on herself for not drawing a new comic, but Soggy Pizza is a good substitute.


"El Fury" at the Bastard Comics table

The publisher is called Bastard Comics, but I have no idea what this cartoonist's real name is. Online she goes by the name "El Fury." She doesn't quite look tough enough to be an "El Fury," but I don't really know. Anyway, I picked up her sleek, full-color comic The Ubiquitous Stan Lee in . . . "The Final Cameo".


El Fury, The Ubiquitous Stan Lee in . . . "The Final Cameo" cover

The comic has the main character, a young woman who looks a little like El Fury, who keeps noticing Stan Lee cameos--first in Marvel movies, but later in video games and on news radio reports, and finally in her car and in her house. It has a twist ending (although an easy twist to guess); I won't reveal it. The art is very stylized and polished, and the predominate color is purple. The comic has glossy spill-proof pages. And it made me laugh--what else can you ask for from a comic?


Ben Snakepit at Snakepit Comics


Ben Snakepit, Manor Threat cover

Ben Snakepit is a prolific cartoonist who draws a daily diary strip. Manor Threat collect three years of them. The title refers to Manor, TX, a town outside of Austin. Pronounced MAY-nor.

His drawing is primitive but functional. But the strips are kind of boring. It's hard to do a daily diary strip and keep it interesting because one day is more or less like the previous one. Snakepit makes no particular effort to make one strip different from another--he shows himself going to work, exercising, watching TV with his wife, eating, etc., over and over. He depicts himself playing video games by drawing himself as a giant turd, which is kind of funny the first couple of times he uses that image. But after a while, so what?

I'd have to contrast these comics with American Elf, the long-running diary comic by James Kochalka. Kochalka made an effort to make his strips vary from day to day. Part of how he did this was to focus on one tiny episode from the day--a stray bit of conversation, or a chance encounter. With Snakepit, it only gets interesting when something out of the ordinary happens, like getting a report from Planned Parenthood about his low sperm count or going to a comic convention.


Ben Snakepit, panel from Manor Threat

Such as this panel from a day at SHAPE, an Austin alternative comics festival. I liked it because it depicted how I felt after a day at Zinefest. There was an after party at Gallery Homeland, but I was just too wiped to attend.

The Pan Review of Zines: Zinefest Houston 2013

Robert Boyd



Zinefest is an annual daylong festival devoted to zines, which are DIY print publications generally produced by amateur writers and artists. This year, it was held at the Museum of Printing History, which is a symbolically appropriate venue. But it did have one problem--it was really cramped. Considering how Zinefest has grown over the years, that's not surprising. The first Zinefest I went to was at the Caroline Collective a few years ago, and all those zinesters would have fit into one room at the Museum of Printing History. Zinefest 2013 was in four rooms (and in a few other nooks and crannies) and was bursting at the seams.



The exhibitors and fans tended to be on the young side. Dress was very casual. It was definitely a different crowd from the Texas Contemporary Art Fair, which was running simultaneously. Let's face it--when you pay $10,000 for a booth, the stakes are high. But $25 or so for a table? It permits a more easy-going attitude.



Zines have been around since the 1930s when science fiction fans started publishing their own zines in order to stay in contact with one another.  These early zine publishers got addresses of other fans from letters columns that ran in professional science fiction magazines. This continued through the 50s and 60s, adding comics fans to the mix. Even though they didn't call themselves "zines," I'd say the peotry magazines of the 60s (often printed with mimeography) were important primogenitors. (The Museum of Printing History had an excellent exhibit on this kind of magazine in 2010.)

Zines exploded in the 70s as photocopying technology got cheaper and cheaper. That was the beginning of the punk zine, where music fans wrote about their favorite local bands--bands (and scenes) that otherwise got very little positive coverage in the local media. At the same time, mini-comics--small self-published comics zines--started to grow in number.

One thing to remember here is that almost all of these were traded through the U.S. Mail. there were a small number of other venues (permanent and pop-up), but mostly it was people contacting like-minded people through the mail. Learning about other zinesters was difficult. That changed when Factsheet Five, a magazine devoted to zines and listing hundreds of them in each issue, started publishing in 1982. It ran until 1998, which is auspicious. By 1998, the internet was getting big. The internet obviates the need for most zines.

