Carnel #20 / $5 / Half-Sized / 40 Pages / R. Rees, TFF, 22 Victoria Square, Clifton, Bristol, BS8 4ES, England / carnel@talk21.com / http://carnel.sdf-eu.org/carnel/index.html /
No clue where I got this zine at, but the cover comes as a transparency, with the cover sprayed over with red paint. This issue focuses pretty heavily on role-playing, Kosovo, and the British reaction to the war in Afghanistan. I guess I had this issue sitting around my place a little longer than I should, but Carnel has some serious issues to it that tend to bother me. First off, all of the text is black on red paper, which does make for slightly harder reading than would be on a white/black layout. Luckily, Robert uses the same font the entire time through, so there isn’t that one font that cannot be deciphered. However, this is more of a double-edged sword in the sense that I wouldn’t mind seeing something, a picture, some art, some little diversion from the topics contained within – all that is in this issue is a piece of in-review art and the back cover, which has a set of bomb and a quote, “Even the son of God had to die before he could be redeemed.†There are a disproportionate amount of book reviews to this issue, which have high amounts of detail but tend to ramble on for a quite-long period of time. The discussion in the letters section seems to be very dependent on reading the prior issues of the magazine, something that I (as well as probably a number of other zinesters) are not lucky enough to see, unless they have access to the internet. The zine just reads much too dry for my taste, without any humour – this is a long ride of a zine.
Rating: 3.0/10
John Sargeant, writing on NeuFutur as Sargeant, is the founder and editor-in-chief of NeuFutur Magazine, where he has covered independent music, PC hardware, consumer tech, and gaming culture since 1998. With over 25 years of continuous digital publishing experience, he has written thousands of hands-on game and record reviews, conducted in-depth hardware field testing, and analyzed digital media monetization trends. His work prioritizes first-hand evaluation and long-term product testing.
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