Publish You (edited by Gareth Brookes, Jimi Gherkin, Peter Lally & Saban Kazim) Website
If anybody out there is curious about the current state of small press comics in the UK (and shame on you if you’re not), this is as good a place to start as any. Gareth is one of many people involved in putting this thing together, but it goes up on his page because… well, I don’t have a particularly good reason. Mostly it’s just to draw attention to his comics one more time, as they are one of the genuinely good things in this world. So how about this anthology? It’s in color (except for the pieces that stuck with black and white), the pages are numbered and there’s a solid table of contents, so there goes any chance I had of bitching about the production values. This book is right around 80 pages but it feels longer than that. I believe that’s a compliment. Stories in here include the tale of angry freakish neighbors by Steve Tilotson, some of the lies we’ve always been told by Gareth, Edd Baldry finding out that walking to work in the snow is no better than riding a bike, Mickey Lam cramming the story of Falun Gong in China today into two pages, Zarina Liew with an adorable piece about mime speed dating, cheerful suicide by Enrico Ariis, Scott Jason Smith deals with old poisoned candy, Saban Kazim lays out the relentless side of peer pressure, Sina Shamsavari gets into the awkwardness of running into an ex long after the breakup (and what to do if they “don’t recognize you”), and Richard Cowdry proves that bringing up comics in conversation with the opposite sex doesn’t always result in them running off in the opposite direction. As always, I’m skipping plenty of stuff in this book that should probably be mentioned, but that’s where you come in. If you’re as curious as you should be you’ll check out that website, and if you’re even more curious you’ll just go ahead and buy the damned thing. This, of course, will mean that I’ve done my job, such as it is. The price is in that funny foreign currency that’s actually worth more than “real” money these days (as American dollars are powered by our imagination at this point) so let’s say… $13?
