Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Zine Review: Smog City #3




Smog City #3
$5 / 40 pages
Mulnix
PO Box 29753
Los Angeles CA 90027
eddiemulnix.blogspot.com

Full disclosure: I only read half of this zine. The reason? A good portion is comprised of chapter three of “The Night Snacker”. Having not read the first two chapters I felt completely lost within the narrative.

Smog City is a “pulp litzine” written by Mulnix and given a stunning graphic presentation with dye-cutouts and halftone pages. The illustrations are crisp throughout the zine and the cover art done in purple borders on hypnotic and somnambulant. In addition to creating a graphically beautiful presentation, Mulnix can write! His short fiction is engaging and the brief essay on the cities of the mind (and the gnomes who inhabit them) is evocative of places and people everyone has encountered.

I won’t give away the scenarios of the two short stories in Smog City #3, other than to say one of them featured an extremely believable, though passive-aggressively flawed, punk paralegal named Fooz Pinkley.

Smog City is one of the highest quality zines both in presentation and content that I’ve read in recent memory. 

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