Blog Archive: September 2025

Zine Machine
For the past few weeks I have been toiling away at making a ZINE for the next batch of Data and Doctor Doom shows.

There are mulitple THORTS behind this, the first one being that I'm off to play a couple of festivals soon and so I thought it'd be nice to have some MERCH to sell. Long experience has shown me that there's no point at all in trying to flog MERCH at Fringe gigs, as people usually rush off as soon as your show's finished to see something else, but that people DO sometimes want to buy stuff at festivals. My initial idea was to try and record all the songs for a CD, but to be perfectly honest I could not be arsed so to do. Also, I have another IDEA for what to do next with the songs and indeed the talking which I'd rather do instead, more news of which ANON!

Another driver was the fact that I recently attended a comics conference and caused a minor FURORE by suggesting people stop moaning and just got on and DID some stuff without waiting around for permission from somebody else. Obviously once I'd said this people asked what *I* was going to do, so I had to come up with something! My initial idea was to do an ACADEMIC ZINE but, as with the previous idea of recording a whole album, 2 seconds thinking told me that this would be a LOT of work, so instead I decided to just do a zine myself about the show. To be more precise, I thought it'd be good to have something that EXPLAINED some of the ideas that I didn't have time to go into AND/OR went into some of the issues that have been raised by DOING the show.

This all led onto the THIRD motivation for doing it, which was that it was Actually Quite Good Fun. Writing the various articles was all right, but the FUN has arisen mostly from the decision to ILLUSTRATE it with some of my own DRAWINGS. Last year I created a comic strip poster for work which was a) FUN b) a LOT of work, so I thought I would try and focus on the former aspect rather than the latter and do some spot illustrations. This has been LOVELY, and I'm now thoroughly enjoying tinkering around with the layout to make it all look ACE.

The PLAN is to get these finished in the next week or so, so that I've got time to get them printed ready for my appearance at The Lakes International Comic Art Festival at the end of the month, but I'm also planning to make it available to buy online. I'm THINKING of doing various options, including a PDF version for non-UK people (now that various TWITS have made it expensive and difficult to send things abroad), but I'll see how it all goes. Either way, there should be an announcement in the next issue of the newsletter, and possibly more discussion of PRINTING efforts here! THRILLZ!!

posted 4/9/2025 by MJ Hibbett
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Two (2) New Songs
As anyone what is following me on the socials will be aware, I have spent much of this year re-posting and commenting on some of my old blogs from the space year 2003. This has been a DELIGHT for me as I have been reminded of all sorts of LARKS, but it has also shown me that I have fallen behind in some of the Old Ways Of Blogging.

Primarily it has shown me that I used, long ago, to get all excited about having written a new song and dash to Blogger (for such it was back then) to tell people about it. I don't really do that anymore, in part because my songwriting has slowed down massively since then, but as I've written a couple of new songs this week I thought I would have a go at speaking about them.

The first of these is Time Wasters Need Not Apply which, as the accompanying song notes say, came as a result of REFLECTING on a) the lovely gig me and Chris did in Brighton and b) Alan Jenkins' amazing book How To Be In A Pop Group. Basically, I wanted to write another story song, and Alan's book reminded me of being in bands in Leicester in the early 90s, where you'd sometimes meet people who were always going to form AMAZING bands but never did. It is, I think, a bit of a WEEPY, and so I am looking forward to getting it out into the world and seeing if I'm right.

The second song is called Goodness Knows I've Been Good and is very much in the rich vein of Me Attempting And Failing To Do A Country And Western Song. I don't think this one is quite as likely to cause mass outpourings of EMOTIONS, but it is VERY catchy and I have been singing it around the flat all week!

I've know idea when or indeed IF these songs will get out into the live environment, let alone recorded, but it's lovely to have my brain working in this way again, and I have high hopes for MORE SONGS soon-ish! Also, this is a reminder to me in the futuristic year of 2047 to do some more too!

posted 4/9/2025 by MJ Hibbett
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