3 out of 5

Friend of a friend’s zine.  That’s why.

So ‘Clown-Kisses Press’ is a little precious, and our loser love story is cute verging on too cute, but it’s totally zine-appropriate and – sure, I’ll say it – age appropriate, assuming Harrison is… school age, whatever range that suggests.  Younger than me.  The zine has a pretty sweet finger-smudging photo cover done up garish green and yellow and I’m a big fan of MS Paint-style pixel art, so the hand-cut pages of black computer art on pink paper works for me.  Harrison’s choice of images to show us does suggest a good artistic eye, not just lazily following the action, and he has the good sense to not try and rub a moral in our face, just letting the ending appropriately fade out.  But some of the artistic sloppiness could use with some consistency, just to keep characters looking mostly the same from page to page, and the art limitations makes crowd scenes sort of a jumble, so perhaps figuring out a smarter way to represent that.  And I’m not really sure if the ‘Concssions’ banner is supposed to be ‘Concessions’ or just means something that I don’t understand because I’m an old man.

The one-word summary: cute.  And pretty much exactly what you’d want / expect from a mini-zine.