Rotherham Zine Library

Victoria Baths Convention. . . and some big news!

rotherhamzinelibrary — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:05:00 +0000

sd Victoria Baths Fanzine Convention

Tinnitus

rotherhamzinelibrary — Mon, 07 May 2012 15:16:41 +0000

This review has been a long time coming! We first spotted a preview copy of Tinnitus at last year’s Victoria Baths zine convention, and were immediately drawn to Benjamin Cooney’s bold, charismatic drawings. The first full issue of Tinnitus followed in September, and is made up of a series of vignettes, stemming from different sources — Sonic Youth lyrics, the travails of working at a coffee shop, hippies. It’s beautifully printed too, with a slick linoprint dustjacket. Definitely one of my favourite comics in the zine library. We’ll keep you posted if we stumble onto the next issue any time soon.

benjamincooney.com

Current Resident

rotherhamzinelibrary — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:42:52 +0000

Last time we posted about Where You From, a zine which looked at the love/hate relationships people experience with their hometowns. This time, we’re focusing on the bricks and mortar. Current Resident is an ongoing project in which Krissy collects vintage photographs of houses, sensing the stories behind them and writing short monologues based on the people she imagines to have lived there. In the third issue [pictured], she includes nine different houses, inhabiting a unique narrative voice for each one. The result is an imaginative collection of short stories — plus, each zine comes with a copy of an old house photograph attached to the cover, which is a nice touch.

ponyboypressprojects.blogspot.co.uk

Where You From?

rotherhamzinelibrary — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:32:43 +0000

Where You From? is a glimpse into the hometowns of twelve different people, exploring the ways personalities can be shaped by place. Most of the writers are from small American towns, which are described with equal warmth and disdain. Hope, who put the zine together, sets the tone with an introduction about her visit to Sicily, the home of her family, and how this compares with Baton Rouge, her actual hometown. She makes the interesting point that the romantic image of an ancestral homeland always seems more attractive than home itself, but also that this may be because her Italian “wasn’t good enough for me to understand complaints or banal conversation”. It’s exactly this sense of the banal which drives the contributors to describe their towns so vividly; the strictures of the suburbs and the yearning to escape, followed by the need to return. In among tales of open highways and picket fences, however, is a piece by Steve, who writes about growing up in Boston, Lincolnshire: “a town that has to make do with what it has”. Although he eventually moved to Nottingham, Steve recalls a point during his teens when he couldn’t imagine wanting to live anywhere else, simply because the local punk scene had grown so good.

gutwrenchpress.blogspot.co.uk

Yuck ‘n Yum

rotherhamzinelibrary — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:45:14 +0000

Yuck ‘n Yum is “a labour of love and bloodymindedness”. It’s also a quarterly arts publication based in Scotland, and we’ve just received our crisp new copy of the Spring 2012 issue. The collective are keen to engage with art outside of a formal setting, and their zine is a generous abundance of prose, photography, drawings and interviews. This time, there’s also a particularly illuminating essay about an unwelcome development in Scotland’s cultural scene: the recent “tax on creativity”. New legislation introduced at the start of April ruled that all free public events now need to have a full license, with the result that pop-up exhibitions and the like will find themselves beset by costly bureaucratic measures. While this is a real kick in the teeth to artists, writer Gayle urges everyone to keep doing what they’re doing and to resist the efforts of councils to strangle creativity. Hopefully, zines such as Yuck ‘n Yum will keep this kind of momentum going.

yucknyum.com

Last call for Papergirl Submissions

rotherhamzinelibrary — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:12:27 +0000

You may already be familiar with Papergirl, the benevolent figure on a bicycle whizzing through city streets and handing out zines and artwork for free. Originally set up in Berlin, the project treats art as an everyday experience by distributing work as breezily and accessibly as if it were a local paper.

Good news: you now have the chance to be a part of the project, as Papergirl Bristol are on the lookout for submissions for their next exhibition — after which it will be rolled up and given away by their trusty freewheelin’ team.

Your work won’t be returned after use, but that’s a small price to pay when the end result is putting a smile on the face of a stranger, or at least causing them some cheery bewilderment. Just make sure your work can be easily rolled for the occasion.

All entries must be submitted by 1 April. For more details, contact papergirlbristol@gmail.com

Interview: Rob Jackson

rotherhamzinelibrary — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:30:40 +0000

Having amassed a fine stack of Rob Jackson’s comics, it seemed like high time to find out who he is. Fortunately, the Bolton-based scribbler was on hand to humour us.

