4 out of 5

With respect to my fellow obsessives, I think people who enjoy reading fanzines are the same people who would enjoy writing for fanzines. …And I am not those people. But that’s why I tried to pitch that inclusively, as I write reviews for “myself,” and thus I read a lot of reviews of movies, of comics, etc., but I recognize that’s really not a bag everyone carries either. So I bear that in mind as I comb through the pages of “Coconut Meat Skull,” compiled by a Bergen Street Comics dude – Josh Lambert – to whom I owe massive props, as that was where I bought my first Copra collections way back when; because the question I kept having, while struggling through 70 or so pages of navel-gazing, where the most frequent topic was about how critiquing Michel Fiffe’s Copra from any perspective besides navel-gazing was the real navel-gazing.. that question was: What The Hell Are These People Trying to Say? and Why Am I Reading It?

But man, without those people, who knows if I would’ve had a shop to stumble across Copra in the first place, and it’s clear that Fiffe is one of these people, able to participate in some navel-gazing – no, he doesn’t write a piece in his own fanzine, but surely has run forms of what amounts to one if his Patreon dedications to his various influences are considered – and so I wouldn’t have Copra without such folk either.

All to say: if you’ve ever had a conversation with someone trying to explain Copra to them, wanting to avoid just framing it as a Suicide Squad riff; or if you’ve frequented joints from which some of these essays are pulled – Savage Critics; Critical Chips – then you might be more engaged than I was. Me, I’m going to take a step back and assess the effectiveness of this thing-that-is-not-for-me in terms of making its point, and its presentation, and if you’ve navel-gazed this far down in the review, I assume you’ve seen the positive rating at the top already.

Yeah, this is 70 pages of folks telling you what you inherently know: that Copra is amazing. But they’re trying to tell you in that zine-y way, of either relating Fiffe’s passion to their own, or off-handedly analyzing art styles while more directly talking about Indiana Jones, all with charming misspellings and run-on sentences and inconsistent text stylization that’s befitting a fanzine.

Interspersed are some truly awesome pinups from a bevy of indie all-stars (Sarah Horrocks; Nate McDonough), and then a whole bunch of pixelated images from Copra which often have… tenuous (or at least not directly clear) ties to the articles. I’d say some of this does cut negatively into the book’s appeal, as some text gets dressed up with bold and colors, while some is just super dry flat text flat white pages – making a couple articles feel longer than they are – and while any Copra art always looks cool, I do wish the editing on this was a bit tighter or, alternately, a bit looser, with the former making the sequencing of text and pictures flow better, and the latter giving it a classic chaotic feel; instead, the end product is a little half-and-half: it’s a super substantial product for a fanzine, but just clunky enough to undercut its potential.

Although, I dunno, I don’t read these – maybe that’s the ideal.