Treasury of Mini Comics Vol. 2 by Various

Treasury of Mini Comics Vol. 2 Reviews

• 
  Robert

  The third and final book in Michael Dowers' retrospective/selective history of the American mini comics scene. Not as good as the second volume but definitely better than the first, this one has some real peaks but some valleys as well. In all this is a fascinating series that highlights the great breadth of subject matter and the wide-open, anything goes spirt of the mini comics art form. My full review is here on tcj:
  http://bit.ly/1DdZZc8
• 
  Chris Browning

  I miss zine fairs and comic shows a lot. I miss heading to a city either as a punter or especially as a stall holder and seeing the buzz of creativity of dozens of likeminded but always vitally different talents. A show where my weirdness and silliness can be on a table next to someone’s poetry zine or silly gag comics or a feminist call to arms. You can and do get a little bit of everything at the best comic shows and it’s something we try to achieve when we run our own in my town as Scribblecon. You’re in the middle of fellow talented amateurs from every spectrum of the comic world but who all choose the mini comic as the simplest, most basic and widely accessible format
  
  I miss these shows because you end up absolutely buzzing with ideas... someone will have created something you have literally never seen or thought of before and it will flick a switch or lever in your head where you start trying to think how that can apply to your own creativity. It’s very much a process that at its best feeds into the essence of creativity- you are inspired by someone else, you might inspire another person as well. There’s nothing quite like it
  
  My first zines and mini comics used to come from a now sadly defunct American distributor called USS Catastrophe: because post a decade and a half ago was always pretty reasonable, you could just randomly take a guess at all manner of cheap wonders for a dollar or so. For about thirty dollars you’d get about twenty or so zines or comics from across the spectrum of creativity and it absolutely fed into me wanting to make them for myself. I’m delighted that names from those early investigations turn up here - Dan Zettwoch, Souther Salazar (whose Monster Who Ate Planets is my favourite mini comic of all time), the godlike Theo Ellsworth - as well as other familiar artists. I’d personally like some Warren Craghead and Kevin Huizengha but that’s because they were my favourites from those days
  
  But the whole book feels like a microcosm of a great comics show. Stuff here that’s the furthest from my own tastes - Tijuana Bible stuff basically, although you do get Johnny Ryan sending that up too - nestles to artier stuff, silliness next to autobiographical stories, a healthy dose of uncategorisable stuff and even some interviews. It reminds me of the other books that made me decide this world was for me: the glorious Expo and SPX compilations. But these selections are wider in their scope, with not so much historically significant examples of the genre as a selective cross section of the weird, grimy and sometimes bewildering world of mini comics
  
  I’ve been slowly building up my skills and making more and more complex books over the ten years or so of doing The Common Swings, and I’m in it for the long haul I think. Some mini comics skills are just glorious one offs, a brilliant explosion of mad ideas that fizzles after three or four years. And that’s all part of the world. And this book celebrates it beautifully. Some of the comics are absolutely not to my taste, but that’s absolutely not the point. It’s the closest I’ve got to being sat at a table and seeing the many different styles and tastes of this world colliding together. And I adore it for that
• 
  Orion

  Incredible wealth of underground comix and zines collected here, lots of great work from many notable names like the creator of Tuca and Bertie has her zines in here too.
  
  There is old relics included in the beginning as a treat, old "Tijuana Bibles" - adult zines passed around and sold via underground markets and in places where people played betting games, in bars, etc. Most featured licensed characters bastardized for a niche audience.
  
  The historical impact of this collection is superb. There's so many great artists in here showing the real underbelly and some of the more gruesome and weird thought processes of artists here from the early 20's (the bibles in the beginning) to the 2000's with a heavy stopping place on the 80s/90s handmade zinester communities.
  
  Worth a read!
• 
  Joshua Williams

  There is some absolute gold in here but there are get too many entries that are just total nonsense or artistically trash
• 
  Grant

  Rambo 3.5