Fragments
Perzine, anonymous, fragmentszine.weebly.com, $4
Looks can be deceiving. From the cover of this zine — it’s a high contrast image with Impact font and overall stern presentation — I figured, this is a hardcore fanzine, right? Wrong. Fragments is a zine collecting the deeply personal reflections of an individual who is utterly devoted to God, presumably in a Christian sense. A Christian devotional zine is a strange premise, sort of like Christian metal, and as such, my brain has trouble computing it. I cannot help skipping ahead. I try to get a foothold in these sincere and tightly typewritten paragraphs, but with every capital “He” I lose the thread. I mean, I’ve listened to Bob Dylan’s “Saved,” but that was more out of morbid curiosity.
So I just can’t with the God stuff, but what I can do is talk about what I liked and what is interesting about this zine, and you can decide for yourself whether to check it out. First of all, Fragments doesn’t come off like some creepy, moralizing, manipulative pamphlet that someone would hand you at Yonge and Dundas Square. Fragments is anonymous and “dedicated to those who fully allow themselves to struggle, be ridiculed, be judged, and humiliated in the name of a higher power.” The writing is enthusiastic, intense, and personal. The author does not seem to be interested in what the reader thinks, as there is no contact information and it only leads readers to a website that resembles an Etsy page.
This may be 100% sincere or this person might be a total bullshit artist, I truly cannot tell. But perhaps a Christian zine that resembles a hardcore punk fanzine is not so strange after all. At least in the sense that our anonymous author appears to be as excited about God as I was about the Los Crudos/Spitboy split LP when I was in high school. (Chris Landry