Zine Review: Baby Hair

Artzine, William Dereume, issue 1, luckys.ca/books/559/BabyHair, $7

Baby Hair is an astounding little comic that is cute and cosmic at the same time. It starts in the middle of a strange configuration of stardust as the hand of God picks out two little embryos, a boy and a girl, in order for them to be born out of a weird door and turn into birds. Later, on earth, as humans, the characters go on a really nice date where he twiddles
her hair a bit. Back home, the boy walks down a lonesome road to come to an abandoned building that contains the embryonic version of the girl he dated. With a mischievous
look in his eyes he approaches the girl, but is interrupted by a mysterious space spirit who looks in through the window of the dimension next door. The spirit plucks him up and pushes the boy into a door located in the bizarre entity’s chest. The boy dissolves and the dream ends. The next morning he encounters the bird that he transformed into at the
beginning of the book. He then metamorphosizes into the kind of extra-dimensional entity encountered a page earlier. End comic. I hope that didn’t spoil anything for
you. The plot needs to be experienced to be understood, and even then it’s an understanding on the intuitive irrational level of dreams and love. The art is masterful in its simplicity. Sure, it has an off the-cuff doodle quality to it, but that emphasizes the relation between the spiritual and the mundane that is demonstrated in the plot. It’s the blending of high and low that really makes this zine a successful one. Maybe your date tonight has karmic resonance, which you can only dream about. Maybe this little cartoon contains the secret of heaven. Maybe if the doors of perception were cleansed, Baby Hair would appear to us as it is; infinite. (Neal Armstrong)