Bunyon zine

This is an excellent chronicle of the BC  hipster scene, as well as the travelogue  of Rob’s journey through the ugly  landscape of his soul. This zine speaks  to the despair of being a thinking  creating person with such fervour that  it is almost like the kind of prayer  people make in their heads as they are  walking home from work after a  desperate, shitty day. That said, there are  a lot of comics in this zine including the  unforgettable Ackerman Dick story and  Shawn Bristow’s Just When I Thought  I Had A Grip On Life Love Rams It’s  Fist Up My Ass. Oh Yeah! Anyway,  Rob’s family obviously has a knack for  self confession, because the proseCont. from previous page  that pushes this zine into the limelight  where you can see the zits and  loneliness are by Rob and his Mom.  Mom – who is, in fact, identified only  as Rob’s Mom – gets to start the zine  off with a letter about adjusting to her  recent move to small-town  Saskatchewan. This is a great piece of  inflected prose, every sentence is an  ([un?]intended) punchline. She should  write a book of this stuff, it would  definitely win the Leacock award for  humour. Particularly notable was the  portrayal of the “elderly gentleman”  who keeps driving by her new home in’  order to present up to date reports at  the town coffee shop on what the new  folk are doing. Hilarious. Now don’t  skip the rest of the zine, but Rob’s own  gut wrenching admissions from a diary  (fact or fiction, it don’t matter) come at  the very end. Eight pages of diary  entries see Rob move from love-sick  puppy to irrational dick-head while his  health steadily deteriorates under the  office flourescents and his band-mates  rebel against his authority. As if that  wasn’t enough, constant cameo  appearances by indie bands and zine  kids alike give this diary a lifestyles of  the poor and fucked up feel that both  undermines and speaks to the repetition  of being alive. A bunion is the inflamed  swelling of the first joint of the big toe,  but Bunyon is the shrinking swell that  never stops chafing.

20 pages, Act #7  main creator: Robert Dayton  $2 plus $1 postage  317A Cambie St., Vancouver, BC  V6B 2N4

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