Zines prior to the late 90s/2000s weren't published to be "zines qua zines" for the most part. They were published because it was the only way for their creators to get their ideas, their poetry, their scene reports, their comics, etc., out there. These were artists and writers who were frozen out of mainstream media. (That said, many who got their starts in zines went on to have actual remunerative careers as writers, artists, etc.)

But the labor-intensive aspect of creating a physical zine, not to mention the fraught efforts to make contact with people who might be interested in reading your zine were made unnecessary by the coming of the internet. First came BBSes, which allowed fans to converse directly with other fans of whatever specific interest they had. Then came webpages, then blog software, then MySpace, etc. If you are into underground music or writing poetry or making comics (or writing about art, like me), there is almost no barrier to communicating with like-minded folks on the internet.

So why keep making zines? That was something I asked myself that Saturday as I wandered the aisles. None of the people here needed to make zines in the way that people in the 60s, 70s and 80s did. They have other options that earlier zinesters could only dream of. And yet, here they were. Here's a selection of the zines I got at Zinefest. Perhaps looking at them will help explain why they still exist.



This sloth version of Napoleon Crossing the Alps by David is by Houston artist Sebastian Gomez de la Torre.  He also was presenting a zine full of his illustrations called Deep Press Zine.


Gomez de la Torre has slick illustration chops and is capable of playing around with a variety of media and drawing styles, as you can see below. But you can see all these and more on his very nice Tumblr. So what's the point? One reason may be that a zine can serve as a calling card of sorts--a mini-portfolio that you can leave with art directors or potential clients.  (You can buy buy Sebastian Gomez de la Torre art in many forms here.)



Women Artists: Interviews, volume 1 is an ambitious art-zine. Obviously this kind of project has a lot of appeal for me as an art-blogger. The credits on the zine are a bit vague, but I get the impression that Caroline Knowles is the editor/publisher. The zine consists of interviews with five artists conducted by Knowles, Rhiannon Platt, and Tricia Gilbride.



W/A has a blog, but the interviews are not published there. The zine is for sale, so maybe the zine exists as a way to generate some revenue from all the work. It's something I think about often--I don't make any money from this blog, and sometimes I think it would be nice to get a little something for my efforts! (If you readers would buy approximately 175 items from Amazon by clicking on the Amazon sidebar to your right--if you are reading this on a computer--I'll get about $100!)


art by Tara Marynowsky

I'm pretty sure that this zine is produced in Austin, and two of the artists interviewed, Katy Horan and Angel Oloshove are from Austin and Houston respectively. But the other artists are from all over--Tara Marynowsky, whose work appears above, is from Sydney, Australia. By calling this "volume 1," the creators of this blog imply future volumes. I look forward to seeing them.



Abstract Comics comes from Beaumont. It was made by four Lamar students--Jon Nguyen, Andre Woodard, Jensyn Hanley and James Lang for a class, Design 1. It is one continuous work, so it is impossible to know who drew what, but the individual styles are fairly distinct. The structure is abstract images within a strict 9-panel grid. The visual tension is between images that overlap the grip and images that progress from panel to panel. It's a lovely exercise to give to young design students. I wonder if they came up with the idea on their own or if they were assigned to produce an abstract comic. Either way, the result is charming.



You can imagine that these young designers might have been exposed to Kandinsky and Mondrian and Paul Rand for the first time and were eager to show what they had learned.



But classic comics design enters the work, too, as in this Jack Kirby-esque page. I'm not sure how you can buy a copy of this zine, but it was published by ZAD Projects.



Another ZAD projects zine is For Madmen Only. This one is by ZAD himself--Zachary Dubuisson. It consists of spooky, nighttime photos with mysterious light flares and ominous silhouettes.


photo by Zachary Dubuisson

For Madmen Only can be read as a photo essay or as a mini-portfolio. I've been told that for a lot of photographers, the goal of a given particular photographic project is a book. A zine can be a way to document a small project--an assay into a what might become a larger body of work.



