First impressions are everything. Skin Ego is a really pretty little quarter-page zine–the cover is screenprinted on lovely thick paper, the title’s printed in artfully wobbly typewriter font, and there’s even a mix tape track list (“PARTY WEEKEND!!!”) photocopied onto the last page. After thoroughly judging the thing by its cover (I have heard there are rules about this), I was all ready for a sweet, artsy punk-rock love story. And that’s what I got. Kind of. The most bewildering part of Skin Ego is the first page, which is a synopsis like you’d write for a school project. I learned what the entire 42-page story was about after reading this one page (Sean does himself no favours here by telling you what the “highlights” of the story are). The story was okay, but unsatisfying. Not a lot happens to Evan, the protagonist–he’s the star of the school play, he has some friends, a girl has a crush on him, and he has a crush on his drama teacher, things happen to him, but through all of it he’s just uniformly cranky. There was nothing terrible about this zine, but after all the work Sean put into the cover, I wish he’d put a little more into the story. (Emma Healey)
Zine, Sean Zeo, [email protected]