Zine Pickup – INFERNAL

After experimenting with risograph printing, I found that I’d like to make more personal Illustrations using the technology. I figured it would be worth looking at, or picking up small books made using a riso printer more often.

I picked up a risograph printed zine from one of the comic book stores in town. I don’t buy on impulse, and I like to browse the self-published books for the illustration and text, but INFERNAL caught my eye, I decided to pick it up. I want to share a few pictures of the artwork here.

The zine’s cover.

It is, of course, a zine full of demons (it’s “a zine about hell”). It’s a collaboration between two artists, Eli Spencer and Sophie Robin. The publication is a non-standard size, I’d say close to A5, and it was made thanks to the Edinburgh-based social enterprise print studio Out of the Blueprint.

It is difficult to capture the vivid colours of riso ink with a phone camera (or digital camera) and my photos don’t quite do the book justice.

Inside the zine – comics and illustration.

Not all zines are made using a risograph printer, of course. One can use a regular photocopier, or any kind of printer. But the reason I picked this book up was because it was riso printed; the pages are all grey sugar paper, using fluro orange, red, and black ink.

seeing small self-publications like this gives me the hope that I can also print books if I wish to. I can’t see myself printing an artist book or zine in the near future – between the upcoming academic year and work – but it is something that I can work towards if I find the time to paint and draw. An artist’s book can just be a collection of work reprinted and bound!

Detail of an eastern demon illustration.

Each artist’s work complemented each others’ and that makes flicking through the illustrations engaging. The colours of the inks of course reinforce the association of hell and red, ruddy brown, and black tones.

You can see that some pages’ registration is a little off (or, I assume it to be) but that’s one of the charms of this printing method, and each zine is an unique artwork in its own right.

I recognised some of the demons in this book (some exclusive to literature or folklore than religion) but none of the demons are indexed and I wanted to know more about some of them.

The centrefold illustration.

Even though the printing risograph zines is technical and uniform, the internal contents of the zines doesn’t have to be. The insides will be as varied as the people who make them!

If your local comic book shop has a section dedicated to self-published works it’s worth checking out to see books with content that otherwise wouldn’t get printed; either because they cover subjects and issues big publishers shy away from, or the content might not interest a large enough audience to validate the cost of mass-printing. Regardless, you’re not likely to find artist books or zines in a chain bookstore!