I F#cking Love This Album
Various – Put Together by Chops
http://www.theworddistribution.com/

I F#cking Love This Album is Fishspit’s first foray into teaching me all about a lot of music that I’ve barely or never heard of.

As far as a first step goes, this one is a good one.

I F#cking Love This Album is a multi-contributor zine that takes you not through individual songs that the contributors love but the albums that they love. As Chops puts in the intro:

You didn’t have to pick your “favorite” album, or the first album you fell in love with, or the album you most like right now, just an album you love.

When it comes to zines like this that explore favourites or loves, I’m glad to see that there are multiple contributors. That way you can get all sorts of recommendations that are inspired by different backgrounds and influences. Where I expected a zine of text where everyone shared their favourite and that was it, I was impressed to find different takes on the prompt.

One person responded in comic format, and another person focused on the often-overlooked movie soundtrack album. All this made for a more engaging read and even more different varieties of things to look up.

You’ll still get what you expect with this zine, though: a scavenger-hunt-esque zine that may introduce you to music you’ve never heard of before or that reminds you to go back and listen to those old loves.

Everything Dies 7
Box Brown
BoxBrown.com
Everything Dies

I think Microcosm Publishing describes this awesome and hilarious zine series best:

One of the best and most promising new comic artists out there today, Box Brown writes and draws the Everything Dies zine series as a hard (and oft times hilarious) look into the religious myths of our world.

Everything Dies 7 takes you into the great flood myth, but not the biblical one. This is the Sumerian version with the crankypants Sumerian god Enlil getting upset at all those vexing humans.

This zine comic is great. I’ll come out and say that right now. TL;DR: Everything Dies 7 is excellent.

Box Brown’s style is very enjoyable and reminds me a little of the Felix the Cat cartoon style that I used to watch as a kid. (Which is meant to be a compliment; I love Felix!) He has a great way of using the images to really enforce the humour found in the writing. I laughed out loud more than once (“It vexed him so hard!”) thanks to Brown’s sense of humour. Especially in the little things like a god saying ‘hullo’ instead of ‘hello’.

Love it.

What really made it a keeper (though, let’s be real, it was a keeper pretty much from the first time I saw it) was the addition of letters and responses in the back! All still keeping in the style of the overall comic and just giving it that little something extra.

In and of itself, the comic is so enjoyable and definitely one of those zines that I don’t even let people borrow because I don’t want to lose it. Still, I feel like there’s even deeper examinations to be made once I get my hands on 1-6.

PS. By clicking on the Everything Dies link above, you can grab every Everything Dies comic (for a fair price) and start reading right now.