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Angry Young Spaceman by Jim Munroe  |
From the author:
Sam's going to another planet to teach English, where he hopes to earn enough creds to pay off his student loan and maybe buy a jetpack. He's not entirely comfortable with spreading the English virus but it beats working for the power brokers on Earth, and Octavia is a dreamy underwater planet populated by eight-armed beings.
He ends up learning more than teaching. From Mr. Zik, a singer of melancholy songs. From a boxy robot named 9/3. And from Jinya, whose undulating tentacles make Sam forget all about human legs.
Against the colourful backdrop of kitsch science fiction, this novel entwines UFOs with STDs, androids with androgyny, and youth culture with culture shock. Leave your millenial angst behind - blast off to 2959!
Reading this book, I felt like going back to the computer adventure games I used to play, Space Quest, Monkey Island and the like. This book, like these games, were about discovering new worlds and new characters, all of them quite comical, if not downright satyrical. Angry Young Spaceman has our protagonist discovering a planet looking up to Earth's culture, which is not unlike a certain Most Powerful Country On Earth at the moment... Like any good science-fiction, the story might be light-years away, but the themes are as contemporary as they can get, and that is why what is cast as alien is so familiar to the reader. Furthermore, Jim writes in a countercultural voice that makes one feel like Angry Young Spaceman is a zine that has taken longer to write; a diary about resisting dominating cultures that could have been any zinester's life.
Format: book, 244 pages, $20 |
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Saugus to the Sea |
From the editor:
It's never a good thing when your world turns weird and you're the only one who notices.
Beyond the smog of L.A. is Saugus, a California everytown where Billy Brown's life is rapidly becoming the stuff of conspiracy theory. It all begins when Billy discovers a network of antique underground sprinklers in the desert town of California City. Soon Billy is investigating the missing Saugus to the Sea road, the shady goings-on at the Caltech Earthquake Hotline and a mysterious cabal of Arbor Day anarchists intent on turning Hollywood Boulevard into forest preserve.
Bill Brown's debut novel chronicles life in the underground L.A. Amid the glitz of Tinseltown is a hidden world of critical mass bike rides, straight-edge punk gigs, guerilla gardeners, time-travelling monkeys and desert towns where the Blessed Virgin Mary still puts in an appearance.
Bill Brown publishes a travel zine called Dream Whip.
Saugus to the Sea includes illustrations by Brad Yung of Stay As You Are.
Format: book, 186 pages, $15 |
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Wide Collar Crimes by Matthew Blackett
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If you haven't been able to read all of the m@b issues, maybe we can help. Wide Collar Crimes is a compilation of 8 m@b issues from 2000 to 2002, featuring some of the best work of this anti-punchline comic strip. Each copy comes personally signed and dedicated by the author! I'll quote from the introduction here because I think that I can't write a better description:
"m@b is filled with found sound; accidental conversations and spontaneous confrontations captured upon paper with ink and a few choice words. Eavesdropped insight from cab drivers ("There's no use in exercising. God will kill you when he bloody well wants to"), teenaged couples ("Don't touch my ass in public"), and his Portuguese neighbour ("You no friend of Manuel"). It's what Jane Jacobs describes as the "intricate sidewalk ballet" of urban existence. Matt acts as court room artist, recording the pirouettes of city life.
Setup. Setup. Punchline.
That's the tired domain of the daily newspaper strip. Matt keeps you guessing, inks a curve, makes you chuckle at what you didn't expect with an anti-punchline. He doesn't ply us with cheap laughs to make sure we keep reading. He builds characters instead. When they do something silly, we giggle. When they hurt, we ache alongside them. Matt captures moments without rubbing them red and raw."
So whether you've read m@b before or have only started to read his weekly strip in Toronto's eye weekly, or heard about it from Broken Pencil ("Impossibly this baby keeps getting funnier"), from NOW magazine ("Best underground publication to hunt in 2002") or from This magazine ("Cultural Worker of the Month, January 2002"), this is your best occasion to load up on the goodness between one set of book covers!
Format: book, 200 pages, $18 |
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