Zine Fest Bounty

Zine Fest Houston was held last Saturday. In all the years I’ve gone to Zine Fest, this is its fourth location. The first time I went, it was in the courtyard of Caroline Collective (a now defunct maker space), followed by a few years at the Printing Museum, then a couple of years at Lawndale Arts Center, and finally, this year, the Orange Show hosted Zine Fest. They didn’t try to set up tables in the actual Orange Show—it would have been far too cramped to have a festival in that building. Instead, there was a large, disused industrial building directly behind the Orange Show.

In this Google Maps aerial photo, the little building at the corner of Munger and Sanders (with the red & white cicular fountain) is the historic Orange Show building. The large grey building to its right is where Zine Fest was held. I’ve been told that it once a storage space for wooden pallets—it’s a large flat building with truck-loading bays, which are open to the outside. It was a sunny day with temperatures at in the 60s—perfect for an open air festival.

The number of exhibitors was small. I think they were keeping it small for this come-back show (since COVID killed Zine Fest last year). They could easily fit twice as many tables in this space, if they decide to come back to this space next year.

And being a semi-open air site allowed zine-lovers to bring their dogs.

This is David McClain, one of the editors of Superpresent, holding a puppy that visited our table. He co-manned my table. You always want to have at least two people manning a table—so that someone can spot you when you go to the bathroom or go get something to eat.

And you need a second person so you can do some browsing. Which I did. I didn’t buy a lot of stuff, but I got a few items. Here’s what I got.

St. Olaf Stories by Rose Nylund

I think the author of this very funny little zine is “Felice Q. Cleveland”, or maybe it’s Felice Q. from Cleveland. Rose Nylund was a character from Golden Girls. Apparently in the show, Rose would tell the other girls stories from her hometown of St. Olaf. The Nylund character was played by Batty White.

I don’t know if the content here is original or if it is taken from Golden Girls. But it is funny!

Broomzine Digest

Broomzine is an ongoing zine project by Jason Dibley. Most issues I have seen have black an white photos of brooms in ordinary locations. Occasionally there will be a human body in the photos, but often it’s a broom leaning against a wall and that’s about it. He prints them in a tiny zine format (3.5” x 5”, 20 pages). The photos are published full bleed. The only type is the word Broomzine on the cover and on the inside back cover (where there is also a date and Dibley’s email address.

But the Broomzine Digest has a different format/ (2.75” x 4.25”, 8 pages—printed on a single sheet of paper with a slice down the middle and folded into a zine. This kind of format is is very cheap to produce—each issue is a one-sided black-and-white photocopy 8.5”x11” page.) Instead of full-bleed images, the brooms are isolated against a ghostly white background. A nice variation.

Depart, Depart!

I passed by this table and saw that one of the items on offer was a slim, squarebound book called Depart, Depart!. Pretty ambitious for a zine festival! I picked it up and read the first sentence: “A wave of humanity flows onto the court of the Dallas Mavericks basketball arena, wearing clothes people wear at 3:00 AM, clutching the things people grab when they have seconds before the world ends.” Wow. Sim Kern had just sold me a book.

The book imagines Houston getting hit by a Hurricane that like Harvey did, pauses and dumps a shitload of rain. It fills the reservoirs west of town and the Addicks and Barker dams fail, sending water flooding into Houston. A hundred thousand people die. The protagonist is Noah is a trans man living in a group house in Montrose. Just before the flood, he sees a vision of a little boy named Abe who convinces him to park his car at the top of a nearby parking garage and once there, to get out of his car are climb up one more story. From his vantage point, he sees the waters of Buffalo Bayou rise until they are just below where he is. All of Montrose (and presumably anywhere else near the Bayou) if underwater. His housemates are dead. He is rescued off trhe roof by a helicopter and transported to Dallas with other refugees. He self-sorts with other queer people from Montrose.

The vision of Abe keeps coming. Abe is his grandfather, who barely escaped the Holocaust. He mostly tells Noah the right thing to do, but by the end of the book, Noah is ignoring Abe to rescue his Montrose friends from the Mavericks arena.

Kern writes a terrifying scenario. Texas (and the US as a whole) is devastated by wildfires. The city of Dallas is hit with food shortages because of the wildfires, and the people of Dallas are blaming the refugees from Houston. By the end of the book, it looks like a group of MAGA fanatics are about to massacre refugees at the stadium. I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil it.

Depart, Depart! is a quick-moving and terrifying read. For an old cis man like me, the pronouns are occasionally confusing, but you get used to it. The story sweeps you along.

The back cover has this copy: “Depart, Depart! grapples with intersections of social justice and climate change…” If I had read that before reading the first line, I would have not picked it up. That copy would make me assume that this would be a didactic, preachy book. There is a little of that, but mostly it was a book about finding your people even as the world is ending.

The publisher is Stelliform Press from Canada.

