219: zines and terrible scenes

Bits of paper, some with words, some with pictures, others with both or neither.  Some of the pieces of paper are folded and fastened together often using small bent strips of steel wire.  When compiled these are known as books or magazines or, when constructed by a wannabe illustrator, designer or pretentious hipster, they are zines.  (Speaking of pretentious, those first three sentences were phrased incredibly pretentiously; what was I thinking?)  I haven’t the money to go spending on zines at the moment; but if I did, I would.  Waiting to start a family on my shelf are only two zines, Protomurk by Zeke Clough, and Dogs & Dice by Martin O’Neill.  Between the two of them they pretty much cover all basis of my interests.

Zeke Clough (this painting is his)

Protomurk is sixteen pages of Zeke’s garishhh bright colours and obsessively crosshatched surrealist and non-representational nightmares; melting pig-face bleeds into boggle-eyed duck and hypertense clown-machine, whilst exposed synapses and gagging baby flipper-insect watch over swinging witch and handsome hand-faced abomination.  If there is a story I think that about sums it up. 

Dogs & Dice is a collection of collages assembled from scraps of paper ephemera, postcards, newsprint, rolodex cards, etc.  The artwork is beautiful, and perfectly shows how simple images can have so much power.  The best part for me is the photos of Martin’s bits and bobs collection; shelves and pigeon-holes stuffed with dolls faces, mouth casts, typewriter keys, playing cards, reference books, etc.  And the Bisley cabinets with collage material prepared and organised into categories; retrotech, cutlery & religion, woomen & boobies, radio-morse & blowers, Gloria Gaynors, digital bollocks, thrills & swoon, Canada vs America, and of course, dogs & dice.  A good lad or lass at Magazine Junkie has upped a load of pictures of Dogs & Dice so I don't have to: you can view them here.

Martin O'Neill 2008

 I’ve never made a zine.  That seems to be the done thing for people like me; creative, like drawing and writing, like organising things into boxes and files, lots of pencil cases and packs of cards.  Yes, I shall make a zine.  For some reason no-one, as far as I can tell (with the most cursory of google-glances) has made a zine out of Plasticine and named it Plastizine.  Possibly because it’s a rubbish name.  All I can find along that vein is an old abandoned GeoCities music forum called Plasterzine archived on OoCities; probably only of interest to the most anal and completist of all Internet Archaeologists.  I imagine a little magazine with each page made out of Plasticine, brightly coloured and flat-ish.  For practicalities sake the actual zine would be made from photo reproductions of the pages, not the actual pages themselves.  I’ll add that to the ‘maybe’ pile; don’t steal it!

I've got years worth of drawings that could easily be arranged into a zine of sorts.  Couple those with some scanner collages (I don't know about you, but I really like them), come up with a semi-witty/'arty'/self-consciously-weird name, scrabble together some printing costs and Bob's your wotsit, I've got a zine.  I have to many other ongoing unfinished projects to add making an original zine to the list, plus I promised to illustrate a story for my dad.  It would be nice to have a book/magazine/zine made, but dad's story gets priority before my zine.  Plus I'd probably just make it all about octopuses, or something... now there's an idea!