Fanzine Fiction
I've heard lots of good things about Mike Weller's work over the last few years, but never actually got around to reading any of it. Well, more fool me. Fanzine Fiction weaves a multithemed narrative of small-press comics, societal decay, adolescent emotional stumbling, a broken marriage and life imitating art, centered around a boarding house in a retro-futurist contemporary London. Sounds pretty heavy? It isn't. It is challenging alright, but it's not confrontational. It's better than that. You read it. You think how good it was. You put it down. You wake up in the night thinking about it. Next morning, you have to read it again to see if you missed anything. And then you're still not sure, so you have to read it again after that. And maybe again, after you've had a little longer to mull it over.
MJ Weller, 3 Queen Adelaide Court, Queen Adelaide Road, Penge, London, SE20 7DZ. Text + spot illos, 24pp, A5, UKP1.