Zines have always been about personal expression, so memoir is a common genre for the form. Monster Heaven #4 by Lauren Elizabeth is a prose memoir of a trip to New York. She goes into a lot of detail about the trip, and I found myself getting a little bored--it was a little like looking at someone else's slides from their trip. But the prologue, about the life and death of her friend and ex Chuck was quite powerful. This is a case where focusing on someone else might have been a better strategy. It would still would have been highly personal. This is the feedback I would have given Elizabeth if I were teaching a writing class. This brings up another problem with zines (and blogs like Pan)--they usually don't have an editor. Readers get the first draft. And while Monster Heaven #4 could have used some editing, it has a lot of strong points.

Unfortunately, Monster Heaven #4 doesn't have any contact info for the author, and Google isn't turning anything up. If you are Lauren Elizabeth or know her, let me know and I'll put ordering information here.

 

Psycho Girlfriend, written by Meredith Nudo and drawn by Jessi Jordan, is a very slick production. The drawing inside is as nice as the cover, but I am reluctant to show any of it because it would spoil the story. I won't say any more than that. It is a good little story about having a degree of skepticism about what your buddies might tell you.

This comic was included as an insert in SPN: The Zine. This zine is a spin-off from a blog called Space City Nerd, which is devoted to mainstream comics and video games. Not totally my cup of tea, but the zine was well-done and Psycho Girlfriend is very accomplished. Given the content of Space City Nerd, you might have expected any comic associated with it to be more like Penny Arcade--aimed at nerd culture and possibly not accessible to those outside of it. But that's not the case at all, interestingly.



There are zines that have no particular focus or purpose. Often they are nothing more than seemingly random collages of modern printed detritus--the zine equivalents of Kurt Schwitters. Cat Juice isn't quite that random, but it has a dada zine feeling. It is the work of seven artists/writers/bricoleurs: Monica Foote, Jonathan Jardin, Paris Jomadiao, Rex Mohammad, Alyssa Stephens, Geoff Smith and Alonso Tapia.




The attitude is snotty, but it is beautifully constructed. I'm not sure how you can get a copy, but perhaps contacting one of the artists will do the trick.



Sarah Welch's Pedestrians is from 2012. It seems to have been published as a sample piece for Vrooooom Press (which now goes by Mystic Multiples). And if this is why this zine got made, it strikes me as an excellent reason--to show off your printing skills! Welch is an illustrator and designer, and assuming the comics in this zine are autobiographical, she has lived in Chicago, Austin and Houston.



This one-pager is typical of the work here. As a story, it is barely there. But like many of Harvey Pekar's shorter comics, this little episode gives you a flavor of urban life. This is one of the best things a comic can do, in my humble opinion. You can buy copies of it here.



My favorite zine of the weekend was Endless Monsoon also by Sarah Welch (published by Mystic Multiples). It's from 2013 and it seems like a big step forward from Pedestrians. It may or may not be autobiographical, but it is realistic. A young woman has just moved into a new apartment (which appears to be a ground floor apartment in a fourplex), and it's not great. It leaks and has bugs, and the rain just won't stop. She thinks she may have made a bad decision. Welch tells part of the story in more-or-less straightforward comics form, but she also adds pages of collage elements, photographs, and patterns (like the pattern of linoleum tile). These elements slow it down and give it a meditative quality that is utterly appropriate to the story. Without being explicit, it uses the mise-en-scène and collage elements to beautifully convey the character's misgivings and regrets. The injunction to "show, don't tell" is overused in comics (and other storytelling genres), but Endless Monsoon is an superb example of the power of showing instead of telling.

Welch's drawing seems stronger here than in Pedestrians. And her use of a second color--green--is quite creative. It sneaks in and out of the images as necessary. You can buy Endless Monsoon here.



So why zines? Why does this subculture still exist in the face of the internet? I think in part it's the pleasure of holding and reading these intimate little objects that motivates many of their creators--as well as the opportunity to congregate at events like Zinefest.