ZQ-287 AND ITS MALCONTENTS
ZQ-287 is a small label specializing in publishing its own blend of destructive nuance, and irrevocably dedicated to both crushing its mortal foes and killing the future.
Although most societal values are in need of reform, if not wholesale reconfiguration, we largely relegate ourselves to lashing at the sensitive, squishy brain matter of the general populace with our horrifying words and images. May they eternally be impressed upon, and thereby forever traumatizing, the mind.
But mostly it’s just good clean fun for all surviving readers as we sink slowly into our new, our comfortable, version of the apocalypse.
Here’s a list of our current contributors.
STEVEN T. BRAMBLE
Steven T. Bramble is a prose novelist.
After attempting to capture the psyche of the Information/Technology Age in Grid City Overload, he set out to prove in Disposable Thought that the concept of disposability is the primary culprit for all modernity, as well as the most sacred weapon of Western ideologies. Then he wrote a dystopian conspiracy thriller, Affliction Included, over the course of a cocaine-filled month to make sure he could still fantasize like a proper paranoiac.
His work courses through political, sociological, economic, cultural, and scientific issues of the contemporary world, attempting to explain and theorize with a playful, philosophically demanding style. There is a commitment to bringing the interconnected ideas that exist on the periphery of thought into center-view, to fitting separate pieces together into wholes, and to disintegrating established notions.
ALAN CLARK
Alan Clark is a graphic novelist, journalist, artist, and friendly neighborhood supervillain.
Of a prolific output, his two primary works to-date are Babylon, the graphic novel gold-standard for transhumanistic, dimension-traipsing, and crime-instructive soap operas, as well as the groundbreaking Daily Earth, which yielded an incredible graphic journalism retrospective of the year 2013.
A radically disruptive, unbelievably detailed and transgressive style is fused in Alan’s work to a rough-edged dedication to figure, perspective, expression and gesture that gnashes through pages and can keep the reader’s interest on strength of the images alone. His stories and writing complement his artwork: constantly in flux, moving and probing, asking questions and provoking discussion about relevant issues, yet always with corrosive wit and clear-eyed levity.
JEFF GUARINO & DEAN WESTERFIELD
The graphic novel team behind several avant-garde graphic novels, including the epic Dust of Midian, the quiet masterpiece Amboy Pop. 5, and the boyhood parable Boom.
With a talented restraint and strong commitment to the art of storytelling through comics, this writer-illustrator duo weave ambitious, challenging narratives that are accomplished through a practiced minimalist style. Writer Jeff Guarino‘s ability to unpack grand and complex themes through the individual voices of human characters that are striking and believable is vividly depicted by Dean Westerfield‘s earnest, detailed illustrations.
A wealth of clarity predominates the drawings, which are done in a faithfully uniform pen-and-ink style. There is a keen sense of judiciousness for visual information, imagistic symbology, and layout that renders a swift, cryptic movement through important worlds, and yet the method always remains friendly to the reader. Never afraid to shine an observant eye on taboo images such as birth, aging, sexuality, or the human body, we get a vision of human beings at their most vulnerable, and also at their most interdependent. Through this, the stories are as emotionally hypnotic as they are intellectually stimulating, and lead us to question the ultimately humanistic dimensions of our largest themes—society, religion, loneliness, love, family, history, and death.
ALAN LACERDA
Alan Lacerda was born in 1975 in Mossoró, Rio Grande do Norte state.
“There is a curious indigenous name (which is to say, neither European nor African) for people of the state: ‘potiguar.’ So I am a potiguar.”
Alan holds a PhD in political science, and worked as a political consultant in Brasília, the nation’s capital, before becoming a professor at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. His work shines a honed academic eye on the Brazilian, and international, political scene.
ISABELA MATUS R.
Isabela Matus R. is originally from the coast of Oaxaca, and was born in Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, in September of 1990. Her heritage is afroindigenous/zapoteca, Mixteca, and Turca.
She positions herself as an anarchofeminist and is a Licenciada in humanities, in the area of philosophy, having attended the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca, with minors in political science and art anthropology.
She currently lives in a mountain forest with the intent to be self-sufficient and continue with her mobile, transdisciplinary project, Tierra Primitiva, in which she tries to unite artistic expression, ancestral knowledge and activism into a project of multidisciplinary social scope. “Art and the earth are of the people and for the people.”
Her artistic production is little documented as she works with the idea of the ephemeral in public and unexpected spaces. She is now working with music and audio performance.
RYAN DENNIS
Ryan Dennis has appeared in numerous literary journals, such as The Cimarron Review, Fourth Genre and New England Review. He is a former Fulbright recipient in creative writing and has taught at several universities. He is the author of the literary novel The Beasts They Turned Away, forthcoming by Epoque Press in March 2021, as well as the founder of The Milk House, an online community for rural writing.
ZQ-287 