So a couple of weeks back I had picked up a few zines from both the MCA and Other World’s zine fairs.

Archonic
It’s an architecture/design mag put together by students, by the looks of things. The design of the magazine has all the elements that are in vogue; photos dissected by simple geometries, large bold quotes in contrasting colours, vector graphic and wire frames of objects-to-be. But the work needs editing. Grammatical and layout out errors persist from the first few pages. It makes a frustrating read, because I can see exactly where it can be improved.

Shangri-La
The new James Jirat Patradoon book is out. The fact that it has an ISBN probably calls into question whether it is a zine. But I’m not going to pass up a new Jirat book. The whole thing is full-colour madness, a mix of black leather horror to Japanese cyberpunk.

Super Ugly & Double Ugly
I’ve seen Mike Watt’s art around Canberra occasionally and it’s really good to pick up both his Ugly books. Basically, the contents include character illustrations plus a snashot of their individual lives. Lean and to the point, and the embossed cover is a nice touch too.

Biblio-Curiosa
Chris Mikul, the guy who puts together Bizarrism (a favourite of mine), also collects strange, rare books and then write about them in Biblio-Curiosa. It is also short biographies on the writers, where possible, to give insight into their works. As usual, I expect that this might be one day collected in a compendium, like I expect with Bizarrism.

Fallen Angles
Phillip Dearest continues to draw nightmares. Which is good and Fallen Angles seems like his most SFW zine yet. I have an almost complete collection of his work and I still cringe flicking through the pages. While such tame work was unexpected, much more mature and controlled.

Steakpunk
A comic by Louie Joyce, Nic Shaw and Eric Dittloff, tells the story of a butcher who provides meat for this cannibal clientele. The whole art and design has me a little surprised that they don’t have an Image Comics logo attached to this.

Lettering Zines
These two untitled zines cover a little of the lettering and texture work of Georgia Hill. Nice, heavy stuff.

Urban Rural
The Wildfolk Collective made a photo zine of double exposed film each taken from inside and outside of a city.