Should you happen to find yourself in the slow train between The Hague and Rotterdam, you might come across this monthly fanzine made by Schiedam artist Ronald de Graaff and friends.

Zienzine is set up as a platform for contributing artists. It is distributed for free (in the train, and at the addresses of some of the makers), which is why each edition is limited to 250 copies. The editors are trying to put back issues on the web for those who don’t often find themselves in the slow train between The Hague and Rotterdam, but so far have only managed to make issue 0 of the five that have been published available for download.

The first issue contains stories about Volkswagen plagiarism, pinhole photography, and doodles and cartoons. There is also a recipe for vegetarian boerenkoolstampot. If you want to know how not to pronounce this word, see here (featured earlier).

I discovered Zienzine from the print edition of Zone 5300. Zone’s latest is filled with comics from Flanders, and may be had for a few more days. It appeared last December, but I could not review it then. TNT Post never delivered my issue, and I finally got to rectify that last week.

Cowboy John is a comic strip that appears regularly in Zone 5300, and that now has its own, eponymous album. It is basically a continuation or spin-off of the Jan Jaap comic that writer and artist Jan Vriends published in the same magazine.

Cowboy John is a man with a past that has led him to drink and dress up as a cowboy. The comic strip switches back between single strip gags and longer, dramatic bits, and to fill out the album ‘bloopers,’ out-takes and Cowboy John strips that appeared in other magazines.

Do I like Zone 5300 sending me review copies? Yes. Would I buy the book? No. Cowboy John has a warm, safe home in the tri-monthly and motley collection of comics, reviews, short stories and curiosities that is Zone 5300, where its erratic style fits right in. But it’s not an album with which to snuggle up on the couch and forget the world for half an hour.

The Cowboy John book is the first in a new imprint named after the magazine, Collectie Zone 5300.

The Summer edition of Zone 5300 contains a large retrospective of The Cramps, the psychobilly dinos that put the fun into punk, because of stiletto-heeled front-man Lux Interior’s death earlier this year. Writer Eric van der Heijden handcuffs you, then shows all the clean versions of rock ‘n’ roll and the dirty parents they sprang from. Guess where The Cramps belong?

Lars Fiske reports on a 1922 visit of Dada to the Netherlands (illustration).

What do you do if everybody is already shooting nice pics of microbes, hell, if nice pics of microbes are really old hat in your country? Stereoscopic photos of the creepy-crawlies! Plus you try to get American art schools and Dutch museums to believe your story that art can only be objectively enjoyed after you have dunked classic works and instruments in a bath full of micro-organisms. Such is the wondrous sense of humour of Wim van Egmond.

Maaike Hartjes tries her hand at photography. Eerie! Cute! How does she do it? (Maaike’s got a new blog by the by, so go check it.)

And finally a long comic of Fool’s Gold contributor Milan Hulsing about collected collectors, so you know he knows what he is talking, er, drawing about.

(Illustration: Lars Fiske.)

An ad on the back of the latest Zone 5300 brought together these colourful and perhaps slightly disturbing comic book covers by Dutch and Flemish artists (click for a larger version):

From left to right:

• I Heart Paris by Maarten vande Wiele and Erika Raven;
• De Maagd en de Neger 2 (The Virgin and the Negro, part 2) by Judith Vanistendael;
• Rood Gras – Ik ben een bos en er lopen mensen door mij by Rob van Barneveld (Red Grass – I Am a Forest and People are Walking Through Me);
• Als Vader Abraham van huis is (When Vader Abraham is Away from Home) by Argibald; and
• Zachte Dwang (Gentle Coercion) by Kim Duchateau.

They almost make me want to not buy the books, so that I can fantasize about what is in them.

Between the covers of issue 85 of Zone 5300 are stories by Tanxxx and by Wittek & Sven Tauke, excerpts from Typex’ sketch book, a two-pager by Zone editor Sandra de Haan, and also a two-pager by Maaike Hartjes, in which the author goes introspective, but in a funny way.

Zone 5300 also points out that the ultra-Dutch comic Sjef van Oekel is being rereleased in French (where the title character is called Leon-La-Terreur), but not in Dutch. “What’s up with that?” the mag demands to know of the artist, Theo van den Boogaard. “The co-operation between publishers De Bezige Bij and Oog & Blik is still young, but there is a good chance they will publish the Dutch reprint. Wim [Wim T. Schippers] and I always wanted to be published by De Bezige Bij, so this development makes us very happy.”

Fool’s Gold editor Frits Jonker is playing with typefaces, faces drawn using the letter shapes (only and all) of a person’s name. He’s got a longish Flickr photostream with just typefaces of what I assume are his friends, but the image above with Batman and Robin and Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie was taken from the latest Zone 5300.

Speaking of which, the winter issue of Zone 5300 has an exerpt from Nozzman’s “drawing book” (”not a sketch book, because even if I don’t study or research these drawings, they’re still mature”), part 1 of Mr. Mack’s very handy guide to trucker’s CB talk, Robert van Raffe’s look into dandyism, an interview with detective writer Philip Kerr, and much more.

Piet Schreuders, him of the Poezenkrant (which is not about cats), designed this card in 1984 on occasion of the birth of his daughter Anna. It’s a family tree that goes back four generations, pink branches signifying girls, blue ones boys. It’s one of the reasons that the Fool’s Gold editors clamour for a Schreudermania book.

