Six More Slices of Life Vol. 2
Comic, Keming, 6 pgs, keming.ca, $3
This zine is short and sweet. Six pages; six illustrations of everyday trivialities. So yeah, the title makes sense.
Six More Slices is a well crafted, staple-free zine printed on decent paper, created by Toronto-based artist Jae Lee (aka Keming). The illustrations are vibrant and poignant in their cheekiness, depicting the routine quirks of two characters. A young man stares with a fixed, frustrated gaze at his flash drive: “Never goes in the first time, do you?” reads the caption. A young woman sits watching her laptop. She’s wrapped tightly in her blanket, holding a cup of coffee and with a bag of chips by her side: “Hermit mode fully activated.” In another panel, the young man’s gaze is fixed on a half-butchered apple, knife in hand. “How does mom do this?” Next, the young woman is depicted staring lovingly, head in hand, at a similarly tilted flower. “Wish I knew your name.” Later, the pair walk side by side: the man eating a bag of trail mix, surprised by the confidence of a peckish squirrel by his side, while the woman is walking (at least trying to) against an onslaught of wind and rain.
Like I said, it’s pretty simple, but these pages have stock. I like when zines take advantage of the format’s immediacy and Keming does that in this comic. Six More Slices of Life Vol. 2 is a great coffee table zine. It’s brief, cute and occasionally insightful. (Jeff Low)