Imagine a Houston That Keeps George Floyd at Home, Alive & Safe

This zine was given away for free by The Houston Abolitionist Collective. It has the specific intent of convincing you that the police force in Houston should be abolished. They marshal a lot of strong evidence. Their chart about the clearance rate of the Houton Police Department is enlightening. “Clearance Rate” is a police term for when a charge is made or a case is dismissed as a percentage of total reported crimes. Thankfully, they clear over 50% of the murders and aggravated assaults, but still a huge number of them are never cleared. For robbery, violent crime, property crime, burglary, larsony theft, motor vehicle theft and arson, the clearance rate is significantly less than half—single digits clearance for burglary and motor vehicle theft. So one reason to abolish the police is that they are fucking incompetent.

But while they have compiled a pretty strong argument against the police, they seem unwilling to look at the political reality: that people are never going to vote for this system. They write about the word “abolition”:

One the surface, this idea may seem frightening or extreme. However, abolition does not mean taking away all means of public safety and keaving people to fend for themselves.

If you have to explain what you mean in this way, you have no chance of convincing Mr. and Ms. Citizen of ever voting in your program.

Still, it was an interesting read.

Teen Witch

Teen Witch is by San Antonio illustrator Luis Portillo. It is 32 pages long, printed on glossy paper, and is formatted like a magazine. The whole thing is one somewhat story.

The art is printed full-bleed on every page, one image per page. it has a limited palette (mostly oranges, purples and reds), designed in such a way as to give each page kind of pastel look. Even the line-work is dark orange.

I don’t have a lot to say about the story which seems to be the first person account of someone whose party has gone sideways. The number of words is really small. It’s not exactly a comic, but kind of operates like one. The swirl of words and image combine to produce the story, so I guess, sure, it’s a comic. But it feels like its own thing. Portillo has produced a very pretty zine object here.

Flat Files issue 1

Flat Files is a short-run magazine (250 copies) published in Houston by FLATS Lab and edited by Jessi Bowman and Chris Skelton. I like magazines, which feel like a defunct form of communication now. When the last newsstand in Houston closed down, I felt like a Roman watching Alaric marching into my city in 410 AD.

The things I want in a magazine are good editors, good contributors (both writers and visual artists), a good vision for what the magazine should be, and good design. FLAT Files achieves all of the above. The design is a little unorthodox, but benefits by being both bold and readable. The interview with clown-oriented photographer Domeinic Jimenez is especially exciting to look at with its type superimposed on Jimenez’s photography (a bold move in an art magazine) combine with the full-bleed design.

Normally, I’d worry that such an approach might seem insulting to the artist. His work becomes a design element instead of an autonomous work in its own right. I’m going to assume Jimenez was OK with having his image used in this manner—I hope so because the interview looks fantastic.

Not every feature in the magazine has this kind of design happening. Sebastian Boncy reviews two photobooks, Charting the Afriscape of Leon County by Jamie Robertson and Nobody Wants to See a Bird that Cannot Sing by Patrick Collier, who photographed the red door above. This review is arranged like a two-person portfolio in the magazine that runs for 12 pages—it is an amazing generous gift to both photographers, and the pages are design with between one and three photos on each. The design is opwn and airy. And the review is fantastic. Boncy is a sensitive reviewer and excellent write, writing the following about Robertson: “She doesn’t seem interested in the toxic individualism of a Wellsian time traveler, an unmoored person that becomes both catalyst and observer, possessor of a fixed self and perspective. In Leon County, it is an entire community that is traveling through time…”

One of the pieces in the magazine is credited to “Project B”, a semi-anonymous collective described as “artists, collectors and curators. Project B uses their archive of offbeat vernacular photography as a basis for artwork, exhibitions and publications.” (I describe them as semi-anonymous because although they don’t list their names, there is a photo of what I assume are two of the members of Project B in the Contributors section. But looking at Project B’s website, I see that the two people in that photo are Barbara Levine and Paige Ramey.) It is a selection from their collection that they put together for FLAT Files, called “From the Archives: Defaced & Captioned Photos.”

I love that FLAT Files includes the work of untrained photographers alongside the work of people who went to art school. I’ve been thinking that this should be more common. Not every artist is part of the art world. Two other recent exhibits I saw have this mixture of untrained and trained artists. The exhibit of art from the John L. Nau III Collection of Texas Art at the The African American Library at the Gregory School that I saw in September and the mammoth exhibit currently on view at CAMH, Dirty South. Both of these shows freely mixed the work of trained, professional artists and so-called outsider artists. And both exhibits were infinitely richer for having done so, as is FLAT Files.

They also included a snapshot print from the MFAH archives. I don’t know if the snapshot is from Project B’s archive, which they donated to the museum, or if the MFAH just happens to have so many old snapshots that they are willing to give 250 of them away to FLAT Files and its readers. Mine is a washed out 3.5” square photo.

I’d rate Zine Fest Houston a success in 2021. I’m particularly happy to have discovered Sim Kern and FLAT Files.

My zine Goodbye to Hollywood sold a few copies there, but if you want me to mail you an autographed copy, just support my Patreon at the “Great God” tier.