From the Stacks: October 27, 2006

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Molly the Popsicle is a delightful comic-zine by father-son duo, Christoph and Herbie Meyer. The cover features an orange-colored (and -flavored) talking Popsicle, complete with a real wooden Popsicle stick! Some may know Christoph as the maker of the charmingly handcrafted zine 28 Pages Lovingly Bound With Twine. Molly is 5-year-old Herbie's story-time conception about a popsicle taken from her frozen habitat only to be forgotten, left at a table's edge to melt into sticky goo. Christoph found the tale 'so delightful, so childishly grim, that I had to adapt it into a minicomic.' Herbie also has another zine (edited by his pops) called Mean Zine Submarine. -- Suzanne Lindgren

Fashioned with an X-Acto knife, some ink washes, and a vintage cookbook, Crumbs on the Cutting Board waltzes through a rhyming ode to food. Created by Alexis 'Lex' McQuilkin, the zine features some intricate paper-cuttings of foodstuffs, such as dim sum and quiche, pasted atop dated cooking guides and recipes, along with a singsong poem ('W is for weiners/boiled and slick/X is for xanthan gum/making sauce thick'). Despite her description of Crumbs... as free of 'an overwhelming amount of thought and emotion,' McQuilkin succeeds in creating a visually impressive piece of zine-art. -- Rachel Anderson

Typed in Century Gothic font and entitled a tenderness so painful i thought my heart would burst, Karen Olson Edwards' homage to former ambitions is indeed wrought with emotions: toiling over insensitive high school remarks, missing favorite sweaters, revisiting teenage clich?s. Edwards confronts nostalgia's cruel way of making the past seem more pleasant and hopeful than the present ever seems capable of being. Anyone who spent their teenage years in awkwardness, nurturing high hopes, may appreciate Edwards' recollections of how 'totally ridiculous' plans got her through the rough spots. a tenderness... appears to be a single edition, though Edwards also writes the pine box, described below. -- Rachel Anderson

A photocopy of 17 dark-haired people looking somewhat skeptically at the camera and seated for what could be a pre-1950s college class photo graces the cover of the second issue of the pine box. It's the type of photo I wanted to take my time with, studying the subjects' faces and wondering about their lives. That's pretty much how the rest of my time with the 'correspondence and distance' issue of Karen Olson Edwards' zine went. The pine box is filled with enchanted musings and photos, but my favorite part was the inclusion of an excerpt from the National Postal Museum's membership magazine, which informed me that when mail can't be delivered it's sold at postal auctions. -- Jenna Fisher

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