Cometbus

The wonderful journal Cometbus was hatched in the Bay Area punk world of the early ’80s and continues to flourish from its perch in New York, unleashed on a deliciously sphinxlike publication schedule. Its most recent numbered issue (#59!) an excellent “post-mortem” investigation of the underground, came out a few years ago. We have been craving more ever since.

In a sense, the Cometbus drought ends here. The publication’s proprietor, Aaron Cometbus, recently issued a quartet of mini-zines, divided thematically, largely culling previously published pieces that had been scattered to the winds. While not formal issues, the tiny publications bear all the charm readers have come to expect: Monsieur Cometbus’s meticulous writing, his truly independent pearls of wisdom, his casual intellectual swerves, and, for a few pages, his familiar handwritten text. The publications are miniscule in size, but there’s a ton to enjoy. One theme covertly weaving through the zines involves the role of such publications themselves. “It may be hard to believe that in 1989 there was nothing in the small press about how its participants lived,” the editor writes in “Cometbus Mail,” which gathers some letters written to the magazine in the ’80s and ’90s. “The personal was submerged…The gulf between real life and how we expressed ourselves in print was massive, and I wanted to bridge the gap.” (He notes how the independent press has since overcompensated, stressing autobiographies “to the exclusion of all else.”)

Meanwhile, in “Let’s Talk About the Mainstream,” Cometbus writes of print publications morphing into the depressing world of online-only. “Without print, a publication isn’t truly public and can’t maintain its moral authority,” he writes. “It ceases to be a pleasure and becomes just part of the nervous electronic feed that we should all get away from rather than increase.” Cheers. Get thee to a bookstore to find Cometbus’s latest salvos! (In New York? Brave the snow this week and try Codex Books, right across from CBGB and the lovely Bad Brains mural.)