While I generally prefer the issues of Carousel that have more of Tom’s shall we say horrific looking fucked up pen sketches of drooling monster people, number 6 is nonetheless a fairly premium issue if you so chose to enter the Tom Lacroix world. This time around, Tom features a transgendered chick-with-dick whore whose life and times consists of a whole lot of abuse. This would be a nasty, puerile, pointless story in the hands of someone else, but when Tom recounts it – in barely legible shrunken typed lines occasionally interrupted by inked-in non-sequiturs – he somehow gives the story a validity, or should I say a verbiage? “Once he had even found himself masturbating on a bus, frightening the other passengers, but fortunately not leading to criminal prosecution. He had even shook the conductor’s hand with his offending automatic appendage. Now though he was more aware of today, and his groping was easily incorporated into the guise of straightening his shirt etc.,” writes Tom. And so it goes, the author’s seemingly uncontrollable descent into perversity somehow sounds like an altogether authentic experiment with no control group and no way out of the lab. (HN)
zine, #6, Tom Lacroix, $2.50, #201 – 350 East 2nd Ave., Vancouver, BC, V5T 4R8