Come Find Out – Fresh off the Press at 2016 LA Zine Fest!
Don’t Know What a Zine Is?
The doors to the 5th annual Los Angeles Zine Fest opened promptly at 11am on Sunday, March 6 at The Majestic in Downtown LA. My good friend and fellow zinester, Anjelica Colliard and I were there to celebrate Hot Magic, Come Find Out‘s 13th zine issue.
As the exhibitors patiently waited, the first and second floor of the historic bank building quickly flooded with steady streams of hipsters, students, and older folk interested in cheap art, self-published literary work, and alternative stories.
We knew many fellow zinsters from the Bay Area who were also exhibiting for LAZF including Tiny Splendor, there to release their newest literary feat, Box of Books, which is a pink Chinese pastry box full of 20+ zines. I managed to snag this print by Carolina Paquita who is based out of Brooklyn. This print/zine really struck me. Thank you!
But back to our sexy witch zine!
Hot Magic is the thirteenth issue of Come Find Out (CFO), a collaboration between Anjelica Colliard and Krusty Wheatfield. Hot Magic started with an open call for illustrators, writers and comic book artists, which evolved into an anthology of modern-day magic. With blush inducing comics and illustrations, we explore our animal intuition and sexuality.
Krusty was at LAZF in spirit as she is studying the ancient art of comic books in France. Read her introduction to Hot Magic below. Powerful, funny, poignant…weird. Klassic Krusty. I transcribed it below.
Desire is a tricky thing. Everyone knows this. You want what you want and when you get it, it transforms into a banality. Magic can help you subvert this tendency by revealing the erotic power of transformation rather than being bummed out by it.
The Erotic, if you follow George Bataille’s reasoning (for example), is a temporary suspension of death, or rather a privileged view into the mysterious generative power of sloughing off one state to assume another. Blood sugar sex magic, ha ha.
So the erotic brings you into a state of continuity akin to that of returning to the soil, but this time with some other body’s freakiness – touching tongues with the mystery of existence. The occult & the erotic are on a spectrum, an ever-turning cycle upon which we should more often run our fingers down like the spine of a lover. Sex & magic, the erotic & the occult – these energies trouble the boundaries we move around daily, and for the better, separating the body from the metaphysical is not only dangerous but terribly boring! When you are in tune with the mischievous soul of the one recumbent & regal before you (or within you, if yr goin’ solo), are you not more fully resplendent & filled with cosmic glee?
This delight in the unseen wonders nestled within our bodies & the primal pulsation to move toward places unknown has profound implications beyond yr chosen bower of bliss. With raging conservative cockatiels singing the praises of a border wall like some kind of goddam apple-pie-scented condom of hate, the onus is upon us to actualize our ability to romance the philosopher’s stone.
We might go on and on about the loss of magic that modern technology & the history of imperialist rationalism propagate (or seem to), but we have no time for such humbuggery. This zine is here to help you visualized what can happen when the beast with two backs meets the book of the dead. We sing the body electric!
Dark matter means that dark matters, in short. Moving through the murky corridors of consciousness does not need to mean being lost, rather a need to redraw our vision of world. A marauder’s map that let’s us see, briefly, steamy encounters heretofore unimaginable.
Hot Magic is at your services with sigils, sensuality & body language of all kinds. May this thirteenth issue of Come Find Out give you the same post-coital angel glow we got while making it. We shall conceal & reveal, to conceal again, casting a zine spell, a wet dream via dry paper.
May you be titillated & transformed, and never stop howling at the beauteous booty of the moon!
Love,
Krusty Wheatfield & Jellicore
I’ve been a proud longtime contributor to this zine and submitted Ritual, a four-page comic book about a young woman’s nighttime full moon ritual. You can see my comic in the flesh in Hot Magic – now available on Etsy!
LA Zine Fest was a great experience to connect with other artists and writers in California and I look forward to more in the future. xoxo