Reviews

It's fucking Robocop! What more do I really need to write? Alex J. Murphy, the brutally murdered policeman reborn as a superhuman cyborg crime fighting machine codenamed Robocop made his feature film debut in the year 1987 and since then has been featuring in numerous comic book publications since the early ‘90s.

Robocop's first appearance was in Marvel Comics in early May, 1990, in a comic based around the first film obviously titled Robocop and was written by Alan Grant with art from Lee Sullivan.

This is a book designed for the obsessive nooks and crannies of the Asperger’s riddled brain.

Death of a Scenester is a zournal that collects together various writers contributing to a shared topic. For issue 2 it's Boys. It's quite a meaty zine, nearly 80s pages long, and it took me a while to read this as I only felt comfortable reading it at home. I mean... it's called 'Boys' and it has a picture of a boy's face on it. In this modern pedophile-conscious society I just didn't really want co-workers or strangers to see me reading it as it could cause potential confusion. Even just with reading it at home I got some strange looks from my partner.

Anyway!

Moving on!

There are a variety of stories within these covers. Some have a pretty loose approach to the theme of 'boys' but weren't any the worse for it. Some, I have to confess, didn't seem to me to be about boys in the slightest. I could've done without the poetry, but hey - that's just me. I didn't really get the Lady Primrose Girly Girl thing, especially as it seemed to be part 6 of an ongoing series. Also, Freak by Anne Witherall looks like a series of random extracts from a larger novel, so I have to admit that I only skimread it. Joke or not, I'm just not interested in reading the middle parts of a novel.

Anyway, those are only minor niggles, the bulk of the contributions are excellent. My favourites were Miles the Monkey, Hoop, the opening memoir about the Pet Shop Boys, the pieces by Eddy Burger and Matt Ford and The Last Gasps of Boyhood. I think the idea of a zournal works best when the articles/stories are either relatively short or broken up into easily read sections. I tended to lose interest whenever a longer piece came along, and I guess there's always that risk when it comes to putting in a long piece. If you read a short piece and you don't like it you tend to still read all of it because it's short. If it's a long piece and the reader doesn't like it then the reader doesn't really give it the same chance because they stop reading before they get to the end. Just an observation.

My favourite stories were the ones where people wrote openly about their childhoods. I think there's a lot potential for further zines along those lines. This zournal is definitely worth checking out, the scope of variety in it ensures that everyone will find in it something that tickles their fancy.

The world of self-publishing is for the misunderstood genius. Forever rejected by the major publishers for pushing the envelope too far and spurned by the public who would much rather stick to their safe little cocoons and read the same story written by a different author time and time again.

This article is a look at just a few of the wonderful self-published works which are out there which are so tragically overlooked by the mainstream. Happy reading.

The Warrior-Priest: Book one of The Tales of Qire-Mersnal

Plot summary: The realm of Gardoool is the setting for this complex tale.