Posted on: April 27, 2008 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

Nihil Ex / :20 / 32L / PMB 278, 6523 California Ave Sw, Seattle WA 98136-1833 /

I hate when I lose a zine, only to review it later and find that all of the contact information I can verify has been changed. This is the case with the excellent Nihil Ex, done by Maggie in 2003. Nihil Ex is heavily picture-based and artistic, using blank space instead of just letting it sit there like so many others. A number of the pages (including the first six or so) are just reproduction of artistic pictures that ey had taken, coupled with captions. Particularly breath-taking is the “Bird on Sidewalk”, which is as its name implies, but the use of shadow makes the picture pop back into memory often. Another thing that bothers me about this zine is the writings by Raegan Butcher. Not that there is anything bad about them, it just is that the writing that ey does is so good and one of eir writings says about “my remaining few months”, so I can only assume that Raegan is out of the pokey. Going back to the captioned pictures after the brief literary interlude by Raegan, what is most confusing is the two pages of blank space found in the middle of the zine. What is probably the case is that Maggie just didn’t lay out the zine right, unless ey is doing something postmodern that I’m not getting. Nihil Ex is a great pictorial into the world of three years ago, and (maybe in its strongest moment) it has some very impressive pictures of Limpwrist, which are surprisingly hard to find nowadays. Nihil Ex is another one of those zines that I would copy, just so other individuals would be able to see the greatness that is contained within.

Rating: 7.8/10

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