The Solutions 3

Here it is!

A happy lil poppet that I hope very much all will enjoy.

There are 150 copies. It is 40 pages long, A5, stapled (or saddle stitched is the industry design technology teacher term), all full colour throughout. ALL the colours used, every one of them, no colour scrimping. It costs £6.50. It can be bought through me if you email me or from shops.

It's quite glossy and shiny. So if you're not really into that maybe look at Our Magazine which is lovely and matt and made in Switzerland.

What happened was this:
Kathryn Cooper put a story by Michael Crowe in Use your Solutions II. On one evening Kathryn met Michael in Broadway Cafe Bar in Nottingham to show him the comic done and suggested to him that a new book be formed, a book to rule all the other books....one book, one power, one vision etc. He was all up for that and so it was.

Kathryn moved to London and over a years worth of time little discs were posted up and down the country with adds and subtractions, good work and bad work The theme to the publication is conflict. Ironically the pair got on splendidly during the making of the book and fell out tremendously on the day of it returning from the printers. In summary then: this book is evil and has evil and will do evil.

On the back page of each one is a hand drawn original wow wow it's real drawing and a writing to go with it.

Michael might write a story in, that he just made up, about conflict in someway and then Kathryn has to make a picture go with it or the other way round scenario. Alternating like.

We've done about 50 I think. Here is an example here on the right of here. If you click on it you can see the one's I finished just now on May 17th 2006 year.

Scroll down to see some examples of pages that are always the same in each one.

Pages 5 and 6: All the happy go lucky playtime in the background to these pages is Michael's delightful artwork that Kathryn soiled by tenuously working it into a story about a lobster making a guessing game for some woodland animals

Pages 11 and 12: This is all Michael's wonder roll, there is a little pictureof a gun that Kathryn did and a self portrait of Kathryn on the bottom right. Other than that Kathryn got involved with these pages by bullying Michael about font size, page size, resolution and story choice...you know, petty bullshit, that sort of thing.

Page 33 and 34: In the published version there is a little note which tells the reader which lines of the poem below Kathryn wrote and which Michael wrote. Kathryn made this page but the wallpaper was influenced by the film Umbrellas of Cherbourg which Kathryn was forced to watch by Michael and loved. Joie de Parapluies, Joie de la tapisserie.

Pages 21 and 22: This used to have a story on it called Brussels but the ending wasn't piquant so it was jettisoned. I dunno maybe it didn't have enough fancy words init or someit? So Michael made this page the sweetheart it is today and he made Kathryn rewrite the story of the two dinosaurs from memory and then he reckons he added some of her bits in to it and but and she can't tell where or what why. In summary then this page is a sham collaboration page. No collaboration here....none....none no nuns.