Still Without Name #2

Still Without Name, SW/ON for friends, is a fanzine printed in Lithuania by Kitokia Grafika Press through a RISO RC5600, a retro and also environmentally friendly machine, as its screens are made from banana paper and it uses soy-based inks, generating a minimum amount of waste and having also a low energy consumption. The use of this technology, able with its many imperfections to create unexpected combinations between ideas and paper, has influenced the theme of this second issue of the anthology, centered on the "experimental machines".

Most of the artists published in this issue of SW/ON are from Eastern Europe, such as Polish Renata Gąsiorowska, here in a more lo-fi version than the one of mini Kuš! #21, but always brilliant in showing the complicated operation of a machine with a very simple purpose. The low fidelity is indeed the common denominator of the anthology, which is made ​​up of black and white drawings often barely sketched: a good example is the funny one-page story by Arūnas Liuiza, taken from the series Birdsonwire. In this manifesto of typographical simplicity we also find works that stand out not only for ideas but also for the refined results. I mention in particular the contributions of Anna Krztoń with three pages on a city possessed by the machines, the Genoese Alessandro Ripane, who is clearly a rising star of Italian comics, and over all Milena Simeonova. Her contribution, already printed in the fourth issue of Bulgarian anthology Co-mixer, reveals exquisite skill in the difficult task of graphically translate the concepts of resonance and echo, even if in this version two pages are inverted: therefore if you will read SW/ON #2, please read page 4 before page 3 of her story Resonance.