What got you started with comics? Was it a childhood interest or something that developed later?

I read the Beano and Asterix when I was little and drew my own comics in notebooks for years. I’ve still got some, but they are rubbish. Then I started drawing comics again in my last year at university after discovering the Underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb, and getting into manga. After university I went to China to teach English and did a lot of drawing there. When I got back I drew my first comic about it, which was ‘Train to Shanghai’.

You’re unnervingly prolific. How do you do it? For me it’s a good week if I read a zine, never mind write one.

I don’t have much of a day job so I have plenty of time to draw. I only work a few days a week and most weekends at my job making and selling ice cream, cheese and soup at farmers’ markets. I try and do some drawing every day, even if I don’t really want to — usually in the mornings.

How long do you spend cooking up an idea before putting pen to paper?

A few months I think usually. With ‘Flying Leaf Creature’ I just started drawing it, in the middle. You can probably tell.

Speaking of paper, is your desk an avalanche of sheets? Or are you pretty organised?

I keep all my drawn sheets on top of my shelves so my cat doesn’t walk across them with his dirty feet. So my desk is pretty clear.

You’re currently working on a comic about your family: ‘Jackson Family Stories’. Was this something you’d planned for a while? Does your material come from anecdotes, or have you found yourself sifting through the family archives?

I’ve been planning it for about six months. I’ve been through my dad’s files of photos and I got him to tell me all the family stories he could remember one afternoon, while I wrote down notes about them. Then I get to do research in books and on the internet to get some of the clothes and boats and things right. I like doing research. I’ve been using photo references for things like horses pulling carts as they are very tricky to draw.

Do you prefer creating surreal, slightly absurd yarns, or those based on your own everyday experience?

I like to do both so I don’t get bored. It stops me doing the same things in the stories.

Your comic ‘It’s a Man’s Life In the Ice Cream Business’ is a nice example of turning your daily life into an entertaining narrative; in this case delving into the pleasures and pitfalls of selling home-made ice cream at farmers’ markets. Can we expect more instalments of this story?

Yes, I’ll do a third part some time this year. I needed a break from drawing gazebos and stalls over and over. In the third part my freezer breaks and I lose a hundred ice creams. When it happened I thought, “At least this will make a good page in my comic, anyhow.”

You’ve also put together some great compilations, including Gin Palace and The Pasty Anthology. How do you pick out artists for these projects, and how closely to they have to stick to the theme?

I put adverts on my blog and on some comics forums asking for submissions and asked all my comics friends to do stuff if they wanted. I wasn’t too bothered if anyone kept to the themes or not as long as they were good stories.

Do you ever have days when the faces just won’t go right?

Yes. I draw the faces very quickly and then later on I stick little bits of paper over them all and do them again, until I am happy with them.

Lastly, can you recommend any other independent comics we should check out?

Simon M is really good, and so is Francesca Cassavetti. And Oliver East is great. Also, Jim Medway is getting a book published this year called ‘Playing Out’ from Blank Slate, which will be really good.

Thanks Rob!

To find out more about Rob’s work, visit: robjacksoncomics.com

That’s Logic

rotherhamzinelibrary — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:51:04 +0000

For all the excitement an airmail sticker can bring, sometimes it’s nice to get a submission from just down the road. That’s Logic is one such example, the project of Rotherham-based illustrator Nicola Ellen Haigh. For the first issue of her zine, Nicola has collected work from an assortment of designers, asking each one to take typography as a theme — and run with it. The result is a pristinely-finished catalogue of work, brimming over with different elements of digital design, pen and ink, photography and street art.

thatslogiczine.blogspot.com

Every Reason

rotherhamzinelibrary — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:28:06 +0000

The latest issue of Every Reason features a pleasing array of writers, poets, illustrators and photographers, not that we would expect any less from this bi-monthly literary zine sped to us all the way from Tennessee. Highlights this time around include Karley Bayer’s tale of obsession, related in razor-sharp dialogue over a cold beer at Smoky Joe’s, and Edaurdo Jones’ poem ‘Christmas Cookies’ — a colourful recollection of his grandmother’s house. ‘Beard Haiku’ is not to be sniffed at either.

pulltheletter.blogspot.com

Crowds

rotherhamzinelibrary — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:55:09 +0000

If you’ve got a soft spot for shoals, flocks or herds then Crowds could be the zine for you. No fuss, no messing about — just lots of large groups of animals and objects standing together, brought to you by Collemoki, a team of designers originally from Japan and now based in London. Cute as a button.

collemoki.com