Blog

POW! 1970
Editor/publisher: Randy Adams

Welcome back to a long time ago, when you had to use your fingers to dial a phone (sometimes in a booth), there were only three channels on television, William Shatner was still relevant (wait, that is still true), and you ordered and received your favorite publications through the mail. The world of Ink Stains. baby!

This is another relatively short installment for a couple of reasons. I have three events in a row starting the weekend that, for you, if you are reading this installment just upon posting, is still happening! Another is that this zine, by editor Randy Adam’s admission, is a zine devoted to full pages of art. Randy was the assistant editor on MCR (from John McLaughlin, which you can see the fourth issue of here) and finally got his dream of doing his own zine with this, POW!

The focus of this zine is the artist (and sometime writer), Bob Juanillo. There is not much info on the late artist on the interwebz, mostly links to images. You can see a list of some of the zines he has contributed here. I did recognize his name immediately, and see that I have covered a few of the zines you will see at the link above. Luckily, there is an interview with Bob right here in POW! and it is very entertaining, comparatively lengthy for a zine, and both interviewer and subject are pretty funny. There are a few cartoons from Bob scattered throughout the interview pages as well.

Other art contributors include Tom Christopher, Jim Pinkoski, and Robert Kline (as well as editor Adams), as seen below.

The interview was fun, but I do wish a few of those splash pages continued with the actual stories! It would have made for more involvement from the reader. Adams does a good job with the layouts, though, with a nod to mainstream magazines by putting the title of the zine top right on every pages. All in all, a visually satisfying experience, boys!

Next month, I will probably do Sentinel 3, from Dark Horse’s Randy Emberlin, and he has promised to contributed some content, so it should be fun! By the way, the events I will be at in the next few months are Midwest Gaming Classic (Milwaukee, WI), Dreamhack (San Diego), SCG Con (Richmond, VA), Magic30 Minneapolis, and SCG Con (Baltimore). Seeya all next time!

Thanks this installment go out to Alan Williams, who sold me a nice little collection of zines that will make Ink Stains (even more?) interesting in the future!

Ken Meyer Jr.
kenmeyerjr@yahoo.com