Pocket Thoughts 2
Ryan Ewing
https://linktr.ee/_my_name_is_ryan_
Pocket Thoughts 2 is a quarter-sized black and white perzine about all sorts of topics.
When you first open Pocket Thoughts 2, you are immediately launched into a black and white world of cut and paste. There are different fonts, different sizes, some handwriting, some typing, and even a backwards message. There is a tiny picture of Ryan, a tiny picture of chunky soup, and a comic one page one.
Yes, all that I’ve mentioned is on the front inside cover with a comic on page one.
Ryan’s style is pretty clear from the start with his Amazon review – “This Is What Happens When Amazon Asks Me to Review the Soup I Buy Online” – of some chunky soup that has plenty of humour and a healthy dose of sarcasm.
Ryan’s language is adult – meaning he swears – and it seems no subject is out of bounds. There is a piece about humans’ strange behaviour around using the toilet, a ‘recipe’ for ‘Poor Man’s Pizza’, and a piece that is ripe for giving offense to the more sensitive believers in god/God. Yet Ryan also contemplates the obsession with youth, the evolution of television shapes, and even shampoo.
And in amongst it all is a compelling piece about how we should switch our focus from putting more love into the world to putting in more compassion. How love can actually feed into selfishness while compassion is an outwardly directed feeling with outwardly directed actions. Some might argue that it’s a matter of semantics, but Ryan makes very good points about the differences.
This is certainly a zine that takes you through a lot of feelings.
As I mentioned before, there’s a lot going on in this zine. A cut and paste paradise, if you will. That does mean it involves a bit of very small text and holding it a bit closer to my face than I care to admit, but I think it’s worth it. It’s a lot of fun and a wild ride where you have no idea what’s going to happen from page to page.
I feel like I’ve only captured a somewhat small look at the way Ryan’s brain works, but that’s a good thing. Now I want to go back to the first zine as well as dive right into the next.
PS. Ryan writes that a cab driver told him that he puts strawberries on his pizza. What… what?