Ah, speaking of Fool’s Gold. People forgot to tell my clients that there’s an economic crisis supposed to be going on, and as a result I haven’t really had the time to review the latest Zone 5300. Issue 83 is all about Outsider Art. Like every other issue of Zone 5300. Which they sort of acknowledge in the foreword, then still power on.

The good thing though is that as part of that whole Outsider Art thing Fool’s Gold got two extra pages in full colour. Comics are mostly by the regular contributors. Lamelos’ Sam Peeters goes solo this time with In de schaduw van mijn lul (In the shade of my penis), which manages to pack armed robbery, monkeys, slipping-over-banana jokes, faeces, swamp things, camp fires, steaming hot sex, and a gruesome beheading all in six small pages, in that order. I thought you ought to know.

Zone 5300 also checks out how Teun Hocks, illustrator to amongst others The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine is doing these days. He’s doing… wait, buy the damn magazine already!

Who’s heard of Lian Ong recently? The comics artist received aclaim with her album Horizon in 1998, winning an award at the Stripdagen Haarlem. The comics book took 8 years to create, and she didn’t feel like repeating that stunt again, so she became a Tai-Chi teacher.

Another (sigh) autobiographical story by Simon Spruyt, this time about his carreer as a comic artist-god (illustration right). Revealing.

Fool’s Gold is looking for subsidies to bring out a CD with their large collection of gay songs, and are asking readers who know which ways to walk toward the state’s purse to help them out. This issue was the first time in years that Fool’s Gold writes something I’d read about before on the web (the phonautogram), a clear indication of what a good nose the two editors have for the weird and the wonderful—or a clear indication that I surf the wrong websites.

10 bonafide ways to lose your punk credibility. Number 7: Run for mayor of San Francisco (Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedies). Finish behind a drag queen called Sonic Boom Boom.

Graphical biography in which the devil tells the life story of American writer and explorer W.B. Seabrook, alleged eater of man flesh, sexual deviant, inventor of the word “wow,” and popularizer of zombies. Written and drawn by two of the magazine’s editors, Tonio van Vugt and Marcel Ruijters.

Detectives should stay away from time travel (illustration left), that would save us a lot of problems. In Joshua Peeters’ De Rechtvaardige Rechters (The Just Judges) our heroes who do not look like another staple of Flemish comics—and we’ll keep denying it till you believe us—try and retrieve the famous panel by the Van Eyck brothers.

One of the major comics cons of the Netherlands is being held today and tomorrow, the Stripdagen Haarlem. The Amsterdam Weekly blog asked four members of the Dutch underground comics establishment what they will be visiting. Read the tips of

• Merel Barends
• Tonio van Vugt (Zone 5300 editor)
• Marc van der Holst
• Roel Smit

Sez Van Vugt:

2. Lots of nice exhibitions during the festival, but I wouldn’t want to miss the Lamelos vs. The Doozers spectacle in De Philharmonie (Saturday, 16.00) for the world. Two famously anarchistic comic artist ensembles build cardboard monsters and will fight each other to death! Mayhem ensues!

The gist seems to be that most will watch the guinea pig races (an old Dutch TV tradition) held at the De Philharmonie, and will ingest a liquid called “beer” afterwards.

Illustration: Tonio van Vugt, self-portrait. Disclaimer: Orangemaster also writes for Amsterdam Weekly and its blog.

In issue 81 of Zone 5300 one Eric van der Heijden is giving Maaike Hartjes a run for her money with his own brand of tiny comics, although his intellectual absurdities remind me most of online comic XKCD. A hunter walks up to a giant rabbit, wraps his arm around its shoulders, and tells it with a big grin: “There are too many rabbits here. That’s all I am saying. Draw your own conclusions.”

There’s a four pager by Floris de Smedt where Mr. Bunny (see image above) escapes from his prison and exacts a terrible revenge from Brussels. Luckily Mr. Bunny is no match for The Professor, who has a brilliant brain and ready access to dragon eggs. No bunny can resist eggs!

Illustration by Eric van der Heijden: “Does this make you feel more of a man? Does this make you forget for a fleeting moment that your wiener is tiny?”

Toen ik klein was (When I was young) is a translation of a comic by Mr. Stocca (Milan Pavlovic) about a boy/bunny who has a crush on his school teacher, and then she dies. I love the atmospheric drawings (see below)!

Also: voyeuristic drawings of young women by Barend van Hoek, a look at artificial creatures, and the regulars (Hibou, Cowboy John, Fool’s Gold, et cetera).

Once again the macabre is represented in the fourth and last issue of Zone 5300 this year. Death and decay play important roles in respectively a Molluskhead story by Fufu Frauenwahl and in Floor de Goede’s Deathboy.

Simon Spruyt reminisces about the time when he took little Lizzy for a tour of his comics plant (illustration). In doing so he gives the reader rare insights in the cold, hard economic realities of making and selling comics. No, it’s not what you think it is. No, not that either. Yes, you’re warmer with zombies, but you’ll have to read the story yourself to find out.

New physical media give publishers an enormous opportunity to sell to you what you already own: DAT tapes to replace your LPs, CDs to replace your DATs, and so on ad infinitum. But what happens to the discarded carriers? Rotterdammer Matrijs van Merg takes care of them. He builds organs from diskettes, videotapes from LPs, and more, and Zone 5300 interviews him. Photo: race track made from LPs.

Another article is the long interview with 1970s underground comics icon Paul Bodoni, whose albums have such imaginative titles as The Story of the Story and Other Stories, and Two Alfredos on a Green Coyote.