Crime Zine

As we have probably mentioned on this blog a number of times, we both love murder mysteries. Whether they're books, films or TV series, we lap them all up. To celebrate our passion for detectives and amateur sleuths, we decided to put together a zine full of our favourite TV characters. It's got 16 pages of biographies and illustrations and it's been bound by hand, like all your favourite Young Explorer zines.

It includes:

Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote

Quincy

Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks (Very topical)

Sherlock Holmes

Poirot

Miss Marple

Dr Mark Sloan from Diagnosis Murder.

You can buy it dead easily from our Big Cartel shop, which has been spruced up a little recently. You can have a look at our other zines while you're there too!

Who's your favourite TV detective? Have we missed out someone obvious? Let us know. It's too late to be included in Crime Zine now, but maybe we can make a Crime Zine Part Two at some point with the best of the rest!

Sailing Through the Trees

Apparently we have mentioned Caroline Dowsett in passing twice on this blog, but this post is going to be completely about her and Alex T Frazer's joint illustration exhibition at Common in Manchester. It's called 'Sailing Through the Trees' and we have been meaning to pop by and see it since it opened at the start of April. The poster gives you a little of taste of how good the exhibition was!

The illustrations in the exhibition tell the story of a wife launching a rescue mission for her fisherman husband who has somehow ended up in the belly of a whale. The series of illustrations are available to buy as prints or as part of a comic (There are prices and things up on the wall!) from behind the bar. We're very tempted. We'll probably pop back and pick up a couple of prints before the exhibition finishes at the end of September. It'd be good if we could grab a copy of the comic for Salford Zine Library, too.

The exhibition is proper ace, with the two artists' work complimenting each other perfectly to tell the story. We'd definitely recommend making a trip to Common, sitting in the 'Club Room' (I think that's what they call the room at the side, anyway. EDIT- it is actually called the 'Kestrel Suite'!), ordering some chips and spending a bit of time enjoying the lovely exhibition. Here's a couple of photos we took while we were at the exhibition (Complete with that annoying reflection you get when you take photos of things behind glass):

The point to take home from this blog post is that you should definitely go and see 'Sailing Through the Trees' at your earliest possible convenience. Okay!

Going on a Field Trip

Skyliner has been one of our favourite blogs for ages and ages. It appeals to our curious nature, is dead nice to look at, is wonderfully written and the articles usually include some pretty nice photos too. What more could you want? Hayley has recently written about the abandoned theme park in Berlin that we mentioned a few months ago, only her's is in more detail and has much better photos!

Hayley also does amazing guided tours of architecture in Manchester, and now you can buy your building obsessed loved one a gift voucher so they can choose which one to go on themselves. We want to go on the 'alternative countryside' one quite a lot. Anyway, our Liz was asked to provide an illustration for the gift voucher and there it is, poking out from behind the badges above. Nice innit?

It's a drawing of a building on Portland Street that Hayley has kindly written about for the next issue of Young Explorer, which is going to be about 'the past' and will be ready very soon we hope. Now stop reading this blog and go and spend the next few hours reading Skyliner instead.

See yer!

S

Woodland Month Part Three: Wildflower Zine

We have been commissioned to produce a zine about wild flowers for Stockbridge Village in Bloom. We're just waiting for it to come back from the printers, but we're pretty pleased with how it's turned out. We've seen some of these flowers and plants while we've been visiting different forests, woods and otherwise green public spaces.

Each page has an illustration of a different plant/flower and some basic information about growing them or just spotting them while you're out and about.

If you own or are involved in running a massive multinational organisation, we will happily do you some kind of zine for mega $$$$. Get in touch!

S + L

x

It's a Disgrace, Joe

Fuchsia MacAree is a mad talented Irish illustrator who currently lives in London. She is sickeningly talented, in fact, and she has stuff to sell on her website, which you should definitely visit now instead of reading the rest of this post.

We recently purchased a copy of her new zine 'It's a Disgrace, Joe', a 16 page zine full of dead good illustrations. The Joe in question, apparently, is the host of an Irish radio phone-in show called 'Liveline' and the zine is full of the kind of mad things that people say when they're given the opportunity to talk on the radio. Although I hope they're at least slightly exaggerated. My favourites are 'They've employed horses in the hospitals, Joe' and the gritty 'They're selling vodka in the nurseries, Joe' which features children drinking from bottles of Smirnoff.

I spent much of my teen years listening to talk radio programs, all of which seemed to attract largely right wing/paranoid/mentally unstable callers, especially the ones that were on after midnight. I'm not really sure why I did this instead of doing normal teenage boy things, but it seemed like a good use of my time. Anyway, that's not really important, what's important is that 'It's a Disgrace Joe' is great, and well worth €5 of your money.

You can look at more of Fuchsia's stuff on her website, including some amazing prints that you can buy and some more example spreads from the zine. You should also follow her on Twitter, if you're into that kind of thing.

Cheers

S